Mapmaking

Lily and Gabe have embarked on a project together. They are making a LARGE map of British Columbia, filling in mountains, rivers, lakes, cities and whatever else we can think of. I initially just thought it would be fun for them to work together on a Social Studies project but it's really much harder than I anticipated. Drawing things to any sort of scale is extremely difficult even though we are using grid paper. And although we have lots of maps of Canada, several geography book - a couple of which are devoted exclusively to Canada - and seemingly lots of resources we are having trouble finding a good detailed map of BC.

On another note - I've been abysmal about updating this blog and now it really needs to be devoted to the educational endeavours of all three kids. So, I'm going to attempt to overhaul the whole thing. The goal was for this to be a log of Lily's schoolwork and I would still like it to serve that purpose -only for all of them!

Butterfly Project

Our butterflies emerged from their chrysalis' this week. Two emerged on Thursday and two on Friday. Lily had to help the first one get onto his feet as his chrysalis was not hanging and he couldn't stand up. It was so exciting to watch the miracle of larvae grow into fat catipillars who became pupa and then finally a beautiful butterfly.
We are currently keeping the butterflies in a mesh bag with greenery, flowers and q-tips of sugar water. The weather has been on the cold side so we will delay releasing them until it warms up.

Yellowstone

Building w/ Crackers & Peanut Butter

Mrs. Pepper & Mr. Apple

Nature Painting

Yesterday Lily and I went for a walk in Idlewild Park. It was a beautiful, warm afternoon and we used the opportunity to gather pinecones, leaves and grasses for our science project. Lily is studying plant structure and life cycles. Today we painted the leaves and then pressed into her nature journal.

Indian Village

Lily and Gabe built Plains Indian villages during Thanksgiving at Grandma's house (back in November!). They first gathered leaves, grasses, branches from outside; dried beans and paper from inside and then had a great time composing the setting!