Had you going there for a second didn’t I?

So we added one more member to our family. And we are all in love. She is not exactly a cuddle bug yet, but there is potential. She is around 7 months old, a light ebony female chinchilla. We named her Neko-Chan, which in Japanese means basically my darling cat. 

We purchased her from a breeder in Wisconsin since the local breeders did not have available females and suggested this woman as our best option. 

Neko-Chan is so sweet and seems to be warming to us. She is fitting into our family beautifully, though I will warn you – I am taking waaaaay too many pictures!!! 

So enjoy the best pictures to date! 

Fuzzy butt!

Tiny paws!

Fluffy rectangle

She is allowed very limited treats. One is chewing on apple tree sticks.

The other is rose hips. Here is one post gnaw.

Snuggled in the box Ken made her.

On one of her once a week outings to the tidied up bathroom.

After working our way forward from the Declaration of Independence to the abolishing of slavery we went back to the near beginning of it all with The Boston Tea Party. This was a Trinity’s choice topic. She had heard about it in passing and was very interested in finding out why “so much yummy tea was wasted.” Yup, my frugal little girl was quite put out by what she saw as an avoidable waste. “Why didn’t they just take it home, or tell them to take it back?”

So we based our unit on the DVD series Liberty’s Kids. It often goes on sale on Amazon. This 40 episode series is a great way to look at the events leading up to US independence. We actually plan to watch all the episodes over time and continue our biographies based on each featured person from history. We found a form sheet for our biographies thanks to Template.net. They have varying levels of difficulty and format to chose from. We specifically chose THIS ONE.

There was a nice selection of books to choose from at our local library.

• What Was the Boston Tea Party by Kathleen Krull
• Ropes of Revolution by J. Gunderson
• Colonial Voices Hear Them Speak by Kay Winters (We chose to have the twins go person by person and write about their reaction to the planning of the Boston Tea Party. This is a terrific book for really looking at the people and the occupations of the era)
• You Wouldn’t Want to Be at the Boston Tea Party! by Peter Cook
• America’s Tea Parties Not One But Four! by Marissa Moss (this was a little mature for our project)
• The Boston Tea Party by Steven Kroll

We found a free lap book set up thanks to Homeschool Helper Online HERE. I used Liberty’s Kids worksheets as well at StarMaterials.com HERE.

For more helpful suggestions check out More Than A Homeschool Mom HERE, Teachers Pay Teachers free resource HERE and HERE. The site Mrs. Nussbaum has a reading comprehension sheet HERE. 

Hopefully this will help anyone else who is working on such an interesting topic, my big suggestion is GET THE DVD! The Liberty’s Kids is interesting and fun. 

One of our mini biographies.

Helpful worksheet. If I have not linked all that I use, a quick google search is awesome.

Mid May marks the end of a new experience for Emanuel and Trinity, well a temporary end as we have already signed them up for the twice a week continuation in July.

We were lucky to have a new opportunity pop up at the local YMCA. A very talented sensei has decided to open classes (and maybe eventually a full on local dojo) for children ath our branch. Sensei Tom is AMAZING with the kids.

For 8 weeks, we have come out every Thursday with their homeschool buds Bella and Drew to start out learning all about karate.

On the 18th of May we marked the end of this first program with the receiving of their yellow stripe on their white belts. This also came with a lovely certificate we are going to frame and hang up here at home.

The kids were super pumped when we told them we had already registered them for the next sessions in July (Sensei has a June commitment, so we have a gap). And we are super proud of their willingness to jump full in on a new activity.