Lionden Landing

As we continued our anatomy study, we moved from breathing to blood.  Froggy built this model of blood as a method of telling back but also an opportunity for Froggy to teach her friend J.(roughly the same age) in a way both of them enjoyed. Our model only had four ingredients like blood only has four main components.  The plasma is made from corn syrup.  We used about a cup.  The color is similar to plasma.  It took some convincing before J would believe that the majority of blood is really that color. We used red hots for the red blood cells.  As you can see in the picture they share their color with the entire mixture as real red blood cells do. White jelly beans represented the white blood cells and gave the children a chance to see the relative proportions.  Sprinkles were added for the platelets.  Ours were bigger than they really should have been but close enough.  Froggy even demonstrated how they work by mashing t...

Sunday - Pasta, Salad, Garlic Bread Monday - Pulled Chicken, Peas,potato wedges Tuesday - NYE - out with friends Wednesday -fish ala jenn, broccoli and rice and ginger pears cookies for Rosh Chodesh Thursday -leftovers Shabbat - Challah, Gefilte Fish Loaf, Matza ball soup, Apricot chicken, green beans, a bagged salad mix, roasted root veggies, and moo-less chocolate cream pie

Froggy has been taking Parkour this semester.  It is the perfect program for her.  A really small class with coaches that work one on one with each kid enouraging and pushing them but not forcing.    She has to overcome her fears   And use all her motor planning skills. She also gets to work on building her upper body strength hanging from bars and playing monkey.

We have spent the last two weeks up in the frozen North   I love being up here because everything is walking distance so I don't get cabin fever even when it snows.  Froggy turned even the most mundane outing into an adventure by tromping through the snow.  She became a variety of characters as she climbed and tumbled over the giant mounds of snow.     This is moonrise over the hill where all the kids went sledding.  It was a gorgeous afternoon.  But ended too early for me. Sunset is 3:30ish in the frozen north.  It makes for a very short afternoon.  The kids kept playing long past sunset till it was too dark to climb back up the hill.

 Our anatomy book is very very detailed provided more information than many middle school texts.  I don't know if it is Froggy's interest, the way the book presents the material or what but Froggy is thrilled with this book. Friday was supposed to be a "vacation" day with no "school work"  Froggy was thrilled and decreed "it can be free play as soon as we do Parsha and Anatomy" You know something is working right when the kid asks for a given subject on their day off.  This week in our anatomy work we looked at the respiratory system.  We discussed the structure of the respiratory system and Froggy drew her impression of what it looks like.   She calls them upside down trees. Then we built a model of the lung with a working diaphragm.   The bottle is the chest cavity and blue balloon is the diaphragm.   The red balloon is the lung itself.  It actually inflates when the diaphragm is pulled.    

We are having so much fun with our anatomy study.  We are not doing all of the experiments listed but we are doing some of them.  This one was tons of fun.  We looked at how soda effects tooth enamel. The basic experiment suggested placing a hard boiled egg in cola to see what happens since the shell of an egg is very similar to the enamel on our teeth.  We went farther. We wanted to see specifically what in the soda might be hurting the enamel, the sugar, the carbonation or the carmel coloring. We put one egg each in regular Coke, Diet coke, and seltzer. We watched them and tested them every few days over the course of two weeks.  The final results were very surprising.  The cola colored the eggs as expected but the seltzer totally ate through the shell.  So the results showed Froggy that even without sugar or carmel coloring, carbonation is bad for your teeth.

This is what a snow day looks like at the Landing.  We did a full day of school including starting a new parsha in our Chumash study. Froggy and I had a snowball while Abba worked. First, she warmed up against the tree while I cleared our paths.  Then we battled it out until we got tired of being competitive and ganged up on the tree.  Then we ganged up on Abba when he came out. We finally got enough snow to try out the sledding hill at the new house.  This is our third winter here and our first on the hill.   And this is what it looks like when Froggy does it on her own.

This year we made hot cocoa jars for some of the special adults at religious school.     We made decorated cut out cookies for our Hanukkah party.  We also shared them with our special friends on our Meals to Wheels route.   I was really pleased with how they turned out.  This is the first time I have ever gotten the piping to look pretty. We did not make any new permanent holiday decorations but we put up fun paper stars as well as "stained glass" stars.

We are finishing up the first term of Year 3 with Ambleside .  As I mentioned before, we have struggled this term.  I have been  revising our schedule for next term with the knowledge I have gained from our stumblings.  One of the major advantages in planning this term is knowing the books and the length and difficulty of the readings.  As a student grows within the Charlotte Mason philosophy, they are expected to slowly take on more of the responsibility of learning themselves.  To that end, I get to divvy up.  We will have two books that I read to Froggy and she narrates back.  We have two books I will read to her and we will also have activities that accompany the material.  As usual, we will have one book we will be listening to in the car. And then we have two books that Froggy will read.  One she will read aloud to me and the other ( our biography ), she will read to herself and narrate.

  This is a crazy busy week at the landing.  We have Rosh Chodesh and Hanukkah to celebrate.  If that was not enough it is our last week at home before our long winter trip.  That means I need to do extra cooking for the freezer so that Abba can eat while Froggy and I are gallivanting around the wiles of Boston. The Menu  Sunday - Hanukkah Party - Turkey Noodle Soup, Tomato Spinach Soup and Sufganyiot Monday - Chicken Black Bean Soup and chips Tuesday - Latkes, veggie sticks and sufganyiot for our last festive night of Hanukkah since I am not with the family on the last night. Wednesday - turkey fried rice Thursday - Pasta Salad and garlic bread Shabbat - This is what I am starting to call my "I don't want to think menu"  - Challah, Gefilte Fish Loaf, Matza ball soup, Apricot chicken, green beans, the mix salad from the store if I can still find it.  acorn squash, and a chocolate experiment dessert. For the Freezer Lasagna Bak...

Over the summer, tiger cubs were born at our zoo.  They recently made their public debut and we got to see them. So cute.   Even though our reason for going was to see these new cubs, we visited the rest of the zoo and were very glad we did.  The animals were in amazing form.  We got to watch the orangutangs climb the O-line   And we got to see the panda having what she appeared to think was a very yummy snack.  We saw Dad eating hsi snack to but he wanted to hide his snack so we only got to see his bottom. These animals came with us and I think they are the cutest of all even if we can't get them to look at us at the same time.