On our reading list right now...

While we're not sitting down for "school" each day, we are learning about American history through cuddled-up reading time, which seems to be the way in which my children learn the most, more than worksheets, or paper crafts, and so forth. Some of our current books include:

The Look-It-Up Book of Explorers
Leif the Lucky
The D'Aulaires Book of Norse Myths
Pedro's Journal
Columbus

After we get through exploration, we'll move on to the colonists. A Book in Time has lots of good suggestions for books about that time period. We also watched This is America, Charlie Brown: The Mayflower Voyagers last night, which finally got Cassia interested in Pilgrims, etc. Cyrus watched the video tour of the first Thanksgiving a few days ago and got very interested then - he's been coming up with random facts for the last couple of days!

We're also learning about the human body. And we've watched a lot of MythBusters. Cyrus and I also watched Punkin' Chunkin'. We really wish they had shown more of the kids' division on the show, but it was still pretty interesting, though we were sorry our favorite contraption did not win. Anything named The Launchness Monster is pretty cool!

Cassia is showing more and more interest in reading. She asks to do reading lessons on the computer, and has me read pages of her favorite books over and over until she can "read" it back to me. I am so relieved... I read early, Cyrus read early, and it has been difficult waiting until she was ready... I can be very impatient!

Other than that, we're just puttering along. We read, we watch movies, we play games, the kids build contraptions out of anything they can get their hands on. I did ask them to start math back up soon, just a few lessons a week. They both opted for Saxon math again for now... we'll see how long it lasts! I'm still searching for the perfect science balance for them. We started to look at Aristotle Leads the Way but decided that would be better in another year or so. I'll figure it out eventually. What I need is a website like A Book in Time that has living science books rather than history. While they're not living books, I am considering ordering the e-book versions of Real Science 4 Kids pre-level and level 1 Chemistry, then Biology. The e-books are quite affordable, and I don't need the student lab book or teacher guide since I have a gazillion experiment books that I could easily correlate to the topics covered. I could read the pre-level to Cassia and Cyrus could read level 1, or I could read it with him.

Today we have Second Thanksgiving at my mom's house (we had ours here yesterday, and she had hers at her church). And I work for a few hours tonight. Tomorrow we're off to see the local junior college production of Willy Wonka, and are very much looking forward to it.