Seattle

Our road trip has arrived on the West Coast! This week we drove into Seattle, Washington, home of the Super Bowl-winning Seahawks (American football team), the very first Starbucks Coffee, and infamously gloomy weather.

Intern Natalie enjoys an espresso in honor of Starbucks

We were all surprised by how pretty Seattle and the surrounding mountains are. Here's a sample of the things we saw there:

We especially loved the Space Needle. We all drew pictures of it:

On Wednesday, we tried to build our own Space Needles!

We also reviewed some rainy day vocabulary words (rain, lightning, thunder, puddle, etc.) so that we'd be able to write home about the weather in Seattle. Together, we read Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a book about really strange weather.

Seattle is also the home of some wonderful entertainment acts: Jimi Hendrix, grunge band Nirvana, and the popular TV sitcom Frasier. We watched little clips of all of these things to get a diverse sense of the city.

Next week we head south to California. Meet us in San Francisco!

Yee-haw! KidsCreate Goes to Montana

Our westward journey continued this week with a stop in Montana to visit the cowboys and cowgirls. We drove across the plains and then up into the Rocky Mountains, reading stories about cowboys to each other along the way.

The cowboys taught us a bunch of western words, like horse, boots, cow, ride, and lasso. "Lasso" was one of our favorite words all week long, and we loved watching the cowboys perform amazing lasso tricks:

In all our classes, we learned that "to ride" is a verb, which means it's an action word. On Wednesday, we reviewed a bunch of parts of speech (which helped us play Mad Libs, a favorite road trip game!), like noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, and so on. On Wednesday and Friday we also learned how to make origami horses.

We also got to wear hats like the cowboys do. Don't we look cute?

Next week we finally hit the West Coast in Seattle. See you there!

Mount Rushmore Rocks

It was a long drive this week as we packed up in Chicago and headed west to Mount Rushmore, on the western edge of South Dakota. After visiting so many cities, it was nice to get out of the car to mountains, trees, and fresh air. We made our way to Mount Rushmore National Monument:

We were really impressed by the carvings and reviewed the presidents depicted: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. There's a handy song that we listened to (some classes learned the lyrics too):

After seeing the presidents' faces, we reviewed the different parts of the face: eyes, ears, mouth, nose, cheeks, and so on.

Then we learned the five senses: sight (eyes), hearing (ears), taste (mouth), smell (nose), and touch (hands). 

Here we are labeling the presidents on Mount Rushmore.

Decorating and illustrating the senses.

On Wednesday we did a tricky Mount Rushmore word search and played "Guess Who?" to practice the face words and some adjectives (e.g. Does your person have brown hair?).

Next week we keep moving west into the land of cowboys: Montana! See you there! Yee ha !

Sweet Home Chicago

We continued our journey west this week with a stop in Chicago, Illinois. We looked through a guidebook to decide what we wanted to see, and we were most impressed with all of Chicago's famous skyscrapers, like the Willis Tower. We started with a river tour of the city to see them up close and personal:

After looking at the skyscrapers, we learned how to describe them: tall, taller, tallest and high, higher, highest. These are examples of comparative and superlative adjectives. We learned how to make comparative and superlative adjectives for many words, such as big, small, loud, etc. Some adjectives are irregular and extra tricky, like good, better, and best. In some classes, we compared our nights to see who was taller than whom:

We found the skyscrapers so inspiring that we tried to build some of our own:

Next week we're heading to South Dakota to see some more famous architecture: Mount Rushmore!