It's like we are living in a rainforest.

The weather in Portland has been pretty miserable. Lots of rain and not much sun—even for here. A couple weeks ago we happened to be learning about the rainforest in the Magic Tree House book Good Morning, Gorillas along with gorillas, Koko, and sign language. It all seems quite fitting. I wrote a bit about learning from these books, reading one a week, and were are still doing it. It's still been really great for us.

For an indoor activity, I found a list of everyday items made from resources from the rainforest. It comes with these tags which you can cut out and stick on objects to identify. I'm still finding them stuck on things around the house—it's pretty cool. The various worksheets I printed out are from TeacherVision. We subscribe to this resource so we get full access, but I think you can see a few sheets for free.

We do most of our research for these weekly topics from library books (in addition to the Magic Treehouse we are reading that week) but it's nice to have online resources, too. We have been trying to include a mix of field trips, building and crafts, writing and reading, and physical activity with each book. Also cooking, music, and role-play, if it works. Some books lend themselves to more variety than others. It's been so fun and contagious to see their enthusiasm each week. The key for me is to not plan too much. I try to think of it as a survey of topics and not worry if we only discuss or do a few things. Also, if I plan too much, I get disappointed if we don't get to it. It's better if we sort of work on the fly—without much prep work.

We made our own mini-rain forest, with the help of a thrifted terrarium (thanks Grammie!) and some tropical flowers they got to pick out at the nursery. After we moved it indoors we discovered there was a small slug living in the dirt we didn't know about. About 10 days later, it wasn't so small (Huge!) and was crawling around. Pretty gross, but awesome, in that natural gross way.