15 Miles on the Erie Canal!

Our TruthQuest History studies brought us to the amazing Erie Canal this week. At 363 miles long, it was the longest in the world, built in the least amount of time, for the least money. It also seems to have had quite a few folk songs written about it, some more colorful than others. But that's what the "fast forward" button is for, right?

We read some great books:

The Erie Canal by Peter Spier - filled with those wonderful, see-something-new-every-time-you-look-at-them illustrations;

The Amazing, Impossible Erie Canal by Cheryl Harness;

The Erie Canal by Samuel Hopkins Adams - a wonderful gem in the old Landmark series.

Then we decided to go to the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse, NY and take a little ride on an authentic packet boat!

Well, OK, the boat was stationary, but we used our imaginations.

Captain Z

We're not exactly sure where people slept if they were taller than a five-year-old.

Probably the floor.

The museum is housed in the only surviving "weigh lock" building in the world. Boats were put into the lock, the water was pumped out and the boat was lowered onto a wooden cradle suspended by spring arms. Once it was weighed, water was pumped back in and the boat was on it's way. All of this was done in 15 minutes!

This interactive display allowed you to drag the boats in, weigh them and collect the tolls.

It was a great way to wrap up our study of the Erie Canal!

We're still here!

Please forgive the very long blog break! Here's a quick look at what we've been up to:

Skiing! Thank you, Grandma and Grandpa!!

Post-Christmas Lego building. We're thinking of trying out the weekly LEGO Quest Kids building challenge too. Looks like lots of fun!

Wow - playing with our new iPad. Thank you, Grandma!

Winding up another fun season of fantasy football.

Upwards Basketball! We LOVE this organization. Both boys are playing this year and having a wonderful time. We almost don't mind leaving the house at 7:30 every Saturday morning.

On the academic front:

• Continuing with anatomy studies - I'll try to post soon on this.
• We're loving TruthQuest History - we're studying pioneers at the moment.
• Chalk pastels using the tutorials here - messy, but fun!
• Institute for Excellence in Writing - Z-Man still balks, but I see a marked improvement in his writing so we'll continue.

Thanks for stopping by!

Merry Christmas!!

Christmas school plans!

I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving! Ours was just wonderful from start to finish. Mark is a little sore from a morning football game with the boys and friends and we all ate a tad too much pie, but I think we'll recover nicely. And tomorrow, Christmas decorations!

I thought I'd put up a quick post about our Christmas school plans, because they start next week, and if you want to join in, you might want to print them out before that.

Each year, we try to do a special study for Christmas. One year, we studied the names of Christ. One year, we studied the symbolism of the twelve days of Christmas. This year, we plan to make a Jesse tree. If you're not familiar with that, it's a series of readings that start in Genesis and go right through the Old Testament, showing how everything points to Jesus. Each day, you hang a little ornament with a picture that reminds you of the story. There are many versions online, but we chose this one, from A Holy Experience, which has beautiful ornaments to print out and laminate. Ann's writing is just beautiful too, although since it isn't the way I normally talk, I'll kind of put it in my own words for the kids.

Of course we'll be listening to Christmas music until we can sing it in our sleep and we'll be reading all of our favorite Christmas books, along with some new finds, which I will list here very soon!

Happy Thanksgiving, all!

Our Week with Ping

Ping holds a special place in my heart because this Five in a Row unit was the very first thing that Z-Man and I ever did in the way of "official" homeschooling. This week, I was so happy to re-visit it with Little Man!

Some of the things we did:

• Found China on our huge, shower curtain map from Target. That was a great purchase.
• Read about China in our atlas and found the Yangtze River.

• Tried our own colored pencil sunsets, using one of the pictures in the book as a guide.

• Read the book, Ducks by Gail Gibbons and learned about different types of ducks.
• Learned how preening makes the duck's feathers waterproof and did an experiment where we tried to mix oil and water.

• Read the book, Floating and Sinking by Franklyn Branley, and did our own buoyancy experiments, using this chart from Homeschoolshare.com. We discussed what a hypothesis is and I taught Z-Man, who couldn't resist tagging along, how to calculate percentages.

All in all, a great week of fun and learning!

First Snow!

Remember that post I wrote three days ago, with the temperatures up in the sixties? Well, today it snowed.

It started like this.

It quickly progressed to this.

Naturally, even two or three flakes in the air makes it all but impossible to concentrate on writing one's letters and numbers.

Ah, now that's better.

Notice those lovely, yellow leaves still obstinately hanging on the tree? Their companions have long since been raked to the curb and swept up by the city trucks.

Ah well, maybe in the spring.

A Beautiful Fall

We've had a gorgeous fall here in New York this year. This week the temperatures are forecast to be up in the sixties. In November! It just makes you want to get out there and soak up every last bit of sunlight before winter hits.

We've had lots of leaf-pile jumping here and some lovely nature walks.

We took a picture of this unusual goose so that we could try to identify it when we got home. It's a juvenile Brant, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and it was apparently just resting on it's way from the Arctic tundra to the coast of Virginia or North Carolina.

I hope you're all enjoying a lovely autumn!