Meant To Teach

We've done 100 days of school, "structured school" that is. As homeschoolers - they are always learning. So all those field trip days, days where they are doing math and reading in the summer, as well as the days they have been off of structured school and are learning things that interest them on their own don't count in this count. So here's to 100 days of being smarter!!

The girls had fun with this activity. You can find the activity here . They put in their guesses of how many blocks that they thought the "hollow bones" would hold. These are literally rolls of computer paper. So obviously it doesn't look that rolls of paper will hold much. Their guesses before they started were only 2 and 3 blocks. To their surprise, they were wrong. This is a great activity to show the strength of hollow bones.

The best part at the end of this history lesson was our dessert! We learned about Archimedes and all his inventions, as well as his jumping out of the bathtub naked and running to the king yelling "Eureka" after he realized the displacement of water. But who can forget the great mathematician's discovery to estimate the value of pi. Before my girls could eat our dessert of apple pie, we proved Archimedes' point by measuring the circumference of our pie (circle) and realizing it was a little over 3 times the diameter of our pie (circle). I'm sure it was 3.1416 to be exact! All I could say after this lesson was, "I wish my high school teacher did this to help me understand." My 10 year old got it! She now realizes the easiest way to measure a circle is to measure the diameter and then multiply it with π. So, we had a little math lesson with our history today, along with a great treat at the end!

We learned about the Peloponnesian War this week. The girls really didn't like the Spartans. Their opinion of them was that they were very mean and had nothing to live for in their lives. However, they really enjoyed designing their own war helmet. This was such an easy, fun project for them. All it takes is a bicycle helmet, toothpicks, and play dough.

We started Chemistry this school year! The kids seem to be excited about it. We are using Bright Ideas Press Christian Kids Explore Chemistry . I already love it - its so Elementary, and if I'm honest with myself - I need that, too. Chemistry was never my strong subject. We did our first lesson today, but before we started off with the hands on activity that's at the end of each lesson - we decorated our own lab coats. This is such an inexpensive lab coat, because its made with one of the hubby's white t-shirts from his closet. We just cut it down the middle, made a name on the side along with a pretend pocket, and the girls decorated the back of their coat however they wanted. This will be our lab coat! They are very cute and I think the girls did very well at decorating. We'll put these on a little coat hanger in our school room.

This is a fun way to learn spelling! The girls wrote their spelling words with a white crayon. Then they took water color paint and painted over the words for their words to be revealed. They loved it. Its a pretty cool activity! Pictures below!

My youngest daughter decided to do her own leaf collection. She decided to do this on her own and we are done with school so I'm proud of her for always learning. Anyways, we found this pretty cool app where you take a picture of the leaf and it tells you what it is or could be (choices). Its called LEAFSNAP. Very cool app! Just wanted to share! :)