Sparkle Day!

I've labeled this blog entry Sparkle Day for more than one reason. One of them is because of the ice, sleet and snow we've received over the past few days.....the other is because that is the title of the Henry and Mudge book that BabyGirl read to me last night. It is a small chapter book, and she just plowed through it. She is so proud of herself! We were so excited at the sight of the snow falling last night! We knew today that we could go outside and have our very own SPARKLE DAY!!

On the reading front we've been enjoying the entire Henry and Mudge series. They are so cute! Along with our regular 1st grade reading/phonics from Houghton Mifflin we've also started the Harcourt Oklahoma StoryTown series. We started with book 1.2, and it's filling in the gaps we have in our other curriculum. The gaps being that BabyGirl ALWAYS wants to read more than one story per day, and ALWAYS wants to do some type of craft or activity at the end of each story. This way, we can work with both curriculum's at once, and have twice the fun! It's also in conjunction with the Oklahoma PASS tests, so I can judge where exactly she's ranking. Yay for this wonderful 2008 curriculum find from our Nanny! Woot! Oh, and as always, props to the Goodwill!

Continuing with our science studies on matter, this week we've explored how different types of matter act. So far, we've worked with sinking and floating. It was a fun activity complete with predicting, observing, classifying, and logging in our journal. Needless to say this was a hit for quite awhile, and BabyGirl really never got tired of finding different things to experiment with!

To further our studies on South America we made some home-made tortillas yesterday! (with a healthy twist, of course) BabyGirl did ALL of the preparations herself including measuring the ingredients (even leveling out the measuring cups!), mixing everything into the bowl, separating, and finally rolling out. The only thing I did was cook them in the pan while she was busy rolling each one out. The recipe was: 1/2 cup wheat germ, 1/2 cup whole wheat flour, 1/2 cup unbleached white flour, 2 tbs. oil (we used coconut), 1/2 tsp. salt, 1/2 cup warm water. Mix the ingredients, roll into six balls (which worked right into our fraction study!!), roll into six circles, cook in your skillet, then eat them! They turned out so great, and we definitely plan on making them again! Last week we made Argentina Butter Cookies with Dulce de Leche. I'm so glad I decided to go outside my comfort zone and just dive into this dessert! Although the Dulce de Leche was a little lengthy (boil a can of sweetened condensed milk for an hour and a half!) it was awesome! It was best caramel we've ever had and goes great with the cookies or even ice cream! Along with the dessert on our South American night we made cheese enchiladas. I've never made them like this recipe before, and I'm glad I stuck to the instructions instead of just making up my own. They were absolutely great, and had far less fat than the usual all-cheddar ones. Our filling was made of a mixture of 2 cups low-fat cottage cheese, 1 cup cheddar cheese, 8 chopped green onions and oregano. We just love cooking up memories in the kitchen!

In the subject of math we've been working on time more this week and enjoying the free worksheets from the Learning Page.com. I'm going to see if she's becoming ready to work on money again soon. If so, we'll break out our time and money bingo!

We played outside this morning for over an hour and didn't even feel a bit of cold! Right now our snow clothes are drying by the heater in anticipation of another afternoon session! We plan on doing our school work, and then heading back out. I love these cold days....the fun of the bite of the cold on your nose as you run down the hill....the laughter ringing through the trees as you slide on the sled....and the time snuggled together learning in our school room.....enjoy!