Union Station

 We took the girls to the Union Station museum in Ogden. It was great! We bought a Family Pass for 15$ and there are 4 museums you get to see with that: a Railroad, Browning Rifle, Cowboy, and Old Car museum. The girls especially liked the railroad museum.

 Look at how nice their dining car manners are. :)

 Monta riding in the caboose.

 This museum is great for kids with these interactive displays. Well worth the time to stop there.

Lily-beans

She's almost walking. :)

Shark Teeth

 Esther had what's called "Shark Teeth", where one tooth was growing in behind her first tooth which was wiggly, but not out. After 6 MONTHS of a wiggly tooth, that was dead (it had abscessed last January) we finally got some floss and yanked that bugger out. Once it was out, it was no wonder it would just wiggle everywhere but not come out -- look at the root on it!

Global Table Adventure

 The internet truly is an amazing resource for the homeschooling family. I had been having our children pick places to make food from, and then on the map next to our kitchen table, we'd stick a sticker on it when we'd eaten food from there and learned a little about the culture. We've "traveled" to Germany (note the lovely Baumkuchen above :) ), Italy, India, Somalia (Amy had a refugee friend from school last year), Hawaii, San Francisco (rice-a-roni), and Ukraine.

 I would look up the country, and pick a menu online, but then I found this AWESOME blog: globaltableadventure  which this woman has done all the work for me! She has 650 recipes from 195 countries. It's thanks to her than I found the Baumkuchen recipe, because I thought I'd never be able to eat one of those over here, and it was delicious, and fun to make.

I feel one of the great things about homeschooling is that the girls have become more keyed in to learning opportunities. Amy came and asked me to take a look at this miniature wasp that she found on the screen the other day. (It's so small, you can hardly see it -- but trust me, it was indeed a wasp, not a fly... tiniest one I've ever seen). When we see a new bug, we go to the internet and identify it, and look up a book at the library about it if there is one.

Wompanoag

Amy has been obsessed with Native Americans for the past few years, and this year for Halloween I made her a costume out of some old fleece I'd used as a drape over our couch a few years ago (nothing like upcycling something).

We watched a great documentary about the Wompanoag and the first Thanksgiving: "Plimoth Plantation: Virtual Field Trip" by Scholastic on YouTube. I wish we lived closer, because this museum seems simply awesome! They have people dress up and learn the type of languages, and pretty much live a reenactment of that time period. We also followed up that one with watching some cultural dances from the Wompanoag from their Powow. The internet really is an amazing wealth of knowledge.

Amy would like us to all dress up for our Thanksgiving and tell about who we are (and she will be the Indian of course). We will be making a more authentic meal, which will be interesting.

Making Feather Quills

 We had some leftover feathers from Amy's halloween costume, and decided to make some feather quills. Our neighbor, Monta, had canned some beets, and we used the beet juice as ink. It was a bit hit for all the girls.

 A bit messy...

 but fun!

Our Learning Nook

We bought these little desks from Downeast Outfitters and love how their study nook turned out.