Under the Sea

For the past few weeks, WWD has been working on a report for school about a habitat. Each student chose a different habitat, and in addition to the written report, they each completed a diorama of their chosen habitat. All the completed dioramas were so cool, of course! WWD chose the ocean; if you'd like to read his excellent report, you can check it out here.

His diorama, as you can see, turned out awesome! See if you can spot the jellyfish, giant squid, whale, dolphin, and giant sea turtle (Hint: The turtle is eating the jellyfish and the whale is eating the squid. What fun would it be without a little "carnivority" going on, right?)

(Note to self for future kids' projects: The ocean is the ONLY habitat requiring the animals to actually hang from the top of the diorama. I'm just saying.)

Cheesy Science

This week we learned that while minerals consist of one, pure substance, rocks combine more than one ingredient. Who knew geology could be so tasty?

Eagle Watching

Friday we took a field trip with Grandma out to an area along the Wisconsin River where bald eagles spend the winter. We saw several eagles in the wild, which was great! They spend most of their time snuggled into their roosting spots, conserving energy for the cold. although it was hard to get a good photo, we got a good view of this one, who was quite near the road.

Journey to the Center of the Earth

I promise, in our homeschool we do plenty of workbooks--spelling, math, grammar, you name it. But science always seems to give the best photo ops!

Today we learned about the composition of the inside of the earth by making individual pizzas with different ingredients for the inner core, outer core, mantle, and, uh--crust.

The Water Cycle

This week we did a really good little science unit about the water cycle.
In our first lab, we fooled around with ice, water, and steam--we thought we knew it all, until it came time to figure out how to get the water vapor back into liquid form. We had ice cubes in a Pyrex pitcher, holding it over the steaming tea kettle, and water droplets formed on the outside of the pitcher. "How do they get there?" asked the wise science teacher (that would be me). (Hey, somebody get the baby's hand out of the steam!)

"I don't know," said MRD. "Do they get through the glass somehow from the melting ice?" I wish you could have seen the look on her face when she realized it was the water vapor in the air, condensing as it cooled. It was one of those moments that make homeschooling all worthwhile, for sure. Later we noticed the frozen condensed water vapor on the outside of our windows, and also determined, of course, just why it is that the mirror gets foggy from a hot shower. Pretty exciting, no?

For our second lab, we created this little structure involving a bowl of blue-tinted salt water with a small empty cup inside, plastic wrap on top, and a pebble on the wrap over the cup. Overnight, the water condensed on the plastic wrap, and dripped--just a tiny bit--into the cup. But the water in the cup was neither blue nor salty. Hmmmm....Have you ever thought about the fact that all the water on the earth is, and has always been, the same water, since the days of the dinosaurs, just getting recycled over and over? Kinda gross, of course, but also kinda scary, since it really makes you think about how important it is to take care of our water and air.

JPD liked this science lab a lot, especially eating the ice cubes. And he ventured out into the sub-zero outdoors in search of more ice to melt. Seriously, though, he's quite a little scientist, and especially loves the Magic School Bus books and movies. In the water cycle book, we saw the kids shrink and ride along through the water cycle in little raindrops, and he hasn't stopped talking about that. I know he's trying to figure out how to get into one of those raindrops himself!

Moonwatch

This morning we went to the second of a two-part class about the moon. I was amazed to learn how far across the sky the moon moves from one day to the next; I thought it was just a tiny bit per day. Also, it goes from right to left (that is, east to west, I suppose), which seems strange to me.
As you might have noticed, we've been reading quite a few books about the moon and about the moon landings this fall. Until now, I never really knew how the relative positions of the moon, sun, and earth correspond to the moon phases that we see. We also checked out one of the planetarium's telescopes, and we're looking forward to seeing the close line-up of Jupiter, Venus, and the moon which is occuring right now (if only all these clouds would get out of the way--go away, snow!).
I hope my kids are as fascinated by all this as I am! :)

More Tasty Science

Did you know that a tortilla can be made to look very much like a waning Gibbous moon phase?
Me neither.

