We are officially halfway done with our year! Week 18 marks the start of the second half of 2nd grade. If we stay on track -- and we've been doing a wonderful job of that; much better than when we used Calvert! -- we'll finish the middle of October and take the rest of the year off. This week also marked the first week of our "official" homeschooling since Miss M will be turning 7 in the fall, the age of compulsory school attendance in Missouri. Missouri requires 1000 hours of instruction between July 1st and the following June 30th, so we just started a new school "year." This week we learned about Eli Whitney and his invention of the cotton gin. I purchased some cotton bolls from etsy seller Pattie's Passion so the kids would be able to see what they're like hands-on. Our teacher's manual had recommended flattening out cotton balls and glueing construction paper "seeds" to them for this lesson, but I wanted to show them ...