New England Aquarium

Sunday we took a day trip down to Boston to the New England Aquarium. What an amazing place. I wish I could have gotten a picture of Sagan at the moment he saw the sharks in the big main aquarium. It was worth every penny it cost to get in. He has this love affair with the shark, gets huge books from the library, owns many and even has toys of them. He is just as happy to look thru a book on sharks as hear me read a bedtime story at night. He will more often then not spend his computer time on YouTube looking up education video clips on the shark. I was a bit sad when we had to leave, as I know he would have stayed there all day just looking at the sharks swim around and around.
Logan found a new love... the penguin. He truly enjoyed watching them swim and bath in the pools and sit on the rocks, pushing each other in. There were sprinklers shooting out of the rocks and some of the penguins stood next to them doing what appeared to be "arm pit washing". That had the kids laughing.
Over all it was a great trip.

Faeries!

Today the boys made faeries, and daddy helped! Afterwards we read some stories from "The Child's Book of Faeries" and then I told them the story from Little Acorn Learning's March stories. This is a great homeschooling/ home child care curriculum, she really puts some great fun things in there to do and wonderful stories. This month (March) is exceptional. We are very excited about all the fun stuff to do this month.

The faeries were one of her ideas.

Enjoy!

The Ocean

A short video I made on the beach near the Portland Headlight. Not all the beach here is rocky, this area was, it was very lovely, sort of moody feeling with the cold air and snow on the beach, the rocky shore. Perfect.

Fun with plants and pretzels

Yesterday the little boys and I read "A Seed is Sleepy" to go with our lesson on plants/seeds, then in their main lesson books they drew seeds and baby plants. We also made homemade pretzels. That a lot of fun and very tasty.

Pretzel recipe

3 cups white flour

1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour

1 1/4 cup warm water

pinch of sugar

1 Tbsp yeast

1 egg yolk

2 tbsp water

coarse sea salt

place yeast and sugar in warm water, let sit for 10 minutes.

Mix flours in with yeast/water mixture. Knead for 10 minutes (I let the boys do it, so it got kneaded for about 20 minutes.) Let rise for 1 hour or until doubled. Shape into "pretzel" shapes, or letters, or whatever shapes you like.

Mix egg yolk and water together well and brush on pretzels, sprinkle with coarse salt. Bake at 325 for about 20 minutes or until golden. Enjoy n ice and warm with yellow mustrad.

A trip to the Portland Headlight

Mike, the kids and I took a trip to the Portland Headlight. Instead of just hanging out around the lighthouse this time, we look a nice wander around the park area. It was a wonderful day. I am guessing that park is stunning

in the spring and summer when everything wakes up.

Window Stars

Cae and I made window stars with waxed kite paper. Below is a "how to" with Cae doing the demo. They are easy and beautiful and look lovely in a window that gets loads of sunshine. You can get the paper at "A Child's Dream" the size we got was $5.90 for 100 sheets, well worth the money. I recommend get a few booklets full as each large star takes 8 sheets (the size we made) but you can use two small sheets to make smaller stars.

Good luck and have fun!

Flowers, colors, and knights

We have been very busy these last few weeks. Sagan has been learning which way to write two digit numbers and practicing his reading in our new set of McGuffey Readers (the same type Laura used in the Little House books, which Sagan loves).

Cae has been practicing sorting things by color, which the Gnumber Gnomes have been coming in very handy.

We have also been working with water colors, which all the little boys love (Sagan, Cae and Rowan).

For Imbolc we started seeds inside the house (since we still have well over a foot of snow on the ground outside), which the boys enjoyed doing. Cae has checked on them about 3 times a day. It is very cute. I truly hope we get a few things growing, he is sure putting out the good energy.

At the library we found a set of videos about the Middle Ages, which has oads of wonderful information on life in that time, especially knights! And the videos are short and fun to watch, which works well for our limited TV/video viewing