Week 12 ~ A Week of Birthdays and Learning

It was a birthday week around here. On Saturday Little Red Riding Hood attended a birthday party for one of the girls in our dance studio. It was a dance party complete with a DJ and 20 or so squealing girls. Little Red Riding Hood had a wonderful time!

Little Red Riding Hood is 11 ~ On Sunday my youngest turned 11! How the time does fly! She invited her three best friends to go roller skating with her. She also told Tom Sawyer he could invite one boy to "entertain him and keep him out of her girl business". It was a perfect amount of kids. Little Red Riding Hood wasn't really concerned with a theme this year so we went with balloons. We started out at home and had cake and presents and then went to the roller skating rink.

Sunday was a perfect day for roller skating. It wasn't at all crowded, which was excellent for our little group of challenged roller skaters. Shall I say that there was a great deal of falling, tripping and generally ending up in dog piles? Thankfully, no one got hurt or even very bruised. They had pizza and spent about 2.5 hours skating and falling before all agreed they were exhausted and ready to leave. Their party favors were lots of glow sticks. What a great way to keep track of kids. My crew was all glowing in the dark roller skating rink.

Monday ~ Daddy had the day off for Columbus Day. Unfortunately, Little Red Riding Hood woke up with almost no voice. She had the beginnings of a cold which plagued her the whole week. We spent most of the day resting and doing calm school activities. We did manage a lovely nature walk that I wrote about here.

Tuesday Through Thursday ~ We spent the bulk of the week doing school at home. We canceled about half of our out-of-the-home activities because of Little Red Riding Hood's cold. Here is a list of our accomplishments:

• Teaching Textbooks 5 times this week
• Tom Sawyer went to his writing class
• Reading time 5 times this week
• Creative writing every day.
• Finished These Happy Golden Years  by Laura Ingalls Wilder
• Lots of Language arts workbook pages ~Little Red Riding Hood finished one workbook
• CNN Student News 5 times this week
• Watched The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (This is an excellent documentary about an African-American woman who is 110 years old during the Civil Rights Movement. However, it is very graphic at times with a lynching, beatings, and slavery whippings.)
• We learned about desegregation of southern schools and read The Story of the Little Rock Nine and School Desegregation in Photographs and Little Rock Girl 1957: How a Photograph Changed the Fight for Integration.
• We learned about integrating the buses in the South during the Civil Rights Movement and read A Picture Book of Rosa Parks and The American Story: 100 True Tales from American History (The Walking City, The Montgomery Bus Boycott).
• Leaf Science ~ The kids separated the fall colors from leaves with rubbing alcohol and watched several videos on YouTube about why leaves change color. They also started making glycerin leaves.
• One Bible lesson and one spelling lesson

Friday ~ My husband turned 43 on Friday. What he really wanted to accomplish for his birthday and day off was going to an attorney to have a will drawn up. Previously, we only had a rudimentary Internet will. So we spent the morning in a lawyer's office drawing up a sweetheart will (which means you leave everything to your spouse). For dinner we had a surf and turf meal followed by a cake with a lot of butter and coffee in it. My husband was delighted.

Blessings, Dawn