Yesterday morning Adelaide played on the front porch while we did school.  She did a good job defending us against intruders.

Austin reviewed the number one.

And practiced writing cursive 'I'.

Then he helped us make a salt dough map of Egypt.  To make it a little easier for the kids, especially since this was our first attempt at a salt dough map, I traced an outline of Egypt on the bottom of the box.

This is what they ended up with.  Not very exciting.  The water areas are lower than the land areas.  I put it in the oven to dry it out so it would be ready for the next day.

Austin and I read this book.

Gavin read this book.

Then they played in the pool.  They got out their Playmobil ships to play with and had a great time!

This morning Austin cut out some words that start with letter I and glued them onto a piece of paper.

We read about bees and he used his thumbprint to make bees on a piece of paper.  Then he used his thumb to make flowers.

After adding a hat to his pajamas (he refused to get dressed this morning) he used a marker to draw stripes and antennae on the bees and a green crayon to draw stems on the flowers.

This is the book I read with Austin.

We finished our book about Mexico that we started on Tuesday and then Gavin made enchiladas.

While we waited for our enchiladas to cook, Gavin painted his salt dough map from yesterday.  The Mediterranean Sea is at the top.

Here he is painting the Red Sea.

Of course when Adelaide and Austin saw Gavin painting they both insisted on painting too!  So I got out the paint with water for Adelaide and the watercolors for Austin.

Here was the map after Gavin painted it.  There is green right next to the Nile River although it's hard to see.

After lunch we finally looked at our water samples and Gavin drew pictures of what he saw in his science journal.  We added tap water and water from the pool to the three we had collected the other day.

Finally, after the paint dried, we added symbols and a map key to our map to identify different areas of Egypt.

Here is Gavin filling out the map key.

He has the Mediterranean Sea, Red Sea, Nile River (crocodile teeth symbol), Thebes, Valley of the Kings, pyramids, Upper Egypt, Nubia, Sinai Peninsula, Kush, Lower Egypt and desert.  

This is the book Gavin read today.

Gavin was quite proud of his map and I thought it turned out great considering it was our first one!