Our Awesome Solar System!

Caleb, Tobin, Evan, Subin, Ethan, and Micah

We have a science co-op with 2 other familes and we are studying Jeannie Fulbright's Exploring Creation with Astronomy. We made our solar system out of proportionally sized ballooons except for the sun which we just used the biggest ball we had. We were really amazed at how small some of the planets are compared to others. You can't even see Pluto! (yes, we know that the science community has dubbed Pluto simply a subplant) It truly was an excellent visual!

As an aside, yes, I will try to blog more often. It's actually been almost 6 months since I've entered anything. I plan to go back and update all the fun we've had the last 6 months. But in the meantime, we've started school and for the most part are having a blast!

Hard Tack? What's That?

We got back into the groove of school this week after the move. We left off with Christopher Columbus and decided to do some review and projects this week to kick-off the school week.

We made compasses, are reading Columbus by D'Aulaire and today we made hard tack, what's that? It was a staple on Christopher Columbus' journeys to the New World. Actually, the recipe we made wasn't that bad. Maybe I was just hungry. We decided to make it a science project too. We stuck toothpicks in all of the squares except for one. We wanted to see what would happen. We made some hypothesis as to what we thought would happen. And then we watched. We were right! The reason you poke holes in the squares is to prevent them from rising. Personally, I liked it better risen. I'm not sure why they didn't want it to rise. Caleb had some very descriptive words about his hard tack experience (right side)! I hope the picture is readable. Click on the picture and you can see a larger size of it.

We also learned that the book we're reading is a biography, so the boys' each wrote a biography paragraph. Caleb chose to write one about his mommy. Micah chose to write one about his baby brother, Isaac. Writing is a struggle for my boys, but I think they turned out well.

We also learned that CC's home country is a pennisula. It's also my birth country. And then we searched for other pennisula's on the world map. While we were there, we looked for another landform, the island.

Frog Guttin' Time!!! YUCK!!!!

WOW! Thanks soooo much to my great friend, Leila Cook, for braving the task of teacher of our homeschool dissection class. Everyone had so much fun and it was so interesting. The kids shared in dissecting a frog, a perch and a few stuck around to dissect the clam. While, we didn't dissect the "Plague of Egypt" sized grasshopper, we did exam the exterior and determined the gender. It was so much more fun to do this with many of our homeschool buddies!