Dig It

TWO IN THREE: Annabelle's looking a bit like a Jack o' Lantern these days. She's lost two incisor teeth in three days. Poor girl. Today's tooth was lost during what I will describe as a flossing accident, if you can believe that. (She got a flosser stuck on her lower teeth, I attempted to help her and I wound up knocking an already loose tooth a WHOLE lot looser. Doh!

I must say, she took me knocking her tooth out pretty well. ;) Perhaps it was the $$ signs in her eyes knowing the Tooth Fairy's coming AGAIN tonight. The poor nymph must be all worn out with his/her repeated trips to our place.

I FEEL THE EARTH MOVE: The Big Dig continues on 'campus.' The excavator is (ever so slowly) making a bigger hole on our property to accommodate the addition to be.

When we walked out the door this morning headed for science and art, both of the kids let out a "WOW!" as the hole had grown dramatically. Maybe the digging will actually have an end in the near future. It still just looks like a big mess right now (despite the $$$ being hemorrhaged).

MATH MATTERS: The kids are darn near done with Singapore 3A, so I picked up Singapore 3B workbooks in the curriculum room today. I remember actually being excited when I was a kid and we got new math books. I'll have to ask CJ and Annabelle how they feel about the new texts.

While Annabelle was in art, CJ spent nearly an hour on the CoolMath-Games.com Web site. He started with a long session of The Number Monster for Long Division which, as you might have guessed is a 'game' involving solving long division problems. Not everyone's idea of fun, perhaps, but CJ offered, "You know I'm really good at division" as his reason for selecting it.

THE BEETLES: The insect unit in science continues. The kids all compared notes on their worms' weeks. There were tales of (exoskeleton) sheds and deaths. So goes the circle of worm life.

Today, the class was introduced to their newest (in class) pets - the milkweed beetle. SUCH excitement, words can't describe!

The kids' project today was to build the milkweed beetles a comfy habitat in which to thrive. It was a rather involved process, but the kids were up to the challenge.

POP!: One of the many reasons I love listening to NASA's Third Rock Radio station is because instead of annoying ads between songs, instead it's factoids about the space program or other science-related stuff. Today, we heard a short snippet about a study by scientists at the University of Scranton regarding the nutritional value of popcorn. Per the report, it's the only food that's 100 percent unprocessed whole grain, the kernels are "nutritional golden nuggets," and popcorn has more healthful antioxidant substances than fruit or vegetables. Good news, indeed. Nice that there's a popcorn machine at the kids' school. Now, if it was only an air popper ...

BIG NATE: CJ has read and re-read the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" series of books. He owns them all in paperback and hardback (for some reason that was a DIRE necessity), but we haven't found another book or books that he comes close to liking as much. I'm hoping that's about to change. I've been seeing "Big Nate" books here and there (often displayed next to "Diary of ..." books) and think they might be a ticket. So, on a field trip to Target this afternoon, we were going to buy one. Until I saw the price tag was $13 for a book he'd probably read in about an hour. So I guess we'll check the Amazon/resale market. ... The Web site for the series is certainly engaging ...