I am so wrong for this...

DH was getting the girls ready for a weekend trip to Grandma's house. Becca was saying that she wanted to stay up there "for forever!" So I told her that would mean that I couldn't be her teacher and Grandma would have to drop her off at the public school kindergarten and she'd have to learn her letters all over again. She started making faces and saying, "Bo-ring!" I told her she wouldn't be able to learn about Crete or Egypt, or butterflies and elephants, or do "fancy writing" and learn Latin and while I was listing those things she said, "Fun! Exciting!"

Oh, I am just evil. I'm secretly tickled that she's enjoying her learning at home so much. Actually I have no idea what they're doing in public school K right now... I took a peek at what would have been her school's website and saw a list of suggestions for parents working with their kindergarteners. It involved saying the ABC's and counting up to 30 each night as well as practicing writing their name properly (not in all caps). Um.... Okay, it's early in the year, maybe they pick up the pace later. Have I mentioned that we're working on adding and subtracting numbers up to 20?

Hey, it's my blog and I'll brag if I want to!

More projects!

We did these simple step pyramids today. I followed the directions in the Story of the World activity guide, so we started with a 5x5 flat and built up with lots of (watery) glue. The sugar cubes we have aren't exact cubes, so that made things a little more complicated for Becca. Sylvia had lots of Mommy help in building her pyramid - she was more interested in painting lots of glue and adding some outbuildings!







Below are some sand clay pyramids. I got the instructions from a book called The Crafts and Culture of the Ancient Egyptians. This was really just for my entertainment - I mixed up the clay and made the pyramids with a little help from DH, not the girls! They think the pyramids are pretty neat looking though.




These are our scarabs, instructions found in the same book as above. Becca and I made the molds and poured the plaster while Sylvia was at preschool, but Sylvia wanted to paint, so she added the gold "accent" to my scarab (on the left, Becca's on the right). You can also carve some hieroglyphics on the bottom of the scarabs, but we didn't do that part.


I am sad to report that our snails met a bad end.... When we ordered the kit, it came with water conditioner and we followed the directions perfectly, but the whole batch died within a day. We got a replacement shipment, and they died just as promptly. I found out from Carolina Supply that we probably had too high a copper content in our pipes, which caused the snails' demise. So unless you have brand new water pipes, if you want to raise pond snails, you might want to use some purified distilled water!

Hopefully our next science unit involving living things will work out better. At least Tommy and Rozy are still flippin'!