We've started reading Harry Potter: The Goblet of Fire this week, which we're really enjoying. This weekend, Emily and I were talking about reading, and she remarked how boring all the beginning reader books are, though Julia really likes the Bob's Books on occasion. So, I started writing them their own Hogwart's stories for us to read together, and the girls love them! Emily, however, made sure that she wasn't actually going to have to go away to boarding school, even if it was one as cool as Hogwarts.

Emily's been playing with our fractiles and making some amazing 3-D images with them. Here she's made a huge ball, then added arms, legs and a head to make the inflated Aunt Marge from Harry Potter 3. She has such an incredible imagination! We borrowed Sorcer's Stone and Chamber of Secrets DVD's from the library and have been watching them again. We had wanted to see Chamber of Secrets again because I couldn't recall the anagram for Lord Voldemort, which I'd been trying to do because Goblet of Fire begins with the Riddle House. So, we were talking all about Tom Riddle and playing with anagrams.

The other day, the kids pulled out the face paints, and Sam had a blast painting his own face. He ended up this cool, swirly blue-green color and was tinged green for the next 24 hours after he washed it off. He looked vaguely sea-sick the whole time. The girls have been playing a lot at Cyberchase and Sam's been playing lots of Scooby-Doo by himself and with dh at night.

The kids have been creating all kinds of really cool science experiments. They've been linking together these large elastic headbands that look like giant pony-tail holders, and Sam has been tying them to all sorts of objects. He'll stretch them as long as he can then watch it rebound with the items of different weights. He's taken to tying his Halloween treat pumpkin to it and filling it with all sorts of things, then watching how it springs back. Pretty good physics lesson! They've also been experimenting with frosted glass, watching how frost and condensation form, freezing water in glasses and marking the levels before and after. Some very cool experiments.

Emily's been pursuing an ongoing interest in Egypt, and recently she's come up with all kinds of projects she wants to do after paging through Pyramids!: 50 Hands-On Activities to Experience Ancient Egypt. We're planning to make a papier mache pyramid this weekend, which we haven't done yet because it's been such a rainy week, and I didn't want to head out to the shed for the chicken wire on my bum ankle. So, she contented herself with making a Sculpey recreation of Egypt that we'll use for our model of the Nile River. All the kids and I made them, and we've got several of the Great Pyramids, the step pyramid that Imhotep designed and, my favorite, Emily's Great Sphinx.