Norah finished reading 100 Things You Should Know About Ancient Egypt yesterday afternoon on her own.

When she finished, she asked me to help her make an eye of Horus, an idea she found in the book. I found this recipe for salt dough online and we used that instead of clay.



I gave her some guidance, but Norah actually did a large portion of this herself, believe it or not.

We used the rest of our dough to make a platter.

We baked these for two hours and I am letting them cool. We'll paint them another day.

I finished Sherlock Holmes last night and I started reading Dumbing Us Down (getting a head start on my reading for March.)

This book is incredible. I know I use that word a lot, but... If you haven't heard of it yet, if you live on Mars or something (just kidding), this book was written by retired school teacher, John Taylor Gatto, and it is a commentary on what is wrong with the formal school system.

Many homeschooling and unschooling families celebrate this book. And, I must admit that I will buy a copy (this one I am borrowing from a homeschooling friend of mine) and Gatto's words will be read and reread and quoted extensively by this homeschool family, too.

For instance, when another homeschooling friend of mine (on Facebook) found out I was reading it, she commented on my wall and told me when she reads anything Gatto writes, she feels like he is "directly talking to her soul..." To that, I agreed heartily and here's what I said to her. It sums up how I feel about this book so far,

"I felt that way while reading it, too! like Gatto is putting into words what has been in my heart for as long as I can remember. I hated school, deeply, but I also felt terrible about this because everyone told me I was supposed to be good at it. I was supposed to love it. So I tried to be a 'good student.' And, I generally was a good student, usually stayed on the honor roll, etc. but felt like I was was dying inside everyday. Going to school did not equal living for me. I did not even equal learning. It was torture. It was intellectual death. Those are strong words, but it is true... for me."

If you want to get inside a homeschoolers head and find out why we would even consider doing something so counter cultural, you could read this book. Obviously, I didn't read this book before I made the decision to homeschool... but it expresses some of the ideas I had simmering when I decided to homeschool even before I had kids. You'll come away from this book with better understanding of why more and more people are doing this homeschool thing and you may even be so moved you will decide to homeschool your kids, too.

Think 1984... only it's not fiction.

Yep. It's that freaky.

The book is that powerful.

We are slowly moving through our history program The Story of the World, Volume One: Ancient History.

I've come to realize that I have to leave a good deal of the additional reading unread and some of the projects, as awesome as they are, undone. I've wanted to do all the additional readings, all the corresponding literature suggestions, all the projects. I didn't want to miss anything.

But, I have had to be honest with myself about how unrealistic it is for me to expect to read more than one or two extra books on each chapter and do perhaps one of the projects per week (maybe even one every other week) if we want to finish this book within a year. (And, I do want to finish this book within a year, so that I can start the next book and stay on the four year history cycle.)

Thus, we've only just now moved on the chapter three (but we have moved on, which is good) and we are going to do as much as possible by Monday, when, we are, in fact, moving on to chapter four, as painful as that may be for me. (I still really want to make the red and white crowns for Upper and Lower Egypt. It really burns me that I kept forgetting the buy the red paper board I needed when I was at Wal-mart.) But, anyway...

At this point, we are planning to do one chapter a week and we are going to try to finish this book by January 1, 2012. At least, that's the goal.

Below are some photos of a project we did this week and the extra books we are read to go along with Chapter Three: The First Writing.


I've had this little package of clay in my craft supplies for years. It finally came in handy this week. One of the optional activities was to write a message in a clay tablet using cuneiform letters.


We used a flat head screw driver in place of a reed. This all-in-one screwdriver (that I keep in my kitchen junk drawer for odd jobs) was even more perfect for the job because the tops can actually come out of the base. Norah held it almost like a pencil.


We kneaded the clay till it was soft and warm and then we formed it into a rectangle so Norah could write different words on it using the cuneiform guide above.


We even let Avril poke around in the clay for a while. It was cute until she started stabbing through the clay to the table...


Norah ended up writing her name in the clay tablet and we baked it according to the directions on the package. It got rock hard and it will make a nice keepsake to decorate Norah's desk or shelf now.


We are also reading through the book 100 Things You Should Know About Ancient Egypt. We're on #52 out of the hundred, I think, and hopefully, we will finish by Friday when the books are due back to the library. Notice the pencil marks on the cover. They're Avril's doing. I'll have to take care of those before Friday, too.


We have also read the book Seeker of Knowledge about Jean Francois Champollion, the man who discovered how to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.



These books have inspired Norah to say, "If I can't find gems in the river in Sri Lanka when I grow up, I want to be a grave robber or an Egyptologist."


This Ultimate Sticker Book: Ancient Egypt was not on the recommended lists in The Well Trained Mind Activity Book, but it's been a fun addition to our week. The stickers are photos of real artifacts which makes them really interesting to examine.

That's a rubber band on the blurry finger she's holding up to me. She'd gotten it off. And, as you can see, the other rubber band is almost off, too. These rubber bands were my last hope. The mom whose little children always have neat hair swore they'd stay in, that it was "impossible" for any child to remove them. Ha! I should have known...

I collected all the pieces of her cabin (Norah had dumped the set into the big pile of Legos) and we built this after dinner the other night. The plan is to re-build and keep all the Lego houses and businesses we have intact until Norah has the makings of a nice little Lego village. We'll see...


I went in to check on Norah before I went to bed and I found her sleeping like this. We got this plush horse brand new from the thrift store for less than two dollars. I love thrift stores and Norah loves this horse. But, turns out, it's like her sixth stuffed horse. I'm not sure where she gets all her horses, though, since this is the first stuffed horse I even remembering buying her myself. Have I mentioned how much I love thrift stores now?

Such a beautiful smile... Can I see it without the passi?