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.

Groundhogs Day and Shadows

This week in school, we studied Groundhogs Day and did some fun experiments with shadows.

The kids started the week learning about real Groundhogs. Then they drew maps of an underground burrow, complete with compass rose.

Next, we studied shadows. We bought colored lightbulbs at Lowes and made different colored shadows. It was fun to mix colors by turning on multiple bulbs at the same time. The kids loved experimenting with shadows: how to make them bigger, smaller, different colors, making shadow figures etc.

Then they made stick puppets and created a shadow puppet play.

Despite the crazy cold and snow, we did play outside as much as possible. Today feels like spring with the temperatures reaching into the 40s! This picture was from a few days ago when it was in the single digits.  Got to love crazy winter weather!

Mixed in between these projects were tons of other work with shadows, too. We use a contract method for organizing lessons. We stole this idea from the Montessori school A attended last year. The kids and I do most of our science and social studies together. Then the last hour of our time, they work on their contracts. At the beginning of each week, I give them a contract that shows the work they need to complete by Friday. This is mostly math and LA since these are the subjects that they are on VERY different academic levels. This time allows me to work with one child while the other child works independently. This is just one of the ways that I balance having two children at different age groups in the same class. 

Next week, we are learning about Solids, Liquids and Gasses and doing a TON of experiments. I can't wait!

Another Cold Week

When we decided to homeschool, one of the questions we had to figure out was what to do about snow days. I decided we'd go by our feeder school district. If our district was off, we'd be off. Of course, I made that decision BEFORE I knew this was going to be such a cold, snowy winter.

We took off Monday for MLK day and spent the morning playing with friends from A's school last year. It was great to catch up with such fun friends. The time went really quickly. The kids had fun playing hard. The moms had fun chatting over coffee :)

When our district took a snow day on Tuesday, though, I decided we had had enough snow days and if we were going to be stuck inside for the day, we needed some structure! So we may have been the only kids in the city that had school on Tuesday. :)

This week, in honor of MLK Day, we read library books about famous African-Americans. The kids could sit and listen to books for a long time, but this time I wanted to turn the books into a project. As we read, the kids had to pick three facts about each person and take notes. Then I showed them how to make a Power Point project to show what they had learned.

With very little assistance, the boys typed their notes into PowerPoint, Google searched for pictures, copied and pasted pictures onto the slides and added transitions. It was a very time-consuming project, but the kids did a great job and had a lot of fun with it! The final project turned out great! I couldn't post it with all of the transitions, but you can get a good idea from this video version. Enjoy!

*Please note: there is no works cited, but all of this information is accredited to library books. My kids are 5 and 6. We will work on citing our work when they get a little older :)

The Human Body

With this blog, my goal has always been to keep a record of the fun things that we have done so my kids can enjoy looking back on the highlights of their childhood. I guess it's the lazy mom's version of a scrapbook. As I highlight the big events in our lives, I want to include some of the fun things we do in school. I think it will be fun for my kids to look back and see how much they have learned. I also get asked a lot about homeschooling. I hope documenting some of our days on here will give some of you who are considering homeschooling (or just curious about homeschooling) a glimpse into how it works for our family. Please keep in mind that every family is different, but this is what works for us.

This week, we studied the Human Body. It was a fantastic week, chocked full of science experiments. The boys received a membership to Magic School Bus Young Scientists Club for Christmas. What a wonderful gift! Every month, they will receive a package in the mail full science experiments on a certain subject. The first month's was Human Body. There were 7 experiments, and we had a blast completing them together. I threw in a few additional experiments, and it made for a fun, hands-on week of learning.

Meet "Skinny". This guy was a great deal! I found a book at Half Price Books for $1.00 on clearance. It had great facts about the body and pop out pieces for the kids to make this model. I am pretty sure they learned something. Later today, A told me, "mom, I think I hurt my femur." :)

I found a cool online game to review body systems.  They love anytime they are allowed to get online, and this one really was a great review. 

 Making a model of a lung. It was cool for them to see how the lungs fill with air. 

This is their picture of a human body. I did the heart and arteries/veins for another project. They filled in the rest. I was pretty impressed. They can name every organ and bone that they drew. This wasn't actually in the lesson plans. I had drawn the circulatory system for a different activity. They were the ones that wanted to add the other body systems to the picture. That's something I love about homeschooling. Allowing them to extend and continue an activity if it's something they are interested in.

Not pictured: We did a lab about germs/handwashing. It involved glitter. Kids think glitter is fun. Moms… not so much. I think we'll probably be finding glitter all over the house for the next two months! Even though we did the project over a tray at the table, glitter NEVER goes away!

I'm back

This fall, my camera broke. Therefore, I had no pictures of anything fun to share. Therefore, I never got around to blogging. I'm back, though. I'm going to make a serious effort to stay updated on here.