Friday, October 21, 2016

Oakland Zoo Visit



A spontaneous visit to the Oakland Zoo with some of our homeschool friends. We met this delightful turtle, and saw for the first time actual hyenas! Our daughter has been studying and admiring hyenas for a while, and I'd been promising her we'd visit this zoo in Oakland where we'd see some.

We also heard the lion roar.

Saturday, October 1, 2016

Book Club: Five Children and It



The first book of our homeschool book club this September was Five Children and It, by E. Nesbit. We've read so many excellent books this past year, and this one wasn't one of my favorites, or my daughter's. But for each book club we have a project, based on the book. Some of the kids make dioramas of certain scenes, others make games based on a books' themes, and once one of the girls wrote an entire rap, which she performed, called The Rap of Nimh. It was so good.

My daughter made a model in clay of the "it" in the book, the sand-fairy. It was an ugly little thing, but the sand fairy was not meant to be pretty. He was grumpy, reluctant and scowling.