Daisies at Gumbo Limbo

Cowgirl's daisy troup went to Gumbo Limbo to see a performance by the theatre troupe from Sunflower Creative Arts. Many of the girls in her troup are former Seedlings, so we do a lot of the Sunflower activities

After the show

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Boca Green Living Festival

We went to this festival in Boca Raton that is all about green living. There were some cool activities and displays from local businesses and organizations, include a fun maze representing the water cycle.

From the animal rescue unit.

A lovely boa to touch.

History activity

Another picture of our school table. We're doing an activity from the Mosaic Curriculum,

from the Ancient Civilizations History Pockets on Mesopotamia. You can also see the Half Magic and Gilgamesh the King books.

T-Rexes and math parties

The first time we went to this science museum, they had a dinosaur exhibit with robotic dinosaurs. That night,  she was talking in her sleep and said "That's a T-Rex!" I never found out what her dream was about, but she now has a fondness for T-Rexes, probably from watching Dinosaur Train.

Our lesson today in RightStart math required a math party, with 10 friends. Since we normally don't have 10 kids floating around, we had 10 soft friends fill in. It seems not all are paying attention.

Character practice

Your character is reflected in your characters. This is the translation of the back of the Vietnamese writing books my daughter has been practicing. If you look at the history of writing in Asia, character writing was very important and considered an art form. Our heritage writing is based on Chinese characters, and being able to write required discipline and diligent practice. Now the Vietnamese no longer use Chinese based characters, but romanized characters with some extra diacritics to mark the various tones.

I've learned that the main writing style taught in Vietnam is cursive, from the very beginning of school. Everyone I've seen has very nice handwriting, probably due to the constant and consistent practice. How well can you do something if you learn one style for a few years, then are taught another style for a few months, then practice neither consistently? So we spend a fair amount of time practicing handwriting in cursive. She already knows how to print, although I never specifically worked on that with her, she picked it up herself from books we had. The cursive style used in Vietnam is based on French writing, so I was able to find a very similar font to use for various materials.

One for tracing is Maternellecolor_creuse
Another for just text is Cursif. A lined version of it is also available.

Science Volcanos

So here's the standard volcano model. It's kind of fun to see the reaction of the kid.

Traded chickens

We found a new home for the roosters, and she actually gave us some hens in trade, plus the option to get some babies when the other chickens start laying eggs since I really wanted cochins. These are supposedly Buff Orpingtons.

Police incidents can be too close for comfort!

Today, as I was leaving to pick up big brother, I saw the end of our road blocked off by police. They were there until about 10 pm. The people who live past the end of our road had a hard time getting home, and a few ended up parking in front of our house.

After this picture was taken they set up a pop up shelter, I guess for a command center. She was curious and went to talk to the cops.

Chickens are grown up!

The chickens are starting to crow. It's not a good thing. I think both are roosters. We have to find them a new home...

We have these curly tailed lizards all over the place. Too bad they're too big for the chickens, they're invasive exotics.

Knight Anole

Found this Knight Anole at the data center. It's so cool and pretty big, too bad they're invasive exotics.

Fully feathered chickens

The cutest chicks are now fully feathered! They are cochins, not silkies. Still not sure whether they're boys or girls.

2 chicks and a kitty

The chicks are getting bigger. They're starting to feather out, but I don't think they're silkies.

We got chicks!

We went to buy food for the quail and brought these two chicks home! I wasn't planning on bringing any home, but another woman said they were silkies because they were feather footed, and I had it in mind that I wanted silkies.

Seedlings graduation

It's the end of the school year. We're done at seedlings. The graduates are crossing a bridge to new adventures.

One last time at the park together.

Vietnamese Language Learning

I bought a set of kids learning books from a company in California, designed for younger english readers to learn Vietnamese. I really could not get into this series. The first book seems designed for the K grade, with a letter-sized book(all the rest in the series is a smaller format, basically half-legal sized) and practice with letter writing (in print) and coloring. I'm not sure how the books correspond to grades, but since my plan was to do cursive first, the whole print thing was a deal breaker.

Couldn't find book 1 while I was taking pictures!

Found this book on Amazon, formerly from the Sacramento Library. It's obviously a bilingual book, while the ones above are mainly in Vietnamese.

Ducks in the neighborhood

There are lots of ducks, mainly Muscovy, in the neighborhood, our neighbor even feeds them. Hubby dislikes the mess they make, but they are fun to watch.

Staredown...

Seedlings half birthday celebration

Seedlings have a little celebration for the birthday kids, or for those kids with summer birthdays they celebrate the half birthday. They have a sweet little ceremony, with a candle made of pats of love.

Making the birthday candle.

With good friends

In the Valley

Monkey Girl

We were out geocaching and she found this palm tree.  What better thing to do than to climb it?

More geocaching and too cold for the iguanas!

We do more goecaching in the winter time, it's just nicer to get out, but it's been unusually cold for a longer period. We found one geocache, and not another but a dead iguana.

Putting the geocoin in another location.

Too cold!

Kids and tire changes

The neighbors grandkids were visiting and found hubby changing tires on his car fascinating. They all had to take a turn!

Geocaching at Fern Forest Nature Center

So we visited Fern Forest Nature Center and did some geocaching. We found a nice geocoin and saw birds and a soft shell turtle.

Geocoin!

Such a cute snout!

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