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​We have a blast with Halloween. If possible, it has been even more fun this year. With the girls homeschooling, Halloween preparations haven't been rushed and we have worked them in to the schooling itself. 

The girls picked out their jack-o-lantern pumpkins several weeks ago at Hollin Farms, but they didn't carve them until the week of Halloween. Between the squirrels and heavy rains, the pumpkins they carved just over a week ago at a pumpkin carving party, have already met their end. To ensure we have jack-o-lanterns on Halloween, we carve them as close to Halloween night as time will allow. There have been times we carved them during the day on Halloween and that certainly is the safest move. 

This year Meg chose a gourd and created quite an unusual zombie pumpkin. Anne continued to insist she have as much independence as possible to carve her pumpkin, so we had to ensure her tools were as safe as possible. Clare consulted a few pumpkin carving manuals and finally turned to a favorite Halloween Picture book, Five LIttle Pumpkins, for inspiration. 

Clare has been the most excited for Halloween. She and a couple of her friends decided that would have a mini-Halloween party. We baked Halloween-shaped cookies for them to decorate. This is our new favorite cut out cookie recipe. They made glow-in-the-dark orange slime. But mostly they just danced and played. Clare decorated for the festivities by making rather nice Halloween streamers.   

For the day of Halloween itself, we began with pumpkin pancakes. At morning time, we read E. Nesbit's retelling of Macbeth, which is the best spooky Shakespeare play. We learned some of the most famous spooky lines from Macbeth. "Round about the cauldron go; In the poison'd entrails throw. ...Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble." 

After some very typical school day work, like math and ancient history, Meg and Clare presented their Halloween costume essays. Meg fashioned her essay like an old newspaper. Clare's was a more traditional essay, but she went for an orange and black color scheme. Anne presented an oral essay about her costume, which mostly consisted of proclamations that her costume was much better than her sisters' costumes. 

Having saved our pumpkin seeds in the refrigerator after we carved our pumpkins, we were able to toast them on Halloween and snacked on them all afternoon. I follow this recipe, though I toasted them for a good bit longer than the recipe calls for. We believe the toastier the better. 

Finally, it was time to trick or treat. Here are my very scary girls. Clare was a colonial ghost (inspired by our trip to Williamsburg this summer). Meg was a voodoo zombie. Anne was a vampire queen. You might notice we re-used our Diagon Alley decorations from our summer Harry Potter party. 

Happy Halloween! 

In our morning time, we have been using Around the World With Picture Books by Beautiful Feet Books. We began with China and have read some wonderful picture books, including The Story About Ping, Ming Lo Moves the Mountain, and The Seven Chinese Brothers. The Teacher Guide suggested studying pandas as part of the China unit and I realized we had the best resource ever for studying giant pandas. 

The Smithsonian National Zoo is an amazing attraction in D.C. Admission to the zoo is free, though parking is not. Many families who live in the area opt for a zoo membership, known as Friends of the National Zoo (FONZ), because the membership privileges include parking. 

The National Zoo is home to quite a wide variety of animals, but it is particularly well-known for its three giant pandas. Mei Xiang and Tian Tian are the parents of four-year-old Bei Bei. On our trip, we were able to listen to a zoo keeper talk at Bei Bei's pen and, happily, Bei Bei joined him. The pandas have a gorgeous and large outside area to wander about, but they also have the choice to remain indoors. To encourage Bei Bei to remain inside while the zoo keeper spoke, another keeper passed frozen sugar cane to Bei Bei through a small window in his pen. As you can see from the pictures below, the sugar cane kept Bei Bei sufficiently occupied. 

We learned so much about pandas during the zoo keeper talk. We learned that once Bei Bei was a year and a half, he was separated from his mother and lives on his own because bears are solitary creatures and do not live together. We learned that pandas eat constantly because they are carnivorous animals that have a vegetative diet. No one is certain why pandas switched from meat to bamboo (a grass), but it was likely due to what was available to eat.

While Anne thought the pandas were adorable, she was very focused on seeing elephants. I don't know why she had such a fascination with elephants, but that's pretty much all she talked about from the moment she found out we were going to the zoo. So after seeing the pandas, we headed for the elephants. We watched them spray water, throw dirt on themselves and stand very, very still. I've decided elephants are very good at standing very, very still.

We enjoyed seeing many other animals as well. Meg loved the prairie dogs. We were fascinated watching the cheetahs. A black squirrel wandered into the cheetah pin and one of the cheetahs went into pouncing position and ran at full cheetah speed after the squirrel. I am happy to say the squirrel escaped under the fence.

We visited the American bison and decided that they related nicely to our recent Little House on the Prairie adventures. The girls also loved the small mammal house which included things such as lemurs, porcupines and naked mole rats. As always, we loved the lions. 

