Unschooling with a conch shell

  Seneca had an awesome unschooling moment today.  She was holding a shell from the beach when she asked me what kind of shell it was.  We then went to google images for "types of shells." Seneca typed in the word shell as we sounded it out.  She learned that s-h makes the "sh" sound.  We compared Seneca's shell to pictures of other shells and determined that it was a conch shell.  I then read briefly about conch shells on wikipedia.
  Seneca and I went over to her craft table and got out her lesson book.  She worked on phonics skills as I guided her to sound out and write the words conch shell.  She still gets a bit confused on the short a versus the short e sounds.  We also worked on writing lowercase n and lowercase h.

4/30/2012

 Both yesterday and today, Seneca made her own puppets.  She drew pictures of people and then cut them out. She gave her puppets the names "Riding Hood" and "Starla."  Today, she sang Selena Gomez's "Love you Like A Love Song" as part of the puppet show.  I also made another "fairy creature" for Seneca to play with. The pattern came from A Little Garden Flower'sThinking Feeling Willing program.  
   Seneca also colored with block crayons.  I read "An Egyptian Cinderella Story" to her.  Seneca retold the story of her birth using simplistic illustrations that I had made.

Legoland 4/26/2012

Seneca making a birdhouse on 4/19/2012

Projects from 4/8/2012 and 4/10/2012

Seneca's Name

  Today, I met a woman who wrote a book called The Road to the Seneca Falls Convention.  Seneca was specifically named after the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. I then found out that the newspaper published by the movement was called The Lily.  How perfect that my Seneca is Seneca Lily.
    I had first learned of the Seneca Falls Convention in my women's studies class in high school.  I later did a presentation on it for AP History.  When I was doing my research for the project, I thought that Seneca would be a great name to give to my future daughter.
  I just about gave it to my first daughter as a middle name, but I didn't follow through with it.  Now, I am so glad that I didn't.  My older daughter has a beautiful Arabic name to reflect her heritage from her father.  And, I did get to name a daughter of mine Seneca and use it for her first name.  In truth, I chose Lily for her middle name because Stargazer Lilies are my favorite flowers, but what a happy coincidence!

Ahh...The Florida Life