Bath England - Field Trip to Roman Baths

Just don't touch the water...

Expeditions with WebRangers

We are a three web ranger house now thanks to the National Park Service. You can do it too at http://www.nps.gov/webrangers/

Reflections

Oh, you thought I meant memories. Nope, I'm lucky if I remember to get dressed in the morning. However, I did get dressed in order to thank the construction dudes who re-roofed the front half of my house. I even climbed way up there to see the view. It wasn't THAT high!

Did you see those masked banditos?

One of the latest art assignments have the kids sketching faces and blending oil pastels. Somehow it turned into the wild west wanted posters assignment.

Did you see that masked hippo bandit? YIKES, maybe they are getting too much of the wild west history stories. Had to do a little Crimean War/War of 1812 to bring us back to the East.

Did I say that art was fun?

Just imagine this cat sitting on the pier waiting for her chance to get one of those fish. Then, ugh, another cat is in the water but closer to the fish. Wait, that's the cat's reflection in the water. Cool, that fish is history.  :-)

Mind the mollusks on the pier piles. We've definitely been reading our ocean habitat books. The latest is called "The Burgess Seashore Book for Children."  Yep, It's by Thornton W. Burgess and it has short chapters that are funny too.

Labor Day Weekend Family Activities

Tennis lessons with Daddy, Home Depot make and take, new duel flush toilet, lunch at IKEA with thousands of other people (it pegged Mommy's crowd meter big time), Bike ride in Busse Woods, Forest Preserve of Cook County IL (7miles on a windy day), a last swim at the pool to say good bye for this year. Time for Autumn :-)

Wrapped Up SOTW3 and Put It Away

This week we've listened to Jim Weise read the final chapter about The Forty-niners and the world in 1850.  We read This Country of Ours as it described the presidency of JQ Adams, General Jackson, Van Buren and Harrison. After our visit to Promontory, Utah in February with the Grandfather, we have the video from PBS about The Transcontinental Railroad. We read Coolies and You Wouldn't Want to Work on the Railroad.   Finally, we watched the Charlie Brown episode about the building of the Transcontinental Railroad that we'd seen in the National Park office in Utah thanks to our local library. 

We are officially beginning Victorian England with a listen to several books from Dickens, Kipling and Alcott.  The recordings of the books are available from Librivox.org for free.  The texts are also available via Gutenberg Project for free too.  G1 is listening to Nicholas Nickleby AND I found the BBC video at the library for us to watch soon.  G2 is listening to both Black Beauty AND Little Women as she follows along on her own hardback copy.  G3 is reading Oliver Twist along with the Librivox.org readers as well.  I found a book about the Life of Charles Dickens's England by Diane Yancey at the library that I read while the rest of the house is quietly listening to their books.  I wonder if we will be able to listen to Kim from Kipling or Great Expectations from Dickens, but it may be too much. But we will definitely find a production of Dickens's A Christmas Carol at Christmas.