Orbits, Otters, Owls and Scones

We read The Little White Owl . We made these puppets and the girls put on their own play (with 3 acts even) about an owl trying to find his family. I got the template for the owl here.

We read the Baby Otter Book and searched the internet for pictures of and more info on otters. Ellie thought this picture was hilarious. Maybe because we finally finished the first Harry Potter book and moved on to the second one this week. While she was drawing otters in her book for fun I remembered something we had abandoned from the Oak Meadow curriculum. I asked her to draw what happened in Harry Potter the night before. So the last few days she has drawn scenes from the book. Here is today's installment.

She said her car looked like a fish... I think he looks like he should be chasing (and chased by) ghosts.....

We also talked about orbit. We played an orbit game I made up on the fly. One of us is the sun, the earth and another planet (venus and mars seem to be the favorites). We chased circles around each other for a while. I then told them to pretend we were on the earth's "nose" so if I started spinning like the earth does is it day or night? Which then turned into a host of entertaining spinning and chasing while asking if it's day or night. I explained if the earth didn't spin it would get too hot, just like your nose burns if you are out in the sun too long. The flip side of that being your bum would freeze. I touched on seasons wouldn't change if we didn't orbit, but at this point they were having too much fun to pay attention so I left it at, "Life couldn't be if the world didn't spin and orbit."

Tamarin is plodding along on her Explode the Code book that she hates and we also did some dice math. I do like these sheets (you could use the domino one for dice too), but this time I just had her write them down on blank paper.

A friend of mine was posting questions about scones on facebook which got me thinking, I haven't made scones in forever! I had blueberries sitting on my counter that were slated for a cream cheese bread. They were confiscated for this recipe. With a few differences.

I used 1/4 c cream and 3/4 c 2% milk.
I had to add quite a few handfuls of flour to decrease the stickiness of the dough. Could have been my mistake or could be a problem with the recipe as written.
I flattened it with my hands and folded it on itself like she suggested, but I waited to add my blueberries into each fold instead of mixing it in before.
I picked the log up, curled it around making a circle and pressed on it till it formed a round.
I slathered 4 tablespoons of butter on top, not 2 and shoveled liberal amounts of sugar on it :)
I bumped cook time up to 30 minutes.

If you coat the blueberries in a splash of flour BEFORE adding them to the mixture they won't bleed as bad, muffins scones, bread, anything with blueberries. Got that tip from Alton Brown.

Tamarin liked it, the other two not so much. Mmmmmm....  I LOVE IT. Wonderful recipe.