Your name in Japanese....

We discovered this fun little website....it translates your name to Japanese. Lola had a lot of fun with this and enjoyed copying the Japanese characters. She did every name in our family!

Millipedes in the garden!

Here is a fine example of why I love homeschooling....opportunities for little ones to learn are literally everywhere! Their brains are are like little sponges and they just love information. They are keen and smart as whips. It's not till we get older that complacency sets in...environmental factors fog our desire for learning. But with children, it's still all pure and bright. Call me sappy, but I'm having a great time learning right alongside with Lola.
Here's a new specimen we learned about today. I snapped a photo of this member of the arthropod family, wandering on our front path, just a few feet from our garden. Other family members include spiders and crustaceans.
Millipedes are really helpful in gardens because they prey on common garden pests. I was really happy to run into one and placed him right back in the garden where he belongs as soon as his photo session was over. I assume he was displaced temporarily because I had just recently transplanted my failing gardenia bush to the backyard.

Lola's Lemonade Stand

We've been learning a bit about coins and their value lately, so I thought it would be fun to have a lemonade stand. Lola's been asking for one for soooo long. There's actually more involved in having one than I anticipated, so today we staged a practice round.
We made the lemonade, the cookies and the lovely sign, but we just invited our friends and didn't actually collect money. Our original intent for the practice round was to have a bowl of spare change that the children could take coins, learn how to count them out and "pay" for their purchases...but that didn't happen. We were so involved with the making of the products and the presentation that we didn't actually get around to the financial aspect of it!! Oh well! We've done so many workbook exercises and games lately that I feel like the concept was well understood all the same...and soon we'll do it again for real.

The bay

We were going to do something related to St. Patrick's Day, but, in the end, it was so hot today that we decided to head down to the bay. It was surprisingly cold once we got there. There was a great information board describing all the wildlife in the bay. We played at the playground for a while then walked over to the bay beach. The water looked and smelled a little...er...funny, so we didn't actually get in the water, although there was another family who were totally swimming.

Nature Walks & Opossums

Today I took the girls to Ant-Sized Adventures, a great little nature program at Mission Trails, geared towards pre-K to K. The focus of this particular class was on raccoons and opossums. We learned a lot about each and sang cutesy songs about them. Lola loved it, but Elise was not into the classroom portion of this at all and pretty much pouted on my lap the whole time. She did get into the nature walk, especially the furry caterpillars we encountered along the way. Lola pointed out a bunch of stuff to me on the nature walk that I probably would never have noticed by myself. Her favorite part was getting to meet a live opossum after the nature walk was over. Our adventure ended with a craft, then we had lunch outside the visitor's center with some friends. It was really nice. We are signed up for another adventure next month. I hope Elise will share some of Lola's enthusiasm next time!

New math games....

I bought a great book with tons of math games for k-1 aged kids. We are having fun with it today and I even made up some of my own games with the new burst of inspiration!

our new pet Henry!

We got Lola a guinea pig! She named him Henry. We sure learned a bunch of new stuff about guinea pigs today.....honestly, I wish I would have known some of it before actually getting one, but so it goes!