Feb 26 & 27

We got to watch Moby Dick last weekend. It was nice to see the story unfold on screen, but the special effects were definitely lacking. But what can you expect from a movie made in the fifties? Georgia enjoyed it, though.

Georgia finished reading Ramona and Her Father and is now on the fifth book of the series, Ramona and her Mother. She browsed the author's website, www.beverlycleary.com, and read character profiles, looked at the neighborhood map, and took a trivia quiz on Ramona. She can't wait to read the Henry series so she can try that quiz as well. I looked up the address for the author at her publisher, and Georgia wants to write her a letter. I think she is in her early nineties now. I used to read her books when I was little, too!

Georgia played her Zoo Tycoon computer game again. She has learned so much from that game. She gets to create her own zoo, including it's location in the world, biome, even landscaping and what type of gates to use for the animals. She also has to hire the employees; zookeepers to feed and groom the animals, and maintenence workers to fix things and clean up the zoo. If she doesn't put out trash cans then trash starts to collect on the ground and her guests start complaining...her zoo will lose popularity. She would need to add more garbage cans or hire more maintenence workers to take care of the problem. It's really neat. It makes you think of everything. There is also a "Zoopedia" where she can read up on the animals that she chooses for her zoo. She reads about what type of food they like, enviroment, enrichment equipment, etc. She has learned a lot of tree and plant species from playing, too. If the animals aren't taken care of they will get sick and eventually die. And yes, the animal dung needs cleaned from the cages or the animals will not be happy and the guests will complain about the smell! It is quite the game! I don't remember when she received the first Zoo Tycoon. I think she was four years old. Then she received the upgrade with additional features and endangered animals. The one she received for Christmas was the African Adventure Expansion Pack that added more animals, a jeep vehicle for tours, enhanced predator/prey behaviors, and more. Olivia likes playing zoo, too. She loves making the sky tram and going for a ride, or making an elevated path and walking it.

Today, Georgia color-coded an Australian map by following the instructions. She also took a quiz on Australia, read some of the library books on Australia, and worked on her Australia poster. The poster will be her final project on the topic. We are making a smaller poster this time.


At lunch she wanted to know why heat rises...something she learned about when we did our unit on weather. I told her about the properties of the molecules of hot and cold items...how cold molecules squeeze together and hot ones spread out. I likened it to if she was cold, she would want to bundle in a ball to keep as much heat as she could. But if she was hot she would want to spread out to cool off quicker. We briefly discussed atoms, molecules, and the periodic table. (she was also interested in the lightest elements because I had explained why a helium balloon rises) We will explore this topic in depth at a later time.

Georgia also had her gymnastics class tonight and had a lot fun with that.

Olivia received her Wild Animal Baby magazine today. We read it together. We also made the shape picture that was in the magazine. I cut out different shapes in different colors and Olivia glued them onto her paper like the magazine picture.

Livy with a glue stick making her picture.

Olivia's picture on the left, the magazine on the right

Olivia worked on matching upper and lower-case letters together. We also talked about different words that started with each letter.

Olivia practiced counting using her fingers. We followed along with a rhyme and had to count as the rhyme progressed.

We read some books together. One of them was an I Spy book. I Spy has a series of photographs of several small objects. There is a list of objects to be found. Olivia loves trying to be the first to find the object in the jumbled mess. This helps with visual discrimination by observing the picture and identifying and naming specific objects. Sometimes there are a couple objects that look similar, but she needs to pay close attention to the minor differences.