A Gift From the Forest

Primus was studying The Hobbit and when she got to the part about Mirkwood, her curriculum suggested that she research a National Forest.  She found an address online for Tahoe National Forest and wrote to them to request information.  

She included a self-addressed, stamped envelope and I assumed she would just get a form letter directing her to their website (the Forest Service website is actually very informative.)

In actuality, they sent her a huge envelope full of fun stuff, like the Smoky Bear-shaped bookmark pictured above.

Of course a nice letter was included, along with these really neat 8.5 X 11 posters of insects, animals, flowers, bird nests, footprints, butterflies, birds, trees, and reptiles.

Here's a large poster about fossils.

Finally, this old Junior Forest Ranger Handbook cracked me up.  It was originally published decades ago.  I'm so curious!  Are they still publishing these things?  Did they make a million of these originally and still haven't passed them all out?  Did they just happen to find one hanging around the office and decide to throw it in her envelope?

It was such a surprise to receive all these goodies in the mail.  Definitely made Primus' day and gave her lots of things to read to learn about forests!

Time With Cousins

It is such a blessing to live less than an hour away from my brother and his family!  (In addition, we were blessed to be able to host my other brother's kids for an extended visit last summer.)  I did not grow up close to my extended family.  I'm jealous of the relationship my kids have with their cousins.  It is so fun to watch them together.  It's also really awesome to be able to spend time with my nieces and nephews and dote on them.  Being an Aunt is the best!

We try to do sleep-overs and kid swaps as often as we can.  Whenever the kids come to our house, I take them out to the grocery store to stock up on candy and junk food.  I'm not above bribing them to love me (though I prefer to say that I'm simply building fun memories.)

Lately our nephews have wanted to come spend the night so they can play hours and hours of video games with their Uncle.  

Most recently, we had our oldest, teenage niece over for a couple nights for a Stranger Things marathon.  That was especially awesome because we had a chance to talk about a couple serious topics.  It felt really good to know that she was comfortable talking with me about things that other teens might be too embarrassed about.

I hope that I can always have this close relationship with my nieces and nephews.  But even more than that, I hope my kids always consider their cousins to be their friends!  They are so lucky to have these opportunities and I think one day they'll thank us for making it possible for them to hang out together so much!

Confident Kindergartners with New Reading Skills are the Best!

Quartus is officially a reader!  He's finished his Distar reading curriculum, is just devouring the many phonics readers we own, and is enjoying reading harder books like Go Dog Go and Green Eggs and Ham.  

This is such a fun phase where he is trying to read everything he sees.  

Our grocery store has this awesome huge sign above the dairy case and I never thought anything of it until Quartus suddenly blurted out, "No one saves milk, you moron!"

It just made my day and now I will never read this sign the real way again.

Life Size Zoo

I found this really awesome book at a library used book sale for 50 cents!  Super cool!  You can see I put a pencil on the cover to give you an idea of the size of this thing.  

It's full of life-size pictures of various wild animals.  Or rather, since most of the animals in the book are quite large, on a two page spread it shows one part of the animal.  

Then in the top corner of the page it shows a reference guide so you can see the size of that part of the animal in relation to the rest of its body.  

Also, the table of contents includes measurements for the animals.

One afternoon we packed up the book, chalk, a yard stick, a measuring tape, and bikes and then trecked over to the nearest large empty parking lot to draw some animals.

I'm sure we weren't totally accurate with our measurements.  But the process was what was most important.

It ended up being the perfect homeschool afternoon!  We did science, math, and cooperative learning all at the same time, followed by PE as they rode their bikes around for a while before heading back home. Homeschool win!