A Different Sort of School

I love reading the Five in a Row books. I really do. But, I think I just needed a break. I was putting together these fab projects, spending hours finding things for Ruth to do and in conjunction with classes that Chris and I are taking, it was just one more thing to wear me down. This weekend, I was stressing over which book to read now, what things to print out and I felt like chucking it all. Then, I had a revelation. Ruth is only five. The FIAR police aren't going to come knocking on my door if I skip a week, or two, or three. Today I had the kids help me clean up the house (well, sorta) and then we hit the library. I informed them, that they were to check out books first. No playing with trains and dinosaurs (yeah, we have a lot of toys at our library) until we had those books. Then, I asked Ruth what she would like to learn about. She has decided on skeletons. She is fascinated at this point with the human skeleton and how it all works. She also thought perhaps those same skeleton books might tell her just how those babies got in their mommy's tummies, too. (Sneaky kid! She's bound and determined to get an answer to that one way or another!) Anyway, we checked out a bunch of books on skeletons, blood and things of that nature. We also checked out a bunch of books on mummies. She is going to do a lapbook on Egyptian mummies, so I thought if we read some about them she might retain more info in the long run. So, we spent our afternoon reading books about ice mummies and looking at the coolest pictures. Much better and didn't require nearly as much work from me.