Science Takes to the Air

Our airport field trip this week triggered an impromptu afternoon of air- and flight-related science experiments. Each student led one experiment.

Here we are testing racecar aerodynamics:


"Must...get...tasty...racecar..."

Discussing rising air currents and discovering that mobile shapes twirl faster when placed above a heat source:

Making a hot-air balloon to think about heat rising:
(This one was JPD's but he was camera-shy.)

Investigating what happens to a glass-enclosed candle in water (when the flame goes out, the water rises inside the glass!):

Making spinning helicopter blades to discuss how the air currents work:

This was a detour from our "regular" curriculum, but it still fit in well with our science theme of "Earth and Space." All these easy and cool experiments came from the book "Air, Wind, & Flight", from the library.

Turbo-Schooling

Check out this cool spider web that we found on our playset today!


What a great school day we had!!
Last spring, we started holding school at the library occasionally. We all love it there, and now we're hoping to be library regulars. So this morning we packed up our books and took over the library reading room, which is truly a wonderful spot.

We accomplished a ton: Everyone did grammar, writing, math, and some logic or other puzzles. As part of WWD's writing lesson, we did a read-aloud of the first chapter of Famous Men of the Middle Ages, which was about the Gods of the Teutons. After reading about Valhalla and Thor and the Valkyries (Teutonic angels, it turns out), we came back home for lunch and listened to Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries at a very high volume, which we all loved. Then we discussed the fact that composers often get ideas from literature and from religion: "Do we think any famous composers got ideas from Christianity? Maybe? Well it turns out that most of the famous music throughout western civilization was composed with Christian themes in mind"...etc.

Today WWD worked with his supplemental math book called Football Math which is awesome. I can't say enough good things about it. We're using it as a workbook; it's full of trivia and math problems based on football history and statistics and hypothetical solutions. It's targeted towards grades 4-8, so it is perfect. Today we calculated averages by figuring out various real players' yardage per game, etc. This got us into long division with quotients and divisors into the thousands, which is ahead of his regular text, and we hardly even noticed! Perfect, perfect, perfect for him! When he gets a bit older, and gets into Fantasy Football, we will have created a HUGE monster. I can't even imagine how obsessed he will be.

We also completed building our weather instruments today. The rest of our weather science unit will include tracking and graphing weather for the next several weeks, along with discussing how seasons work. Here's a picture of our rain gauge, anenometer, and weather vane:

We also have a barometer from William's last-year work with the Jason project, and a mini store-bought weather station, both of which joined the group after this picture was taken. So now we have a real, live weather station in our back yard!

Weather Reporting

Our first science unit is about predicting weather. This week we built a rain gauge and practiced predicting the rain for several days. Luckily, one of these days it was actually raining!

I really like our science curriculum a lot. To differentiate it a bit for our various homeschool grade levels, and because WWD already knows a whole lot about weather, I'm putting him in charge of leading our experiments for this unit. Next week, we'll be making an anemometer and maybe a weather vane.

You Know What?

Maybe part of the solution to yesterday's woes is that I need to just ratchet down my need for lesson planning. If I go to the trouble of planning out the whole year down to the day/hour for each subject, then what? Of course: I'll just stress out trying to follow the plan, and we'll already be either ahead or behind, after, like, the first 30 minutes.

The thing is, we have awesome curriculum materials. Too many, but that's for another post. If we just start on them, and work on them as best we can, everything will be fine. All the kids will cover lots and lots of good material. Homeschoolers always worry about gaps, but the thing about that is--how can you possibly not have gaps? People learn all different kinds of stuff at different rates.

Today I started working with each of the school-agers on our First Language Lessons and Writing With Ease materials. KLD learned what a noun is--not much, but not bad for the second day of first grade, right? MRD worked on perfect capitalization and punctuation, and WWD practiced paragraph writing.

Everyone did a bit of independent reading and piano practice. And we started our new science curriculum with a unit on temperature and how thermometers work. See us? :) (sorry we're a bit blurry.)
Meanwhile, our schoolroom is still messy. We just worked upstairs today mostly. And guess what I'll be doing over the Labor Day weekend...