4th of July

 Melodie and Rocky spent the day swimming at a friend's house. That night we went to a friend's house for BBQ and fireworks. Fireworks aren't legal in our city, but they are in the next city over. I think this is the fourth year we've spent 4th of July at her house. But first, I had to do Melodie's holiday hair.

I took inspiration from one of my favorite girl hair style sites, Cute2TryHairdos. I got all the decorations from a dollar store bow that I took apart. I've only been doing these fun hairstyles for a little over a year, but I love them. Melodie really looks forward to the holiday ones. Here's the one from last year.

 I love making cute food, so I was bummed not to make any this year. I just wasn't feeling up to it, so I'll share what I've made previously.

2009 Not a great picture, but mine are the red and blue star shaped rice krispie treats.
2008 & 2010 were cookies, but I didn't get good pictures.

These are from last year. I love the cookie/candy bouquet. Maybe, because I made two things last year, that makes up for this year. But back to this year. Good food, great people, and fun fireworks celebrating our freedom. Can't ask for more.

Announcement

America Week

While I'm still going to try to follow my schedules I've planned, I'm not going to post them. The reality is that I've been pretty sick and not able to follow them as much as I would like.
 So now for America Week. Here's what we did on Monday and Tuesday. First we read about why we celebrate the 4th of July. We read the Declaration on Independence (I bought a poster of it) and talked about how it was written in 1776. I found this website called Liberty's Kids. Melodie loved watching the "Now & Then" episodes.
 We also learned about fireworks by watching 3, 2, 1 Firework. I was surprised at how interested Melodie was in this. She loved going to the firework stand to pick out our fireworks for this year.
 We did our weekly alphabet, of course.

 And that's it for the beginning of the week!

The Rest of Bird Week

Wednesday
 Melodie loved watching all the bird songs on youtube.  Then we read this book:

This is the second Just Ask book we've read and we really enjoy them. After reading about why birds sing, we listened to bird sounds on the Canadian Museum of Nature website. It's actually a matching game. Mel enjoyed it so we did all four habitats.
 For the craft we were going to make bottle cap birds. I even saved bottle caps, but I couldn't find small bottle caps. They were all the same size, which would have made pretty silly looking birds. So Melodie cut out circles instead.

With the extra feathers she made a random picture.
 She played to games on the computer and liked both of them. Shapes: Starfall and letter matching: abcya.com. The letter matching was too easy for her, so she chose some other games to try on that website too.
Thursday
  We made two kinds of bird feeders. One kind was out of toilet paper rolls and one was out of bagels.

 I haven't been feeling well all week. She's in her swim suit because this was after her swimming lessons, but before going to a friends' house (they have a pool) that were going to watch her while I went to the doctor. On Friday we didn't get a chance to do anything (I was so bummed because the fun food was so cute!) because after swimming lessons I had to go back to the doctor (auntie watched her) and then she had tap. After that she wanted to stay with her auntie the rest of the night. Well, maybe we can do the fun food another time just for fun.

Bird Week Has Started

 We started by Melodie doing her ABC's on cutouts of birds.  I hope we can do this every week. We love it!

 We tried playing Chicken Stacker, but it kept freezing on us. We'll try again tomorrow.
 We watched the youtube video of a chick hatching. Melodie thought the chicks were so cute.
 She spent a majority of her time painting her bird house. She has been waiting months to do this, so I let her take as long as she wanted.

 While she was in the middle of painting, a neighbor knocked on our door. She told us to come outside quickly. This is what we saw:

I have lived in this neighborhood most of my life and I've never seen ducks walking down the street. We see them a lot at Disneyland, but it was so strange to see them walking through our neighborhood.

We got a little nervous when the crossed the street. Melodie wanted to follow them for a while, so we did. Perfect sighting for bird week!
 On Tuesday we watched Chicken Little. I gave Mel the choice between Dumbo and Chicken Little and that's what she chose.
 After that we read about birds and feathers on Kidzone and read about the types of feathers and the parts of a feather on ASU School of Life Sciences. I printed the worksheets on that website and she did all the labeling.

And then we did the craft project. Mel spent hours painting with feathers.

She thought it was fun using both sides of the feather and made several pictures.
 When Rocky came home from work they hung her bird house outside. I also bought a new hummingbird feeder (We had one a while ago and it broke. Since then she would constantly ask for a new one.) so they made hummingbird food and hung that outside too.

Ocean Fairy Book

I forgot to mention this. All week we've been reading this book.

This isn't the first book in the series we've read to Melodie. I think she picked the first one because it had a shiny metallic cover (and it's about fairies). Turns out she loves the stories. When I saw this ocean one, I knew we needed it for our ocean week.

Ocean Week Days 4-7

 We spent the morning on the computer. First, Melodie played the Wild Kratts Ocean Game (this was on the schedule for yesterday). She found a few animals, then said it was boring. On her own she found another Wild Kratts game. This one was called Ride on Remora. She liked it better. However, her favorite ocean themed computer activity were the puzzles on the Pittsburgh Zoo and Aquarium site.
 Math was also a computer game. It was called Shark Numbers. She enjoyed it.
 We did the sight word memory game. I was surprised by how much fun she had (once we started playing the memory part of the game).
 Even though it wasn't our fun food day, I found these chicken nuggets at the grocery store. We had them for lunch.

This turned into our wave day, so we talked about waves and read "What is a Wave?

 We also started our jellyfish (we finished them the next day, after they had time to dry).

 Friday was fun food day. We started off with a fun breakfast. I saw a crab sandwich on a blog, but when I couldn't figure out what the eyes were made out of, I found the instructions at FumilyFun. I didn't have the ingredients for the eyes, plus I made it into a breakfast sandwich. I think it turned out so cute!

 Melodie was very anxious to finish the jellyfish, so to help her with waiting while I cleaned up breakfast and got everything ready (including me), she made some sticker scenes.

Then we finally finished and hung the jellyfish.

This was salt water day, so first we talked about salt water and fresh water, then we did this salt water egg experiment.

Stirring the salt

Will the egg act different in the salt water?

It's floating!

She loved this so much, she took the eggs out and put them back in several times.

 Next we tried a salt water picture, but we didn't really get a reaction from the salt.



I suppose it didn't really matter because she had such a good time painting.
 Lunch was fishsticks and a not quite successful jello.

Martha Stewart did a much better job. For the life of me I couldn't get the fish to swim. Every half an hour I dropped a fish in and it would sink to the bottom. The next half hour it was too firm. Mel loved it anyway.
 Dinner was suppose to be a fun food that night, but we had several plans that were up in the air and didn't do it.
 I didn't plan for any of this to be done on the weekends, but Rocky had to work, so on Saturday we did the sorting board (fish and not fish). I didn't get a picture of the board, but here's some of the pictures she cut out.

I also made the fun food that was suppose to be dinner the night before. It was so cute!

I died the noodles and made a brown butter sauce. I can't even say how much Melodie loved this (pasta is her favorite food). She asked for it the next day for lunch. I'm pretty proud of it too.
 Again, we weren't planning on this, but I moved the planning of the FHE lessons to Sunday. We are always trying to find things for Mel on Sundays and this seemed perfect.