Our Canadian friends are just starting school this week, but we're well settled into our routine now.

We finished off painting our clay island inspired by our read aloud book, "My Father Dragon." I've only actually seen MsI play with it so far. The had girls made some clay animals and I added some glass beads as loose parts. There's a man, dolphin, whale, crab, alligator, mouse and owl. I love hearing MsI's "Hoo, Hoo" while she plays.

We had our first Poetry Tea Time of the year.

MsE requested Hot Chocolate and I used up the last of our Canadian Tim Horton's mix. MsI and MsC requested pink tea. They like it hot or cold. The only real requirement is a "beautiful tea cup." Myself, I had a cup of the Mad Hatter Tea from the Westholme Tea Company in Canada. I only have enough leaves left for maybe one more pot. I guess after a year, we are running out of the last of our Canadian supplies. That's okay we're in a good spot for tea here.

I read some poems from "The Hobbit", prompting MsC to run out and came back with one of the Dragon Masters books, so she could recite some of the poems found in that novel. MsI and MsE requested various nursery rhymes. MsC also read aloud from "Flower Fairies of the Garden;" It's always her favorite. We talked about how some poems rhyme and some poems don't.

For our History Quest we finished off the Neolithic Era by watching a documentary of Neolithic Peoples across the world.

We started into Civilizations by learning about Mesopotamia. Our storybook series of the Epic of Gilgamesh arrived just in time. This tale is considered one of the oldest recorded stories in the world. I was rather shocked that in all the English and Art History Classes I've taken, I'd never heard it before.

Ludmila Zeman's translation is lovely and the book has beautiful double page full illustrations. We've got the 3 stories and have only read the first one so far. It's was originally written in cuneiform on clay tablets and we'll try writing like that soon too.

There are History Quest Teacher Materials that you can buy, which I didn't bother purchasing. I however, borrow their Book List and purchase a number of story books suggested to go along with our text. I'm loving what's come in the mail so far: Gilgamesh, Greek Myths, etc.

MsC's math book lead us into Geometry this week. I made game cards for the 4 of us from one of the activities in the book and we played Geometry Bingo together. I tried to make it very enticing by adding gems and our little tea cups to hold the markers. It was easier to get the girls to the table for this, than it is for workbooks. It was actually MsI who noticed the table first and gathered everyone up, because she wanted to play it. We helped MsI name her 3-D shapes; she knows the 2-D ones.

Science has been a big focus, with the girls fully setting up their planted fish tanks this week.  After setting them up and doing their daily water testing, the girls have also spent a lot of time just observing the fish and learning their proper names. MsE took a lot of pictures of her tank - below is her Guppy.