Beginning of Brick houses

We started out by making lots of brick shapes out of clay. 

 Then we glued them to our wall structures...

 Tomorrow when they are all dry we will put them all together and have our brick house!

Thanksgiving...?

Thanksgiving. To me, it's harder to teach about Thanksgiving than about, say, Christmas or Easter. Do you teach your kids about the real Thanksgiving, or about the happy Thanksgiving that we learned in school? Or both? Thanksgiving's hard, dude.

The Boy and I made these Thanksgiving puppets last year:

And then we sailed them around in a pretend boat, and the pilgrims and Native Americans were happy little friends. And we talked about gratitude a little, but we talk about gratitude year round--so I don't think The Boy really got the connection between gratitude, celebrating Thanksgiving, and pilgrims.

I think he'll be able to grasp this stuff better this year. So I'm going to do a little bit of the history and focus more  on the gratitude. I really want to do a gratitude tree. (Like this one, but the leaves will have things we're grateful for on them.) And for the fun stuff, I'll hit up my favorite free sites for some Thanksgiving-themed activities, of course.

I'll let you guys know how it goes.

Social Studies: Memorial Day

If there's one thing that I've learned from all of this homeschooling stuff, it's that I have to teach Little Boy at his level. (Duh, I know. But sometimes I forget.)

So that's why when we went to the local...memorial park, I think? (Is there a difference between that and a cemetery?), and Little Boy was pretty bored by the whole thing:

we ended up talking mostly about flags instead of history.

Which is good, I guess, since I have a feeling that the Fourth of July will go the same way.