At the very end of our trip, the girls enjoyed riding the zoo carousel and playing in the bee-themed playground. While tired by this point in the outing, they got their second wind and had a great time. 

I am quite sure we have the most fun in autumn. We love apple picking, hayrides, corn mazes and pumpkin carving. Over the past week, we have had quite a bit of autumn fun. 

After listening to much begging, I finally let the girls decorate for Halloween last weekend. I put up a few fall decorations at the beginning of October, but I had not allowed anything that was clearly Halloween. It just seemed too early. After neighbors began putting up their Halloween decorations, I relented. 

Each year, we add a few new Halloween items. Our favorite this year is a giant spider that we put amidst our spider webs. The spider webs have been a constant part of our decorations for six years now, despite the fact they are so annoying to put up and to take down. I bought our skeleton last year on sale. This year, Meg was inspired by Hamlet (seriously, she was quoting Hamlet as she decorated) and posed him with another skull in his hand. 

After decorating, we headed to the Fall Heritage Festival at the Gulf Branch Nature Center in Arlington, Virginia. I talked about this festival in my previous post here. While there, Anne and Clare painted pumpkins. The festival always provides fun supplies for decorating pumpkins. This year the girls used Sharpies, pipe cleaners and googly eyes. 

For an extremely different experience, we left the woods behind the nature center and drove to Northwest D.C. for a pumpkin carving party on a friend's rooftop deck. The girls had so much fun carving these pumpkins. People brought fantastic carving tool sets for intricate pumpkin carving and the girls made full use of these tools. My favorite was a drill attachment that scraped the inside of the pumpkin clean. 

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As I have mentioned previously, we have been reading the Little House series. Autumn is a great time for a reread of this classic series because there are typically pioneer activities at fall festivals. Even if you don't have a pioneer-friendly festival nearby, there are so many activities that can easily be done at home. 

Many years ago I bought the Little House on the Prairie Cookbook. I bought this cookbook long before I had children. I had fond memories of checking it out of the library as a child and trying to make mashed potatoes the same way Laura would have made mashed potatoes. I hoped that one day I would be able to share this experience with my own daughters. Happily, I have indeed had that experience. 

One afternoon after we finished our school work, we decided to make butter. I put heavy whipping cream in tightly sealed containers and gave each girl their own container. They quickly learned that it is far from easy to shake cream into butter. We happened to have the bouncy house up, so Meg and Anne decided they would try bouncing their cream in the bouncy house. Once they made butter, Meg added some herbs to add some elegance. We bought French bread for dinner and served it with our butter.

Shortly after this butter-making experience, we went to the Fall Heritage Festival at Gulf Branch Nature Center in Arlington, Virginia. To our delight, they offered two additional ways to make butter that the girls were able to try. They had a hand butter churner that attaches to a jar. They also had a ceramic churn. While challenging, the girls quickly decided these options were superior to shaking a jar. 

Making butter was not the only way the girls were able to relate to the Little House books. The festival offered dress up opportunities, a tour of a log cabin and pioneer-type games. The girls enjoyed making candles as well as corn husk dolls. We also had the chance to make a scarecrow. I can't remember a specific scarecrow reference in the Little House books, but it did seem very pioneer-like. 

I have a few more Little House crafts I hope to do with the girls and I will try to share them with you as they happen. In the meantime, I encourage you to pick up your favorite Little House book. 

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We clearly watch too many cooking competition shows at our house. When we have a few extra apples in the house, Meg and Clare's first instinct is to have a apple pie bake off. Last year, they followed the same recipe, but Clare decided to add extra cinnamon. When Ryan judged the pies, he chose Clare's pie and Meg has not forgotten the pain she felt in her defeat. 

This year the battle was on again, but with a twist. Clare (with Anne as her sous-chef) used our usual recipe. We have long used the recipe "Jessie's Apple Pie" from The Boxcar Children Cookbook. We found this recipe when Meg was in the midst of her Boxcar Children phase and have loved it. It makes a good pie and is easy.

Meg decided to use the recipe found in the back of the picture book How to Bake an Apple Pie and See the World. If you haven't discovered this picture book yet, definitely check it out. The book allows the reader to travel around the world to gather ingredients for an apple pie. One must gather wheat in Italy and cinnamon in Sri Lanka. Eggs must come from a French chicken, because French chickens lay elegant eggs. Sugar must be obtained from Jamaica, while you must stop by Vermont to get apples. It is a fun book and not a bad tool for teaching geography.

Stinging from her defeat last year and remembering that her dad liked cinnamon, Meg decided to add lots and lots of cinnamon this year. When the pies were side by side, her filling was shockingly darker than Clare's filling and that was due to the cinnamon. 

