Wow, it has been a long time since my last post probably because I am REALLY busy! We are still homeschooling and still LOVING it! I am extremely grateful for all the parents who have gone before me and made it possible, even easy, to homeschool.

Today I took the girls and a laminated world map to Whole Foods. They each found a piece of produce they had never seen before and we looked up the country it had come from. Bella chose red currents from Chile and Ali found some toe-like mushrooms from Korea. There was a music display with cds of music from around the world (Brazil, France, American Blues) and so we listened to the music while wefound the countries on the map. We found a lot of countries to look up in the coffee section (Ethiopia, Costa Rica, El Salvadorto name a few) and the girls had fun smelling (and spilling) the beans in the open containers. The girls helped me choose some coffee to try and I had them write the name of the coffee on the bags for the cashier. Ali chose "Eye Opener." She could only manage to write "eye" but the cashier figured it out and I had a proud moment! The Whole Foods here has mini shopping carts for the kids and so the girls had fun pushing their own cart as we explored the store. Isabella ran into Ali's ankles FOUR times, but let's not focus on that! I probably looked like a crazy lady with my map and two kids going in two directions with their carts, as we stopped in the aisles to discuss geography, but we had fun! My goal with home school is to teach the girls how to learn, not just how to do well in school. I am discovering that the way to do this focuses less on finding answers and more on training the girls to ask questions, to actually think!

After Whole Foods, we went to the gym on base, which has an area where the girls can play while I exercise. When we were walking back out to the car, Isabella found some coins on the ground. They were from Bahrain and Quebec and so I pulled out the map and we looked those countries up too!