Well folks, we are officially traveling again. For now anyway...

Our family is on a temporary job in the Washington DC area, living in the City of Rockville, MD. We know this area pretty well as we have spent probably 4 years cumulitively here in the 10 years of our marriage. Our oldest was born here, our second was inutero here, our third came as a one-year old several times, and our fourth spent 3 months of her first year here. Now we will have our fifth here Lord willing! You would think we liked it here or something!  Not so sure about that, but for places to be there sure are a lot of things to do here.

Being here in DC again is neat and even neater to have so many amazing field trip oppurtunities. We are planning to see the Archives and all the memorials once again, but will add a trip to the American History Museum in Nov/Dec., the International Spy Museum, Ford's Theater, the Natural History Museum, the Air and Space Museum, Gettysburg, Manassas, Mount Vernon, and Arlington Cemetary. We will probably visit several nature preserves around our area as well. So much of this is free and there are nearly no places like this at home in Kentucky. We'll see how much my 30 week preganacy will allow, the rest will have to wait for baby "J" to join us!

Which brings me to the rest of my post...

We are finally actually doing our American History units and we are having a blast! Up til now we covered various American History topics via living books and a few videos. This satisfied our hours requirements, but no where near our mental desires. Neither mine, nor the childrens! So, as money finally allowed I bought the Time Travelers Unit Studies from Homeschool in the Woods. There are 4 CDs to the series and you print your desired pages and teacher's manual form them.  I really like being able to pick and choose and customize our studies. So far everyone loves it!We have made maps, charts, the frame to a lapbook that we will put together next week, limeys (to share a scurvy cure!), fruit leather, knot making, and today we'll make charts for the anatomy of a ship. The first CD which we are doing is New World Explorers. Columbus, Cabot, Magallan, and many more are the hot topics and we'll play piratopoly which will make my little guys SO happy!