a heat wave for the first day of lessons

 the weather was beautiful this morning, but it has steadily gotten hotter and more humid. i actually turned on the air conditioner. right now it's 83 degrees with the humidity at 68% and it'll be like this for most of the night . . i'm not sure when it's supposed to cool down. i think we're in for another week or more of hot weather.

so chanda and i were up early and out the door by 8 am for a bike ride down to the willows. i tried riding the citibike today since my bike's tires deflate so rapidly, but they're such bulky and unwieldy bikes i think i'll return to my old bianchi, smooshy tires and all. 

we read a little more of nicholas nickleby . . we keep plugging away!!

we stopped at duane park patisserie for a berry tart and a cheeese cake which we had with soft boiled eggs at home.

i managed to put up a poem in italian about spring that my friend had emailed me . . . in the spring! chanda was going to learn it and put it in a lesson book . . which she finally did today!

 now she needs to add the translation to the book.

we had bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches tonight for dinner, and plum cake, using my mom's recipe for the dough which turned out very well. i've gotten better at spreading the wet, gloopy batter onto the cookie sheet.

rainy days and thursdays

it has been raining and raining. we thought we would bike ride . . i thought i'd do laundry (postponed because of monday's rain . . ) . . instead we slept in a little longer (no outside lessons to run to) and after a quiet brunch m and c worked on their instruments, their languages, and their history.

chanda got a little antsy, so instead of moving on to the next lesson, she helped prepare the beets for dinner. the recipe is from the around the world cookbook, which is one of my favorite books to use. it has a little information about each country and it's food. the recipes are quick and easy, yet very tasty. it's also very pretty visually! i love the colors for the layout and the food and even the children's clothing! i'm such a sucker for packaging . .

morgana did an interview with the book's author for a meet me at the corner movie. (if you go under "recent episodes" it's an earlier one called "meet cookbook author abby dodge.")

after working on her history lesson about the phoenicians, morgana started her latin work with a map of the roman empire. she was wondering how to get started, so i told her i had noticed that eva's son had also worked on some maps recently. she asked to see one for inspiration. it also happened to be of the roman empire! he's working from livy's the history of rome, books 1-5. morgana was working from her robert j. henle latin book.

they both show such beautiful work! i find eva's posts about her days very inspiring.

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i also find my friend janet very inspiring. she can have a million and one things to do (such as getting a myriad of costumes together for a homeschooling production!), but knows that one of the most important things about life is learning new things while having fun together. this ranges from camp outs where you have to lug all supplies via canoe, to cuddling together in bed and watching the elegant universe, or reading arthur ransome's we didn't mean to go to sea. (they just finished it and really loved it.)

so janet and i managed to get together and take a walk with everyone up on the high line this evening, while our dinners cooked at home (!). it was incredibly windy, and the children ran around like wild things while she and i played with our cell phones (?!). camille, janet's oldest, was sitting beside us knitting on her beautiful sweater, and she said, "i think there is something wrong with this picture. i'm sitting here knitting and you two are texting!"

science experiments

m and c finished their science block this afternoon. c ended with an experiment about gases and how to make water appear to boil without heat.

as she pushes down on the glass and slides up with the wet cloth, a vacuum is created and air is pushed through the cloth, forming bubbles in the water which make it look like it's boiling. the wet cloth keeps the water from escaping as water molecules attract each other and form (something like) a skin over each hole in the cloth.

morgana worked on phase changes with epsom salt and water. as the water evaporates, small unseen crystals will begin to stack together (the long, slender epsom salt crystals which had originally been crushed in the packaging). she will observe this over several days.

you can already see the crystals beginning to form.

schoolwork and a library visit

i pulled out a few of our books about egypt today, and read to c and m about the middle and new kingdoms (from susan wise bauer's the history of the ancient world). they then chose what to write about in their lesson books. c drew a picture of a gold collar, and linked it to the gold nubia was known to have; m wrote about ahmose's eviction of the hyksos tribe, and drew a picture of karnak in it's early stages. we then took a walk to the east side to downtown yarns, to get d's yarn for her ballet t-shirt that i need to lengthen. afterwards, we visited our favorite library in the city . . the mulberry street branch. i took a moment (after researching a few more books about egypt which we read this evening) to sit and knit. their book corner is the coziest in the city, and we like to sit there and read. c is measuring the length of her arms here, with a tape measure given to her from the downtown yarn store owner.