Magnet Study

I was so excited to find a garage sale being put on by a teacher this weekend. I picked up tons of materials and books and she only charged me $10 for all of it! One thing I picked up was a magnet lab. The boys have been begging to start it and we finally did today.

I had Trevor start a notebook and it reminded me of my AP Bio notebook (which, yes, I still have). It makes me all tingly thinking about it. We really love science here, and learning about the world around us and how things work. 

Italy

Abigail's Italy

Trevor's Italy 

Conrad's Italy 

If you go to our family blog, you'll see more photos of our Columbus ships field trip. It was pretty fun!

Unit Studies and Lapbooks

I just wrote a nice post that deleted itself somehow, so I'll just cut to the chase:

We're starting a new chapter in our home education, and it involves unit studies. I took the kids to the zoo last week:

The kids had to choose something there that they wanted to learn more about afterward. Today we started lapbooks about Gila monsters and chimpanzees.

What I'm really looking forward to is our unit on Christopher Columbus coming up. It started when I found this, which we'll be doing this week as a family:

http://www.thenina.com

We'll be picking up books tomorrow at the library, and this is what we'll be following: 

http://mylearningboys.blogspot.com/2012/03/christopher-columbus-unit-study.html

We'll read in the scriptures where Christopher Columbus is referenced, and we just happened to start Ether from the Book of Mormon today, so I got the idea to chart all of the ocean voyages from the scriptures on our big world map. 

I personally will be reading this: https://www.lds.org/ensign/1992/10/columbus-and-the-hand-of-god?lang=eng

And this: http://www.amazon.com/Columbus-Voyages-1492-1504-Laurence-Bergreen-ebook/dp/B0052RDJ5Y/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1409026924&sr=1-1&keywords=columbus+the+four+voyages 

I'm so excited!!

Today we used The Story of the World like usual, but I actually broke out the activity book. It's been months, probably since Twin Cities, that I've used the activity book. Normally I have the boys use a composition book to write a sentance (I write Conrad's) about the reading and they draw a picture to go with it as I read. It was recommended in A Well Trained Mind, and I love it. This time we not only used the activity book for the printouts (a map of India for ch. 30), but we also used the suggestions for enriching the history book. One suggestion was to make Rakhis. I loved the sentiment behind it: girls made this piece of jewelry for their brothers during a special festival/ceremony, and the brother promised to take care of her. 

Except Abigail was napping and the boys made some for themselves. Conrad surprised me by making two and told me the first one was for Abigail. :) I love when he surprises me like that. These are the Rakhis:

I used this website as reference:

http://www.artsycraftsymom.com/diy-handmade-rakhi/

We also tried using our new The Usborne Encyclopedia of History, but I'm not as excited about it as I was originally. I love the pictures, the thoroughness while being brief so I have the opportunity to go deeper where the kids are interested, and the timelines all over. I was really excited about the internet links, but the very first one I tried didn't work (the site says a lot of them won't work on tablets, that you have to view them on a computer), and the other links didn't really relate to our reading today, so I was disappointed. I'm not giving up though--this was just the first day using it, and I still have high hopes! 

In other news, I actually had plans to start out lap booking today for the first time, but we never got to it. The boys were having fun with the rest of the stuff we did. But Conrad got in a double reading lesson (and started off with "I love my reading lesson mommy!"), Trevor got to try out a new spelling app, everyone did workbook pages, and the boys did some random crafty stuff while the craft box was out for Rakhis. 

It was a productive day, but boy am I exhausted! I didn't get enough sleep last night. Zzz...

Three Unplanned Crafts

I love learning and projects that pop up unexpectedly or without too much prep.  The Clara Barton tussie-mussies was a great example, and two others fell into our laps this week. I was called to be Primary Music Leader again, so I decided to make another batch of wiggle worms, so we got to double up and the boys made some as well again. They love that craft. Then, our neighbor who we brought the tussie-mussies invited us to do crafts with them today. We made tie-dye shirts with spray bottles, bouncy balls, and slime. The kids had so much fun! And I'm realizing how much the kids love crafts and how little we've been doing lately! It will be fun to plan some for the summer.

Tussie-mussies

Here's a great educational/service activity to do with kids this summer. Yesterday we read about Clara Barton and made tussie-mussies (metal nosegay holders) and thought of a neighbor we knew who was recently a patient (foot surgery) and gathered wild flowers to put in a tussie-mussies (we made ours from paper and covered them with foil and then "engraved" with pencils) and brought them to her and stayed for a nice visit. I wish I would have taken pictures of the kids with their tussie-mussies!

Clara Barton was the founder of the American Red Cross. The book we read was written mostly about her childhood and her sweet relationship with an older brother (another awesome part of the book!). Clara would treat animals in her community, and later soldiers in the Civil War, and she placed nosegays on the pillows of her patients, which she called tussie-mussies. These sorts of spontaneous learning/service experiences are the ones I pray for most!  The kids learned about love/service, the importance of sibling relationships, history/family history (best-selling author Patricia Polacco wrote this because Clara Barton was an ancestor of hers), the strength of love vs cruelty, treating animals kindly, value of nature, etc. I'm sure I'm missing something! This is FIAR worthy if you ask me!

Here's the book:

Clara and Davie

www.amazon.com

From bestselling author Patricia Polacco's family tree -- the true story of young Clara Barton.Animals and flowers were Clara's best friends. She had a special way with critters and found joy in the beauty that sprang from the soil. But whenever Clara...