Dear Friends, if you need me

call me.

My computer died. :(

Hopefully it will have a new life by next week.

Our Family Flag

Even though we've also begun a family bird study, CG and I have been studying Besty Ross together. Today we read about the time Betsy took her best friend down the wharf and looked at all the flags on the docked ships. CG and I discussed how a flag is representative of a country or a state with a rich meaning. We talked about the history behind our own American flag and our state's flag, too.


Then I had CG design a flag for our family. We talked about how any elements she chose needed to have some meaning. Here's what she came up with:


Green because we live in the country surrounded by lots of green trees. Blue because all of the kids' eyes are blue. The cross because we love God. There are 6 flowers because we love nature and each flower represents each member of our family.


Just for fun we digitized it. CG morphed herself into a bossy art director :) and tweaked it a tad by adding flowery rainbow-colored stars ( which she meticulously showed me where to place them) and switching the blue and green border around:

She really liked the designing part of creating a flag. She could have easily just drawn a picture of something she'd like to see on a flag, but she took the time to carefully think through the use of visual graphics and color. Not too bad for an 8-year-old!

All I can say is...

Yuuummmyyy!

We started our bird study today

We have decorative black iron colums holding up the roof over our front porch. Don't these bird feeders make an exeptonal accessory? You know you have a housefull of girls when you use a purple ribbon to tie a birdfeeder to a post. These feeders are made from an old water bottle. I picked up the feeder part at a homeschool convention years ago.

We also placed seed inside a clay tray an laid it out on a stool. The seed is an assortment of sunflower seed, finch food and dried fruits. According to the package we should attract every backyard songbird created by God. But with our lazy dog napping on the porch and aimless wandering around, I just hope to see a bird.

We also began reading the Burgess Bird Book for Children. I just love how Thornton Burgess weaves science into his personified creatures. Tomorrow we will do a bit of research on the bird anatomy and read a few more Burgess stories.

Our Sunday

Today, these darlings:

collected nature (moss, leaves, bark) while hiking the trails at:

Then they came home and eagerly viewed the moss through our field microscope,

then added a few drawings of the moss to their nature journals.

My nature lovers are excited that spring is coming. Tomorrow we will begin a study of birds. We'll put out our bird feeders and dust off our identification guides. Look for some colorful pictures of our backyard birds soon!