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Mummies and such

For those of you who thought I was kidding when I said we were mummifying a chicken, guess again!

Mixing the salt concoction.

Drying the chicken. It is now in the mummification process. We'll let you know how it turns out. I'll give you the rundown of our entire Ancient Egypt theme soon. But for now, I have to go resalt a dead chicken in my kitchen.

Outside, finally!

I realize I have been on an extended blogging break, but finally spring has sprung in Northern New England, and we have been enjoying the outdoors quite a bit.

We are especially enjoying this incredible new swingset - courtesy of Grammy and Papa! It is just perfect and the kids have been playing on it every free moment they have had. They especially like eating up in the little fort and bringing their little stuffed animals up there to play with.

C. of course only gave me a mild heart attack.

But you've never seen a happier 6 year old girl! Thanks Grammy and Papa!

Another great field trip!

We had a wonderful free field trip to Lowe's home improvement store recently. The employees were very nice and took the children on a short tour around the store, making sure to hit all the highlights. The kids were fascinated by the paint mixing demonstration.

The kids looked so cute in their Lowe's aprons. The moms loved the garden center.

George being George found a nice place to relax.

And now time for a hammer and nails -woohoo! The kids loved the free woodworking project where they all got to put together wooden racecars.

A job well-done! And did I mention it was free?

Happy Easter!

It was a beautiful sunny morning here, although a bit chilly in the thirties. But that didn't keep the Easter Bunny from stopping at our house, or us from braving the cold to attend 9:00 mass. We were so glad we did, with the sun shining on the altar and everyone dressed up in their Easter clothes.














St. Francis of Assisi, Fitchburg, MA


I can't believe how grown up the kids look!


I was so proud of the kids. They didn't fuss at all to have to leave their Easter candy to go to church. They felt so good about getting dressed up.

And they knew when they got home there was a HUGE chocolate bunny waiting for them!

Time for the good stuff! Happy Easter everyone!

Story of the World

I decided a while back that I wanted to add to our curriculum. I am very interested in history and wanted to make it fun but also keep it age-appropriate. I don't think 6 year olds have much of sense of time, especially C., who usually doesn't know what day of the week it is, let alone the concept of thousands of years. But I think it is still fun to think about the way the world "used to be" and try to learn about it.

One of my biggest hang-ups about teaching history is the question "Who's history?" In other words, from whose point of view do we teach our children about history, and of course, there's also "her-story" that needs to be told and is left out of about 99% of curriculum materials. So rather than overthink it to death, I decided just to start out with the basics, skip what didn't work for us, and add whatever needs to be added. I bought some materials called The Story of the World and started with "The Ancient World."

The first chapter starts with a story about the nomads in the area of the Fertile Crescent. It presents very basic information with ideas for a few crafts. C. LOVED it! She actually created her version of nomadic clothes and insisted on pretending to be a nomad for a few days, much to G.'s chagrin, who would have been much happier to be a superhero or puppy. We made cave paintings on crumpled up shopping bags, created a little cave and pretended to eat berries and lizards.
Carmella in her nomadic clothes doing a nomadic dance.
Carmella with one of her cave paintings. (Notice G. being quite bored and put-out by it all on the chair. I intentionally cropped his p.o.'ed facial expression.)


We have now started with Ancient Eygypt, which C. seems to be excited about. She is especially looking forward to the big activity from the book - making a real mummified chicken. Feel free to let me know if you want to help out with this one...

books, books, books...

I have been trying to think of where we can put our books. We have bins and bins of books all over the house, which is fine except that we never seem to have a place for library books and "theme" books.

Luckily, some very smart homeschooling moms on MDC told me about the clever idea of using rain gutters! Off to Home Depot we went, and Handy Ronnie got to work, cutting the gutters and hanging them in the closet area of our classroom which is now a somewhat cozy reading area! We just need some fluffy pillows and maybe beanbags to make it more comfortable. Right now we are using big stuffed horses but they aren't quite as cozy as we would like.

I'm so happy to have a place specifically for library books, C.'s reading books, and theme books! We also put some up in their bedroom, because it always seems to be overrun with books.

C. seems to be enjoying it too. She especially has enjoyed reading the books about ancient nomads. More on that in my next post. Happy reading!