Here are some photos of what we have been doing the last few months.

This is the house finch that nested on our porch. It was so fun to watch the eggs hatch, the babies being fed, and the babies leave the nest. The babies were so loud when they were being fed that we could hear them all over the house with the door shut. One of the babies fell on the porch while trying to fly. We helped it flip over using a piece of paper and it took off flying. I hope they will come back next spring.

We did a Colonial America unit study for history using many library books and the American Girl books about Felicity. Here Adelle is practicing writing using a quill pen. She also built a small Mayflower, made a horn book, sewed a pocket to go under her skirts to carry hankerchiefs (just like Felicity), and many other things that I can't remember right now.

And we visited the Cabrillo Aquarium in San Pedro with our homeschool group. Adelle's favorite thing was seeing the little baby seahorses that were in the nursery area. Maeve was just happy to see fish, one of her favorite things. She isn't that happy in this photo because she is being held up by my friend and Maeve still doesn't like people.

One thing we have done with Adelle that I really like is our nature study. We are using the book  The Handbook of Nature Study, a birds of North America book, and various library books for information about the animals we see. My parents were here one day during our nature study and asked whether or not I had known "all this" before homeschooling. I said of course not. That is the best part of teaching Adelle. I am learning so much! On our nature walk yesterday we saw a mockingbird and listened to his various songs and came home and read about it in our books. I've never known much about mockingbirds before my in-laws came to visit last summer and my FIL was telling me about them. Now I notice them all the time! So if you see a bird with a white belly, the two white stripes on the wings, and hear various songs coming from the same bird it is a mockingbird. Did you know that mockingbirds flap their wings so slow while flying that you can almost count the wing flaps. Interesting. We read a lot of Thornton Burgess books (which I mentioned in another blog) for science. He writes stories with talking animals as the characters. In the story you can pick up a few facts about a particular animal while forming a relationship with that animal. We follow up his stories with a non fiction book about that animal. We read about Mocky the Mockingbird from his book, Burgess' Bird Book for Children after our walk yesterday.