Sophie's World

We've been playing Countdown a lot - it's a good beginner-math game, and Sophie loves it.

Other activities today : Sophie did some writing, inspired by "Little House", finished off yet another Junie B. book, and read the first chapter of "From the Mixed up Files ...". She also picked out another science experiment from this book - we made an "underwater volcano" that shows that hot water floats on top of cold water.

Sophie making a giant Christmas tree poster. She did it on the kitchen floor to try to keep the glitter contained : didn't really work, our carpets are all sparkly. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, right?

Here she is, just having figured out a fair way for Laura and Mary to have divided those two cookies fairly - remember Laura always felt it wasn't quite right that she and Mary should each save half for Baby Carrie?

Making a clove apple this morning.

Today marked the end of Little House in the Big Woods. We'll start a new book tomorrow.

Then Sophs brought me our book of science experiments and said she wanted to make a volcano. So, with a bit of help from Enchanted Learning, we did.

Here she is making the playdough to construct the volcano.

Moulding the volcano ...

The final product - pre-eruption.

Sophie Adding the vinegar:

and, finally, here she is below, admiring the eruption.

More Little House today; Soph's still enthralled. We're going to make a clove apple tomorrow - the book is great in that there's a fun potential craft in every chapter. Sophs almost managed to convince the others that we were going to make "head cheese" tomorrow :-) She's loving math, having fun counting up by various numbers, and figuring out how to break bigger numbers into groups of smaller ones. I want to get Little House finished up quite soon so that we can read From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler before we go to NYC for Christmas. I really like using our current book as a springboard into math/geography/history learning, it's such a natural progression of ideas.

We hit the Scholastic book sale this morning - a huge warehouse full of books, all marked down 50%. I bought a book of science experiments, a book of math games, a book of fun writing prompts, and a few chapter books for each child. It was fun, and pretty inexpensive.

One of the nice things about homeschooling is that we have time to find out about things Soph expresses an interest in. Today, after we read our chapter from Little House in the Big Woods she wanted to find out more about Wisconsin. So we did just that. The internet makes life easy. We also made and ate maple candy. Ems is the only one who really likes the taste of it, though.

We went to the library today. Sophie picked out five or six picture books about Christmas. We read them, and discussed the different ways that Christmas is portrayed in books. She pointed out that some of them tell the story of Jesus's birth, and some of them focus on being nice, and some of them talk mainly about food and presents. We also read the next chapter of "Little House in the Big Woods", and scooted round Lake Eola, and did dangerous yet fun things in the playground there - most notably, standing on the swaying monkey bars. Other activities included painting, and baking peanut-butter cookies.

Sophie's done more running around, more painting, more game-playing, more reading, more writing and more math this past week than she's done in the past month of school. She just soaks up knowledge of all kinds at the moment!

A good first week! Next week we're going to be doing Christmassy things. Should be lots of fun.

Here she is figuring out which states we've visited during our time in the states.



and here she is all dressed up and ready for Brownies (which she loved).

Today's "work" consisted of more reading - we'll be sorry when that book is finished - some ad-hoc real-world math, and a scooting trip along a local bike trail, followed by a journal writing exercise on the things she saw, heard and felt on the expedition.



Sophs enjoyed the school-age storytime at the library today - they heard a story, and got to make their own playdough - and went straight from there to gymnastics. A busy day for an energetic girl.

It was the anniversary of Seurat's birthday today, so we read a bit about his life and looked at some of his paintings. Then Sophs painted her own pointillist picture, and baked sugar cookies decorated with Seurat-esque sugar-dots. The baking was good practice in working with fractions (she did all the measurements using 1/4 cups), and eye-hand co-ordination too.



She also read the second chapter of Little House in the Big Woods to me - she's really loving that book - and then we tried to make butter a la Ma and Laura. Here's the link we used for the method. Well. We took turns shaking that darn cream - we shook and we shook and we shook for ages, and we never got it to turn to butter. It seems to be stuck at the clotted cream stage. We both decided that if we had to churn our own butter on a regular basis we'd just choose to go without.

Today was our first "real" day of homeschooling. It was a lovely day; we both enjoyed it immensely.

Sophie read the first chapter of Little House in the Big Woods to me. Then she made a corncob doll - like the one Laura had in the book. She loved the creative process, and took her doll everywhere she went today. She has named the doll (rather anachronistically) Madison.







We also read about Rosa Parks, since today marks the the anniversary of the day that she refused to give up her seat on the bus. Sophie wrote about Rosa in her journal. Other activities today included some not-very-interesting math worksheets that Sophie adored, scooting and playing on the climbing frame in the glorious Florida winter sun, and a trip to Target to buy Christmas presents for her siblings. Got some real-world math in there :-)