Life this week

It's been a long time since I've posted. We've had lots of snow, cold, and wind. Not as much snow as others, but even one inch of snow coupled with Iowa winds on the open plains is enough to make major road hazards. Carie has had a number of snow days since Christmas. Monday, President's Day, was supposed to be a make up day for past snow days, but the school had another snow day. The kids and I had a nice day together, taking time at lunch to listen to a recording about George Washington and then joining our neighbors at the library later in the afternoon. Our usual Monday evening activity, gymnastics in Sioux Center for Maggie and Carie, was cancelled due to weather.

David has been taking a great interest in letters and words. He is now writing his name by himself and enjoys asking what combinations of letters spell. He can identify certain words in print and likes to "read" aloud books he's memorized. His newest interest is dot-to dots. He can do 1-20 dot-to-dots, saying each of the numbers as he goes along. A few weeks ago he finally got it that numbers go " . . .12, 13, 14, 15. . ." not " . . . 12, 14, 15, 16." As always, he loves to create structures and roadways with boards and leftover sheet rock. Now he has leftover flooring to add to his supplies. He loved watching the men install our new floors. They had buckets, boxes and bags of tools and he watched with great interest as them measured, cut, hammered, and glued. He would hunt down our tape measure and his tools and get busy trying out some of what he saw. Carie often joined him in his activities. When the flooring was all done David enjoyed playing on the hard floor with toys that had not worked right on carpet. All the children paraded around with instruments and shouts of glee when the flooring was complete.


Carie loves going to school and "doing school" at home. Yesterday, while Maggie was busy taking a test, Carie sat with a white board and practiced writing. Then she pulled out some handwriting paper and wrote the numbers 1 through 100. She listened along with Maggie as I read from a biography about Eli Whitney and from a histroical fiction book about Nathaniel Bowditch. Carie has also taken to copying simple drawings with great skill. As of two weeks ago, Carie has officialy begun piano lessons with me. Maggie's piano teacher is too busy to take Carie on as a student right now but doesn't mind if Carie sits in during Maggie's piano lesson. So, Carie sits quietly next to Maggie during Maggie's lesson. I hear Carie practicing fairly regularly. She's doing well with the lessons we go over and with her own compostions.

Maggie is in the midst of taking the Iowa Tests of Basic skills while also doing regular homeschool lessons. At times things are a little tense, but overall this week is going well. In math she has begun mutiplying double and triple digit numbers by a single digit. We've also practiced estimating. In history we are reading about Eli Whitney and the challenge whe was given to creat a machine to separate cotton seeds from cotton bolls. Science is on hold for this week, but lately we've been learning about plants. Maggie's reading Om-kas-toe, a story about a Blackfoot Indian boy and his first sighting of "elkdogs" (elk-like animals that would carry people and had long tails like dogs - i.e. horses). In Bible we've been reading about the travels and trials of the apostle Paul, most recently his appeal to Ceasar. And Maggie's also been reading in Kings. Right now she is using colored pencils to mark verse that are special to her. No, actually she has moved on to replacing batteries in David's toy phone. Soon she'll probably be buried in a book. I better catch her to do some writing before I lose her.

All of the children are shutterbugs. I never know what is going to be on our camera when I trun it on. The pictures of Maggie and Carie were taken by children.