Both girls took an artistic route with their pie crusts. Meg tried a mixture of a solid top and a lattice crust. Clare went with a solid top with a heart cutout added on top. The competition was tough. They were watching each other closely and stealing each other's ideas when they seemed good. 

In the end, Ryan declared Meg's extra cinnamon filling to be the best. But he also said that Clare's pie looked like it should be in a magazine. They were both winners in their own way, though I'm sure what they will remember is how they can improve on their pies to be declared the sole winner next year. 

We are quite new to the homeschool scene. For most of their lives I have embraced the concept of what I now know is termed "afterschooling." Our kids went to school, but I supplemented their education with activities and educational trips. I homeschooled Clare briefly last year, but it came as a complete surprise to us when we found ourselves deciding that the best educational decision for all three girls was to homeschool at this time. It won't be forever. But it is what is best for them now.

As I was plotting out our start to homeschool, I discovered Mount Vernon was hosting a day for homeschoolers. While Mount Vernon is always and easy trip for us, the homeschooler day offered special demonstrations at the Pioneer Farm and a presentation by Martha Washington. 

We started our day with the orientation movie. We learned during our trip to Williamsburg, Jamestown and Yorktown this summer that the movies are always worth the time to see them. At times, the movies are introducing us to historical facts we didn't know. But even if it is a topic with which are very familiar, the movies bring the historical time alive for us. 

From the movie, we headed to the Pioneer Farm. Here, the girls were able to mash corn kernels into cornmeal and grind wheat into flour. They prepared wool for spinning and learned about kitchen tools in a colonial kitchen. Among the kitchen tools were a butter mold, which was of interest to us because we had just read about it in Little House in the Big Woods. 

After the Pioneer Farm, we head back towards the Mansion to visit with Martha Washington. A historical interpreter sat as if at tea and talked to the crowd that gathered. She answered questions and spoke about her life with Colonel Washington. All three girls very much enjoyed this time with Martha. 

There were other events that we simply did not get to. The archaeologists from Mount Vernon were available to talk to the children at the slave burial grounds. While this is something Meg would find enjoyable, she had the chance to talk with these archaeologists last spring so she didn't feel the need to return. Here are some pictures from our very fun day. 

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I am sure you have been very concerned about what we would be doing with those apple we picked last week. You need not worry. We began our apple baking by making applesauce. 

Last year, I bought this apple peeler and it has made the process of baking with apples so much easier. For applesauce, we peel our apples (which are simultaneously sliced). We keep peeling until the crockpot is full. I add a bit of cinnamon (no extra sugar is needed when the apples are as sweet as these) and then cook on low for about six hours. After the apples have cooked, I use my hand blender to smooth the applesauce out completely, because Clare will only eat if if there are no apple chunks. 

Our fall fun was not limited to simply making applesauce this weekend. We decided to spend Sunday afternoon at the Corn Maze in the Plains. The girls were particularly excited because Ryan was able to join us. We aren't usually able to get him this far outside the beltway, especially so close to the tax extension filing deadline. But he wanted to join in on the fun. 

The corn maze is substantial. Signs estimate it takes 45 to 60 minutes to get through the maze and that is consistent with our experience. As you will see from the pictures below, each team takes a flag so you can signal for help if you become irretrievably lost. I am happy to say that both this year and last year we managed to find our way out. Along the path, there are posts on which you can color portions of the map. Perhaps more helpful are the questions at these posts. If you select the correct answer, you are told the correct way to proceed from that point. 

Following the corn maze, there were lots of farm-friendly activities to entertain the family. We enjoyed a hay ride. Clare and Anne loved the swinging horses. All the girls enjoyed tug-of-war, which became a bit less fair when Ryan joined one of the teams. 

We did have a tough ending to the outing when I decided to buy the girls hot apple cider. The cider was a little too hot and it attracted bees. We immediately had two spilled cups and crying girls. I split what remained and let it cool. 

Our trip was enhanced by our finishing the audio book of Little House in the Big Woods and moving on to Little House on the Prairie.  I am so excited that the girls have reacquainted themselves with the Little House books. We will be doing several Little House-inspired activities this week that I look forward to writing about. 

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We have been putting off apple picking this year because it has been so hot. In fact, we had put it off so long that I became concern there would be no apples to pick. So yesterday (enjoying the much cooler weather), we went to our favorite pumpkin patch, Hollin Farms, and decided we would both pick apples and select our pumpkins. I believe this is our tenth visit to Hollin Farms. You can read about some of our previous experiences here and here and here. 

It is about an hour drive to Hollin Farms and, this year, we decided to listen to Little House in the Big Woods as we drove to the farm. I have read several of the Little House books with Meg and Clare, but Anne was just a baby at the time we read them. Meg and Clare recently insisted that we read Little House in the Big Woods to Anne and I was happy to oblige. I enjoy reading these books aloud myself, but the Cherry Jones narration on Audible is exceptional. 

