Spending Time With Mom

My mother covered the school shift this morning while I took Leah and Rebecca for their physicals. It was so great to come home and see Natalie happy and excited about special time spent with her Gram. They played outside making mud pies, then came in and read Moonsnail Song and looked at an ark shell with a hole from a moonsnail in it (we found this down at the beach). Then my mom got out all the shells which I had set up for this lesson and Natalie matched them into pairs. We had 21 pairs. (You can find wonderful exotic shells at A.C. Moore, WalMart, etc. Be prepared to buy two bags if you want a lot of matches, since some large or fragile shells are usually represented only once in a prepackaged collection). After that Natalie drew an ocean and they pasted on her shell tracing and coloring work from an earlier day. Mom said that she talked with her a little bit about how some animals live in two shells which fit together (and I had some which were still attached -- I had saved them from a trip to a seafood restaurant where we got a large assorted platter of steamed shellfish) and some animals, like snails, just live inside one shell. I'm glad they had a really good time together.

I found a better penguin book for my Oceans III list, so if you'd already printed it out, go back and check for the updated version.

I'm leaving soon for my vacation; I'll be back in August, full of notes and inspiration to share from Barbara Dewey's conference!