Super Rachel Zana's Spot

Most springs, our next door neighbor taps the trees in his yard along with the tree between our houses on the boulevard, collecting sap to boil down into maple syrup.  The kidlets like checking on the progress of the dripping sap in the jugs hanging from the trees.

While I was teaching on Thursday, one of our babysitters helped the kidlets make a snow house on the deck.  He shoveled snow up in a heap, and then they carved out an interior cove big enough to fit a lawn chair!  They made windows, and even a fireplace inside.…

Despite the fact that I was up making green pancakes at an early hour and that everyone did have the opportunity to eat Irish soda bread, Kidlets kept asking me all day, “Why are we not REALLY celebrating this holiday.”  They missed the blasting celtic music that usually wakes them…

Monday afternoons are typically when we travel down to our branch library to pick up all of our items on hold and check out new books.  I was so excited that the ice was melted off the streets and the temperature was warm enough for us to load up the…

He’s a busy boy these days, scooting and almost crawling across the floor to get to whatever looks interesting.  We are loving those sweet two bottom teeth that poked up in tandem a few weeks ago.  The big kidlets have gotten very good at picking him up and moving him…

We’ve been having a lot of fun with the puzzle/game Equilibrio.  When you open the box for this activity, you find a collection of small geometric blocks, and a large spiral bound notebook with pictures of all sorts of towers to build, arranged in sequential order from easiest to hardest.…

I recently purchased My Very First Art Book by Usborne Publishers, along with 365 Things to Draw and Paint by Fionna Watt.  The art projects in both books are the kind of open ended projects that I love to have the kidlets working on, and they are presented in an…

The name of that southern state, with its collection of i’s and double s’s and double p’s, is such a great spelling milestone.  Who hasn’t learned to spell it before really understanding how spelling works?  The sound of those double letters is so mesmerizing. Earlier this week Mr. SP came…

She was deep in thought, looking at her large stack of library books waiting to be checked out and brought home during a visit to our branch library last week.  A stack of books . . . so many possibilities.

Because performing is always stressful for me as a musician, and for many of my students, I’ve been wanting for quite some time to try having a performance party where students would come and play for each other without any parents or other grown ups around.  A few weeks ago…