Hollin Farms is located at a very high elevation, which is part of the reason we love it. The views from the farm are amazing. The pumpkins and apples themselves are located on a particularly steep hill. Pulling a heavy duty wagon, we climbed passed the pumpkins and into the apple trees. Because it is late in the season, we had to walk passed numerous rows of empty apple trees before finding apples. 

Once we finished picking apples, we carefully walked down the hill to the pumpkins. Anne found her pumpkin immediately. Meg wanted a whitish gourd and after a bit of searching, she found what she was looking for. Clare wanted a perfectly round, traditional jack-o-lantern type pumpkin. She searched and she searched. We all searched and yelled out recommendations to her. After comparing her top two contenders, she settled on a pumpkin. Finally.

Following our visit to Hollin Farms, we headed to near by Sky Meadow State Park. We discovered this state park last fall. The children's area is incredible. I found a bench and sat at a distance that allowed the kids to be fully absorbed in their own imaginations without my meddling. The play areas are perfect for imagining the Little House books or the Oregon Trail. The girls played together so well and I watched from a distance. 

Some of you might be wondering why we didn't bring our dog, Cubby, as we did last year. The truth is, we wanted to. As we were preparing to leave, he was in the backyard chewing on a steak bone. He refused to come to me when I called him. I tried to persuade him with cheese, meat and peanut butter. He would just grab his bone and run away. I finally gave up. Hopefully Cubby will decide to join us next year, but I think he rather enjoyed his quiet afternoon in the backyard with his bone. 

After a long ride home and listening to more Little House in the Big Woods, Anne and I wrapped up the day by reading the picture book Autumn is for Apples by Michelle Knudsen. We love Michelle Knudsen's books--particularly Library Lion. Autumn is for Apples is a great way to end a day of apple picking. 

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​After what seemed like the never-ending summer, autumn has finally arrived. With the significant change in temperature, we decided it would be a great time for building weather instruments. I've mentioned before that we love the Smithsonian Maker Lab books. We particularly love the the Maker Lab Outdoors book, which has a chapter on weather instruments. 

Our first weather instrument was a barometer made with a jar, a straw and a balloon. We made the barometer just before rain was expected, so we were able to watch the straw move up and down with the change in air pressure. One of my favorite things about the Maker Lab books is that they include easy to understand explanations about why the tools or experiments work. I learned quite a bit about air pressure myself as we worked on our barometer. 

Our next weather tool was a thermometer. Unfortunately, I neglected to get a picture of thermometer, but it was a super cool experiment. You simply fill a glass bottle with water colored with food coloring. You then place a straw in the bottle and seal it with modeling clay. We used an eye dropper to then place colored water into the straw and topped it with one drop of vegetable oil. 

We placed the glass bottle into a bowl of hot water and at first nothing happened. When we were just about to give up, the water in the straw began to rise. We then placed the bottle into cold water and watched as the water moved down the straw. The Maker Lab book explained how this outcome is caused by the reaction water molecules have to hot and cold. The book then applied this to body temperature when one is sick, which was very relevant in our family this week because Anne has been dealing with strep throat. 

I am excited that we have two more weather tools to make. We will be making a rain gauge and an anemometer. I'm going to be honest and say that I have never heard of an anemometer prior to reading this book, but it apparently measures wind speed. I will do my best to get pictures of these experiments up to share with you. 

On Saturday morning, Clare and I headed to the Folger Shakespeare Library for its monthly family program. We missed several programs over the summer due to conflicting plans, but we were happy to be back this month. Often Clare takes along a friend or Meg, but today it was just the two of us. 

The theme of this month's program was Supernatural Shakespeare. The kids acted out Shakespeare scenes that included witches, ghosts and basically anything magical. As a group, they began with the witches from Macbeth. "Double, double, toil and trouble./Fire burn and cauldron bubble." I am pretty sure that my own love of Shakespeare began when my 11th grade English teacher acted out the three witches by himself in class. It was amazing. 

After perfecting Macbeth, the kids moved on to The Tempest. Clare was happy to take on the role of the fairy, Ariel, and properly attired herself for the role. 

The final scene the kids attempted was from Romeo and Juliet, in which Juliet believes she sees Tybalt's ghost. Clare and her acting partner attempted to create the appearance of Tybalt's body, with Clare (still in her Ariel costume) arising as his spirit. 

It is so fun that the kids get to try out their acting skills on the stage of the Folger Theatre. As a parent, it is quite comfortable to watch from the cushioned theater seats. If your child has any interest in Shakespeare or acting, I highly recommend the monthly family programs at the Folger Shakespeare Library.