Meant To Teach

Well, it was that time again - to learn about the solar system, galaxies, how we get our seasons, the moon phases, etc. You can check out our Space Unit that we completed a couple years ago, when we covered space. Meant To Teach: What's out there in space??? Also, here is the solar system we completed a couple of years ago. Meant To Teach: Solar System Complete This time I decided to do something different with the girls. I might add, it was also much easier than our solar system above. I decided to do solar bracelets this time!

That's right, we are celebrating the birth of a new baby in our household. My oldest daughter is absolutely loving her Book Of Virtue Project. You can get the Book of Virtue here and you can download the units to go with this book here . This week her unit is on responsibility. So she has a new baby egg that she has to nurture for seven days. This is so fun for her. She did get a little grouchy when she realized she had to pay a babysitter by either money or chores. This is real life! I will probably be posting more on this project, but today we are welcoming Baby Kendall into the world. My daughter is doing her shopping list to see the grand total of how much it will be to take care of Kendall. She also had to come up with a crib for her baby to sleep in the refrigerator, as well as a babysitter and doctor.  Here is my daughter's list of baby items and cost.  She had random events that would happen every day with her baby. Whether it was taking her egg to the doctor or havin...

In  our history, we have now entered the Dark Ages (Early Middle Ages). I can already tell my daughters are going to have a blast learning about this time in history. Today was just the introduction. Besides castles and Knights, my daughters actually got into this lesson asking a lot of questions about the food they ate, the hard work they had to do, their healthcare, etc. It was all pretty interesting to learn about. At the end of our lesson, we decided to make a sun dial. We talked about how they used hour glasses, sun dials, and bells to tell time. The girls really enjoyed this. They marked the hour change on their sun dial, as well as came up with the idea of putting our camera on time lapse to see it move slightly - along with the sun and clouds.    

This year, we still did the normal Halloween things, such as carving and decorating pumpkins and attending numerous fall festivals and pumpkin patches. Here's a picture. My oldest was creative and decided to do Grumpy Cat. However, the girls really had blast with this activity that we did the week of Halloween. All you need for this activity is cornstarch, water, alka seltzer, and a container with a lid to put it in. We painted ours like a ghost. You fill the container about 1/3 full of cornstarch, then add water until your container is about half way full. Stir the cornstarch and water together. We then broke up two tablets of alka seltzer and dropped them in the container. Finally, we put the lid on the container and then gave it about 30 seconds and then in flew! I really wish I would have taken a video of this. We enjoyed it so much that we did it over again. Each time when the container seemed to pop and fly, we all jumped. Beware though - it makes a mess. It splattered al...

In learning about the water cycle this week. We read Once There was a Raindrop and The Magic School Bus at the Waterworks. We also watched a few science videos on http://www.sdaccelerate.com . My children really enjoy their curriculum and videos. They make them entertaining. We also did a few science experiments of making our own clouds in a jar and a bottle . Pictures are below, but the girls had fun with these. I tried my best to capture the cloud as best as I could, but it really just looked a lot like steam. It was hard to capture, but the girls could see it swirling around, and they liked that. They let the cloud of the jar here and really liked seeing that.

We have just finished learning about volcanoes, earthquakes, glaciers, caves, and mountains. We've already studied volcanoes before, but they say science and history is repeated. In our case, it was sooner than later. You can see my volcano post here . We did the usual volcano activity of making a volcano and watching it explode. We also demonstrated with graham crackers the movement of tectonic plates. I came upon that idea from The Homeschool Den Blog . So this year, I just decided I was going to let the kids make their own natural land form, such as those we just learned about. During this project though, they had to build a model, find out a little research about it (including superlatives), and then diagram how their land form was formed. So my youngest goes with what we are learning about and she decides to do a mountain. My oldest, however, decided to do nothing that we just learned about. She decided to do a Redwood Tree, but I was okay with that - after all, as long as...

Everyone is starting school this week and well - we're enjoying summer! I've had many comments this week about "When do you do school? I see pictures of you at the lake or with friends." We decided to join the families that try to do the year round school year. Really though - its not all year round. The kids still get a summer break, it is just shorter. But they also get a week break almost every month. This week has actually been ridiculously awesome! As school kids are starting back, we're enjoying lakes, pools, and trails all to ourselves (and with friends). I wanted to post our calendar online, because this took me a while to get our scheduling right. I wanted to be able to work around Thanksgiving and Christmas, but to get our 180 days on the calendar - this took some time. So here it is. Obviously, we've already started, but my hopes are for this to be easier for someone to figure out next year if you would like this type of schedule. There are 36 sch...