Happy Birthday, A!

7 is so old!!! I can't believe how fast the years are going. You are so full of life, sweet boy.  I love watching you lead your friends on epic adventures as you fight off enemies or discover new inventions. You are a natural leader, and you are learning that with that gift comes responsibility. I have loved watching God mold that energy and passion for goodness as you have gotten older. Your creativity never ceases to amaze me. And I absolutely love watching you thirst for knowledge. You love to learn more about this world that God has created. You are a sponge for new information and you love to share what you learn with others. I bless you with a year of experiencing the goodness of God. We love you, sweet boy!

Magnets

This week was another crazy week. That may just be the theme for the remainder of our year. But despite the craziness of life and another round of some cold/virus, we were able to accomplish some school.

This week, we enjoyed our third set of experiments from the Magic School Bus Science Club. The theme this month was Magnets. We read a bunch of library books about magnets, did a scavenger hunt to find magnetic objects in our house, built a compass and used it to follow cardinal directions (ex. take three steps west), and made our own magna doodle. We also learned about King Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians. When I took the kids in to rule out pneumonia or croup, the kids' pediatrician was surprised when she walked into the room to find them drawing pictures of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and maybe more surprised that they could explain what they had drawn and why. :)

In all the fun, I took very few pictures. Again, my brain was a mess this week with the crazy of life, so remembering a camera just didn't happen. Even with all of the fun experiments!

But I did take a few pictures of our individual work time. One of the questions I get most often is how to handle two kids in the same class that are at different academic levels. My last year of teaching, I had 34 kids in my class that were all at different academic levels, so for me, two is a breeze! Each week, I create a contract for each of my kids. This is something I stole from A's Montessori school last year. The contract is individualized to their needs and mostly focuses on Language and Math, since we do most of our Science and Social Studies together. They have to finish their contracts by the end of the week, but they can do the activities in any order they choose. When we work on our contracts, they are in the same room, working on different activities.

Another thing that has worked well for us, was also borrowed from A's class last year. Since he was doing well in Math, I decided to maintain consistency and bought a set of math Montessori manipulatives. It came with lesson plans in order from number recognition to long division. I can use the same program for all of my kids for the first few years… maybe to the end of 2nd grade. It was a little bit of an investment, but in the end was a great deal when you consider two years for A, maybe 4 years for C and we can use it for any future kids to join our family. This is C using the beads to add two-digit numbers. A can use the same manipulatives to subtract four-digit numbers with borrowing. I have had to supplement with some other math concepts since this mainly contains lessons for computation, but overall this has been a good fit for us.

Knots

Last week started off on a fun note. The rest of the country was off school celebrating Presidents' Day. This included my sister's children. She is considering homeschooling them next year, so we invited them over for a day of school with us. Okay… it wasn't really a day of school. It was more like an hour of mostly academic time, but hopefully it gave them an idea of what school looks like for us. One of the  best parts of homeschooling is that it can look different for every single family because the needs of each family are so different. So for one hour, they got to glimpse what school looks like in our house. I'm not sure if it encouraged her to try homeschooling or discouraged her from homeschooling, but the kids had a lot of fun. :)

The boys and I read in our Story of the World book about Ashurbanipal and the Assyrians. We learned about how they built siege towers to defeat cities. Then we used Legos to build siege towers, complete with battering rams. Then we put them to good work knocking over Lego walls. It was a great lesson for a group of boys.

While the boys were conquering cities it the other room, my sister and her Little Miss were playing with pom-poms. Sorting colors and using tweezers to put them into an egg carton helped build some academic and fine motor skills. But dumping the entire bag on the floor was just pure 2-year-old fun!

On Wednesday, some friends came to do school with us. Their oldest learned a lot about knots from his dad, so he came and did a lesson on tying knots for my boys. We learned two different kinds of knots and how to coil the rope when you are done. It was so fun to do school with such great friends. But it was also a little chaotic. Thus, I have no pictures to document it, but trust me, it was fun.

We ended our week early as we headed out of town for a much-needed visit with sweet, sweet friends. The 5 hour ride was SO worth it for a weekend of fun, fellowship, encouragement and edifying conversation. I had no idea how much I needed that time with those friends. I came home refueled. Though I have to admit I also came home sad that we don't live next door so we could share life together. But I know God has us in different places because He can use us more effectively. I know that I love my comfort and ease, and I imagine if we lived next door to those sweet friends, I would spend my life enjoying their sweet fellowship and never stepping out of my comfort zone into the world around me. 

