See I said I was a horrible blogger

Well I knew it would be eons before I had a chance to sit down and write and I was right...LOL Let's see what have we been doing. Our veggie garden is in the ground, at least all the colder veggies such as lettuce, spinach, beans, etc. We still have the warmer veggies here in the house like the baby tomatoes and peppers. Hopefully our weather will continue to be nice so we can get them outside soon.

Jonathan has submitted a photograph to an art show

http://www.artallnight.org/

He is so excited he has put a 10.00 price tag on it and is hoping someone buys it! He named it "alone at last" He really seems to love photographing birds...and with a bunch of bird feeders out back there is no shortage of subjects

Drew turns 3 today so I guess we will spend the day celbrating his birthday...Jonathan is going to be in charge of making some construction paper streamers and we will make a cake at naptime.

Flowers and History

We started out today planting the little flower seeds that the Easter bunny brought. They are a mixture of a few different varieties and even a watermelon plant thrown in there. I have never had any luck with these little plastic greenhouses but it doesn't stop us from trying. Drew did great counting the numbers of teaspoons he put into each pot while Jonathan planted his sunflowers and watermelon seeds into biodegradable cups. Zoie was able to watch and put each soil tablet into the pot and she even threw the cover on for the "greenhouse" at the end. Now let the waiting and watching begin!

When the babies laid down for thier naps Jonathan and I decided to try to figure out the presidents on the Jib Jab video "White House Rock"

http://www.jibjab.com/originals/star_spangled

We did Ok but we are confused on a couple. We are going to have to do some more research into the presidential photographs because some of the video is really fuzzy and hard to distinguish. We some how came across the video for Billy Joel's we didn't start the fire so we went through the song and talked about some of the events.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_didn%27t_start_the_fire

Most Jonathan knew about but a couple really peaked his intrest. He was amazed by the children of Thalidomide and was surprised at what had happened to the children. He is also very interested in John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcom X. I can't blame him it is such an important time in our history. We watched a bit of Kennedy's assasination but I think he would do better talking to Grandma since she can give him actual knowledge of what it was like to be living through that part of history much better than I can.

Hummingbirds and Seamonkeys!

Well it has been awhile since I have last checked into my blog. With Easter and everything I just haven't made time to sit down and document what we have been doing but it has been tons! First Jonathan is drawing out plans to make a structure to hold his new hummingbird feeder. He has also researched what plants will attract hummingbirds and how much they will cost. Drew got a package of Sea Monkeys and with his big brothers help now has tons of little creatures swimming around a plastic bowl. They are getting bigger I don't know how they are going to fit into this container if they each grow up to 1 inch! Zoie is helping me plant flowers in little pots right now and we will be able to move them outside as the weather gets nicer. Hopefully spring is getting close as we are all tired of the cold and are looking forward to some warmer weather.

On easter we talked about why Easter falls at different times in the year. Did you know that it always fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox? So this was the earliest Easter in like 80 years! It can only ever fall one day earlier which is March 22. I think since hubby is Greek Orthodox and celebrates a different Easter we are going to do some research into his church's calander this week.

I know Spring brings so many great learning oppotunities and we can't wait! The picture is of everyone "hatching" the seamonkeys!

The Hurricane

Well of course I have been forgetting to blog about what we have been doing so I will have to sum up two days. We watched "Hurricane" this became a subject after Jonathan was wondering about the Bob Dylan song. We read through the lyrics then watched the movie. We did some indepth talking about our judicial system. "Are we really innocent until proven guilty" or is it really "guilty until proven innocent" I asked him if he would rather put someone in jail that he "thought" commited a crime or let them go free. That is a really tough question and he answered it suprisingly well. I have been relying on this website http://www.awesomestories.com/ for a lot of our information about the facts and fiction in the movies we watch.

Yesterday we wound up talking about the Constitution. This came from the School House Rock America video Drew has been watching over and over and over again. Jonathan was wondering about the signers of the Constitution especially Benjamin Franklin. We went through some interesting facts about the Constitution in general then Jonathan took off on the subject of Abraham Lincoln's assassination. We used two great websites....

http://www.constitutionfacts.com/index.cfm?section=constitution&page=aboutTheSigners.cfm

http://home.att.net/~rjnorton/Lincoln75.html

Both of these gave us a ton of information that we were able to use.

This weekend Jonathan and two friends (also homeschoolers) will be visiting a bee keeper to get some first hand information about Colony Collapse Disease in the Honeybee for the contest they are entering. They are really excited about going. The bad weather has been delaying this trip so hopefully the snow holds off tomorrow.

Drew knows his alphabet letters. We were so surprised! Huh...never worked with him on them and one day we were sitting there are he started pointing to them on a piece of paper and started naming them...you go Drew :)

U-571

Well I am a hopelessly bad at remembering to blog so I am going to try and write down what we are doing but if I forget forgive me :)

Anyway, yesterday we watched U-571. Great movie we talked about WWII and the U-boats. I think the movie was a bit unrealistic and we talked about that too. In looking up some battles of U-boats my ds noticed the coordinates and was asking about them...considering I really forgot how to do coordinates we had to go on an online hunt for the instructions. We found our coordinates to our home and some large landmarks around our neighborhood. He was also wondering why some have a negative number....not really sure I guess I'll be looking that up today. No plans on what we are going to do today I guess we will see where things take us. The little ones are into stickers right now...so everything seems to be getting a sticker stuck to it. My ds2 made a great picture using smiley face stickers he had a ton of fun doing it to. We need to organize the toy shelf today I don't know when it got out of hand but it did! Too many homeschooling books I guess.