Dioramas Completed

The girls completed their rain forest dioramas on Friday. Here is Peanut's. She is obviously my most artistic child! The only thing that mom helped with was hot gluing the rocks in, and suggestions for how she could do her water. Otherwise, she did it all. Now, where to store it???

Sissy is showing the various layers of the rain forest - the floor, understory, canopy and emergent layer. Notice the little piece of brown fuzz across from the anteater? It is an ant made out of a pipe cleaner.

This week we have left the rain forest and are on to Norway....

Eggs are Good for Your Body and For Supporting Books Too?

I had no idea how strong an egg shell is! We have been talking about various animals in the rain forest and one of those things were birds. We were supposed to do an experiment this week to demonstrate to the kids that egg shells are much stronger than we think and the way God used the "arch" in nature to lend stability. The older girls tried to crush an egg over a bowl by just squeezing it..it didn't work so we cracked 2 of them by tapping them lightly on the edge of the counter (this became mom's breakfast) and then set the 4 pieces of shell on the table with the end up. Then we stacked various books on top of them to see how many the egg shells could hold. The girls guessed 4 and 6, they were shocked (as was I) to see that they were able to hold 11 books! Some of those books were pretty thick too!

Tears of Excitement

No photo to go with this post, just a mom's thoughts...

With last year having been our first year homeschooling, mom is still using the learning curve when it comes to confidence. Her own that is...I struggle with feeling that I am doing enough and not hindering the girls by keeping them home. I will admit that this year there are frequent things that the girls say based on what we are learning this year, that I am gaining confidence that they are doing just fine.

One thing that was freaking me out about this year was the knowledge that I would have a kindergartner doing school. A child that needed to be taught to read...yikes...how would I do that? Well, in my opinion, Sweet Baby is doing fine. So fine in fact that the other day she came to me with a chapter book in hand (she loves to pretend to read them) and said, "Mom, does this word say 'pond'?" Upon taking a closer look I discovered that yes, it did indeed say 'pond'. I was so excited that my eyes welled up and I nearly cried. I was so proud of her!!

Creating the Rainforest

We are in our last week of studying South America (specifically Brazil and the Amazon Rain forest). Two of the girls needed new church shoes so we had several shoe boxes in the house. I decided maybe they would have fun making a rain forest diorama. I remember making a diorama or two as a child. The girls have LOVED it. Here is Peanut working on her box. She has was making a bromilliad for her box.





Sweet baby wanted to to use pipe cleaners to make trees so here she is trying to shape a tree from her pipe cleaners.





Sweet Baby chose to use some stickers we had in the house to decorate the inside of her diorama. She had so much fun building her rain forest and adding all the different animals and insects to her scene. The other girls should be finishing up later today, I'll share their finished boxes with you then.

Fun and Learning at Co-Op

I know that last year I told you about the Co-Op that we are lucky enough to be a part of but I thought I would share some photos of what the kids are doing this year. If you do not already know, a co-op is a cooperative group of parents working together to teach their children. Our co-op has approximately 30 families and is only about 7 minutes from our house. We meet every other Tuesday and my kids just love it. It was a draw to me as a new home schooler who was terrified that I was going to be harming my children if they were not "socialized" (know I know how crazy a worry that was!) It was also a draw to get to know other moms who are doing what I do. The kids LOVE co-op. They get to take classes that I would not otherwise do with them (like Gym). Here are the classes that my girls are taking this semester:


Sissy (5th grade)


Life Skills (pet care, first aid, cooking, etc)


Gym


Kinex Levers and Gears


0-Einstein (science experiments)

Peanut (2nd grade)

Recorder (learning to play the recorder)

Gym

Great Artists (art history/creating art)

Kinex Levers and Gears

Sweet Baby

Kinder Art

Gym

Circle Time

Lapbooking

I have a few pictures from some of Peanut and Sweet Baby's classes that I thought I would share.

Here is the Kinder Art class working on a project they started a few weeks ago using primary paint colors.

Sweet Baby showing off the "bugs" she created with her paint blotches. The kids had 5x5 pieces of white paper that they chose 2 primary colors to put blobs on each side. Then they folded the paper and let the paint smear. They then cut the "bugs" out and decorated them.

This week they talked about neutral colors and were supposed to use neutral colored paint to paint an animal. I had to laugh as I looked over and saw Sweet Baby plugging her nose. She said that the paint stunk. Now, for the record, we have used paint at our house before! She has smelled paint before this day...trust me!



Here is Peanut in her Kinex class. This has been a class that all the kids have really enjoyed. They are using Kinex to learn about levers and gears. On this day they built a balance.

When they had finished the balance, they were shown what happens when you move the "buckets/tires" along the arm and change the weight on each. Previously they built an old fashioned egg beater to watch the gears move to make the beaters move, a ferris wheel (talking about axles) and a wishing well (to see how pulley's work).



If you are a home schooling parent and do not belong to a co-op in your area, I highly suggest you try to find one or better yet, start one yourself!

Pride....

Sweet Baby has been cruising through her reading program. We are using Sing, Spell, Read and Write and she has enjoyed it immensely. She practices writing a lot...she needs to practice because she gets very angry at herself if she does not form her letters correctly. She crosses her arms, pouts and says "It is too hard!" The son of some close friends was turning 11 this week so all of the girls decided to draw him a picture. Sweet Baby wanted to write him a letter so here is what she wrote, "I like to sit by you at church." Believe it or not, she sounded everything out herself (with a tad of help) except for "you". She could not have been prouder!

Lots to Do

This week was a busy week. The older girls had art class on Monday, Tuesday was our field trip and Wednesday and Thursday were full days of school. I thought I'd share some of what we were doing yesterday...

For Science last week we were discussing exactly how a tree moves water from the roots to leaves. We learned that there are "tubes" inside the trunk and branches called phylem. We did an experiment with some celery stalks to see how important the phylem really is. I pulled the phylem out of one of our stalks of celery (not an easy task) and leaving the other stalk alone. We placed each stalk into a glass of water (I added some food coloring just for fun to see if it would show the food coloring traveling up the stalk) and we left them on the window sill for a few days. We pulled them down yesterday to take a look at them and discovered that yes, phylem is very important. The stalk that we left alone not only sucked all the water up and the leaves were still soft, but they changed color due to the food coloring, this showed the girls that the water was moved all the way through to the very tip of the leaves. The stalk that had been altered had dry leaves and did not drink all the water because the phylem had been removed and it was unable to carry the water through the stalk. Very cool.

We started studying Brazil this week (the rain forest for science) and here Sissy is reading a story to the younger girls. She loved "being the teacher" and being able to read aloud to them.

Peanut began doing problems in her math about dividing items into equal groups, but how do we handle it if the item being divided isn't even? The story was about candy bars being divided among 2 people. I told her to go to the board and give it her best shot. When I looked up I saw that she had not only drawn candy bars, but had a very specific idea of what the "people" would look like. I also have to let you know that she is doing much better with her math facts. She is currently memorizing her 5's but is doing much better!

I continue to be shocked at how well Sweet Baby is grasping reading. She is beginning to sound out simple words and put all the sounds together into words she knows. While I was working with Sissy she wanted to look at some of "her books". She was not content with just looking she wanted to read it. I loved seeing Peanut help her through. This is a joyful thing to see the girls working with one another to achieve a goal, being encouragers to each other and delighting with each other when one of them achieves their goal.

Finally, the girls got to play the Geography Game that comes with their My Father's World Curriculum. They are really enjoying it and it is AMAZING to see how many countries they already can locate when just 2 months ago they knew less than 3 of them!