Valentine's Day

This week and last week have been such a blur. We've had so much crazy going on in our lives that I can barely remember what we did last week for school.

The theme was Valentine's Day. We spent a lot of time on Monday preparing our Valentines for a party on Tuesday at our Homeschool Art and Gym class.

We bought a van, which has been on my to-do list since October. That led to our first two days of "Car-schooling." I've heard stories of people doing school on the run, but didn't think that would ever be us. But it was. Never say "Never!" The kids actually liked it and got a lot of work accomplished. I wouldn't do it on a regular basis, but it worked when we needed it to.

We made a few Valentine's art projects to go along with our usual work. They turned out really beautiful!

And that was the end of the week. I learned a lot this week. I was most excited to realize that we can actually still accomplish school when life gets crazy hectic. I don't think I could keep it up for too long, but I was very thankful that we still accomplished work and the kids still learned in the midst of a very different schedule than normal.

Children's Museum

As part of their Christmas present, P and I told the boys we'd take them on a day trip to the Indianapolis Children's Museum. We left early Sunday morning for our day-long adventure. We had a lot of fun! The boys' favorites included the animal area, watching Bumbleebee transform (though that was also a little scary!), the scuba-diving area and the Egyptian tomb. C was so proud of himself as we took a tour of the tomb and he was able to answer a lot of the tour guide's questions. It was fun for his teacher to see how much he remembered from our Ancient Egypt unit.

Solids, Liquids and Gases

What a week! I think most homeschool moms would agree that no matter how much we do, we wonder sometimes if we are doing enough. Are my kids learning enough? Am I pushing them enough? Those are natural questions… Even when I taught a classroom of 34 kids, I still wondered if what I was doing was sufficient or if there was more or better I could be doing for my students.

Having said that, this was NOT one of those weeks. We crammed a TON of fun learning into one week. Our theme this week was Solids, Liquids and Gases, thanks to our second month of Magic School Bus Young Scientist's Club experiment packet. Our week was packed with experiments and hands-on demonstrations. 

We started off reading library books about the states of matter. Then we used raisins to model the different states of matter. It's fun to hear my 5 and 6 year old explain that the atoms in a solid are close together, so they can't move and that's why solids keep their shape. I think they learned something!

Then we modeled the different states of matter with a fun demonstration… The Life Cycle of a Snowman. The kids filled tupperware with snow and brought it inside to make snowmen. Then we set them in the sun while we did other experiments. We watched the SOLID snowman turn into LIQUID water and eventually had less liquid in the pan as it turned into GAS. So fun and a great visual!

This experiment is called Dancing Raisins. Pretty easy. Stick raisins in some kind of carbonated beverage. The kids predicted the raisins would sink and then had fun watching them "dance" up and down because of the air bubbles. Another fun experiment that really taught them about science. They could explain that the air was lighter than the liquid so it wanted to go up. The air brought the raisin up and then escaped so the raisin sank again.

Next we mixed a solid (baking soda) and a liquid (vinegar) and created a gas. It's a variation on the classic volcano experiment. Only this time, we stuck a balloon on top to catch the gas. The kids were able to see the balloon inflate as it filled with gas.

There were several other experiments, including making slime, but I was so busy trying to keep the mess contained that I couldn't grab my camera. 

We ended the week with a super fun field trip that has to do with one of our favorite liquids: Maple Syrup! Our local Nature Center offered a homeschool class about maple-sugaring. Because of the awesome layer of ice covered with a dusting of snow, they also threw in a ton of information about tracking animal footprints. 

The kids located buckets that had been collecting maple sap. Then we collected it, put the buckets back on the trees and brought the sap to the evaporation room to be turned into syrup. We even got to taste some of the sap as it was going through the refining process. Yum!

We couldn't bring ourselves to leave the Nature Center, so we at a picnic lunch (inside) and did some bird watching. I love how much my kids love to learn. They have such a natural curiosity. It was fun to listen to them identify most of the birds they saw and figure out a way to look up the names of the ones they didn't know.

Even the Nature Center store provided some fun math practice as they decided to figure out which stuffed snake was the longest. It was such a wonderful trip and the perfect ending to a great week of school.