Little House on the Prairie

Maggie has just finished reading this book. She has really enjoyed the stories, even though I had to prod her into getting started with them initially. I found her some games and word searches, vocabulary and comprehension tests for her to take tomorrow. Then she will start reading Farmer Boy. It should be fun because there are a bunch of recipes for making natural dyes and I'm sure we will have fun playing with those. We were going to see Little House the musical, but the reviews weren't favorable, so we decided to skip it.

Maggie has been doing a science experiment with her fish.  She was feeding them each day and tapping the sides of the glass. Now when she taps the glass the fish rise to the top, even when there is no food. They have been conditioned, just like Pavlov's dog.

Maggie planted some flowers out front and has been helping me harvest blackberries from our field. We hope to have enough to make one pie. They got ripe this week, but I haven't been able to pick them. I'm afraid they will over ripen and be done before we get them picked. And it's supposed to storm the next couple days. Hopefully tomorrow evening we can get over there and get them picked.

Difficult Day

Maggie doesn't want to work today. I had a hard time getting her up and going. Even though we were only watching a History show, she was still very resistance to learning.  However, we watched the show, she enjoyed it and now I'm having her write a synopsis for her chronology notebook. Since we don't always study things in order, I like the idea that she can flip through and see how events were relevant to one another. She is in better spirits now and as soon as she is finished, we're going to get some lunch and mow for a little while if I have time to get over to the field. They say it's going to rain this afternoon, but right now it looks good.

The donner Party

Today we are having a hard time getting motivated, so we're going to watch one of the American Experience shows I recorded on the DVR.  It's about the Donner party and their supposed cannibalism of each other. I recently read an article that said that the researchers have recently discovered that they ate the family dog, but not each other.

Maggie tends to turn her nose up at my "educational" tv, but in the end she ends up enjoying the shows I present. I figure it's a way to watch TV, but learn something and I always quiz her when it's over. I gave her the choice of The Diary of Anne Frank, Nova or American Experience.