Pennsylvania Week 1

Before I move on to telling you about our Pennsylvania studies, I'd like to tell you about our Delaware meal that we made on Saturday.   The recipes came from the book "Eat Your Way Through the USA" by Loree Petitt.   The menu looked harmless enough:

Peppered Beef Tip Roast
Broccoli-Cauliflower Casserole
Peach Crisp

The casserole was yummie, the peach crisp was DELISH.  The beef roast almost burnt my lips off my face!!  The recipe called for various things, including 2 tsp. of cracked black pepper and 1/2 tsp. ground red pepper.  Thus the name, PEPPERED Beef Tip Roast.  I did as the recipe instructed, mixed all the ingredients together to make a rub, then spread the rub evenly over the surface of the roast, bake and serve.  Simple enough.

Yeah well....here is a direct quote from my husband about 2 bites into the roast...."I  think it's good, but I can no longer feel my tongue."   Beads of sweat were popping out all over his forehead and his eyes started to water (seriously).    Olivia who LOVES beef roast of any kind dutifully ate her portion.....and drank several FULL glasses of juice.  Several times she commented, LOUDLY, while sweating "this is whipping hot mom"!     Lindsey, the wise one, said "no thank you mom, may I have butter bread instead?" 

So, moving on to a new state...with damaged taste buds.     This week we labeled our map of Pennsylvania, showing adjacent states, bodies of water and state capital.  We learned to locate the state on our U.S. map and we also labeled and colored the state flag.   Since the G-20 summit is taking place in Philadelphia, we're also clipping articles about the summit and making our own world events section for this part of our State Notebooks.

On Tuesday, our local library hosted a seminar entitled "Monitoring Monarchs" and all four of us were able to attend.   The speaker did a wonderful job of educating us on the lifecycle of the monarch butterfly.  We were also allowed to tag and release about 20 butterflies.   You can read my full post about it by going here.   However, I'll show you this one photo...just to tease you into reading the full post.

While we were at the library, I figured it was a good time to have Olivia get her own library card.   She was thrilled that she gets to "buy"  her own books now.   She was quick to "pay" when we were ready to leave (with 23 books in tow).    The photo reminds me, she lost another tooth last week, and I forgot to tell you all!

We're really enjoying the Song School Latin program.  I'm pretty certain I said that last week, but it's true.  Olivia is really picking it up nicely, and we're trying to incorporate it into our daily conversations where applicable.  This week we finished lesson four, which was a review lesson.  I'm really thinking about offering to teach this next year at co-op for the kindergarten kids.

Awana started back up on Wednesday night, so that will be our Bible curriculum until the end of May.  Lindsey is in her 2nd year of Cubbies, and will have the 1 memory verse per week.   Olivia is in her 2nd year of Sparks and will have at least 2 or more memory verses each week.  A bonus, is that one of her co-op classes is currently memorizing the Old Testament Books, which happens to be a requirement for Sparks.  

I decided to stick with the Abeka K-4 for Lindsey after all.   I think the biggest issue for her is that I spend a majority of my time focusing on Olivia's work and don't necessarily give Lindsey the time and attention needed in her studies.   I've been letting her listen in to Olivia's math work a lot more, and she's picking things up really quickly just from the exposure; and again is giving Olivia the answers to some of her questions.

We finished up our 2nd grading period this week.  I'm pretty happy with our progress and am looking forward to getting a couple of extra field trips scheduled, now that we have such a huge time buffer!

I think that is about all for the week.  Tomorrow is co-op, and then on to ballet and then to baseball.   Head on over to the Weekly Wrap Up to see how everyone else managed for the week!