A Fly On My Homeschool Wall

 It was a good school week. It was also a good food week.  (Honestly, most of our weeks are good food weeks, but I'm learning some new skills, so I have a sense of accomplishment and adventure that is new.) We're part of the country that has been frozen solid. So on Monday, the kids and I froze bubbles.   It was harder to do than the beautiful blogs with their beautiful photographs indicate. But it was awesome! It was something like -4° outside, so I don't think we even lasted half an hour with the bubbles, but we came in happy and cold.  We read a little bit about the science of bubbles and freezing, then we settled into regular academics like math and spelling and history. I doubled up our moon studies in the plan above with both a craft and an Oreo moon phase diagram,but the craft (listed as "easy" in the book) turned out to be too complicated and fiddly for my particular crew. Hurrah for doubling up!  I chucked the craft, did the Oreo activity with the ...

6:30 am next to my driveway We dove fully back into school this week. And it went fairly well. Because our Christmas School was so enjoyable, I designed a month's study in the same style. This is the first week's plan. The kids said they knew what would happen when they brought snow inside to melt, and they acted a little bit blasé about it all.  But then it started to melt as they worked, and they began applying pressure, moving their cups to places in the sun, and generally becoming engaged in the process of a huge cup of now melting down to an inch or two of water. Not included in the plan above are my handwritten notes about including spelling (I printed out a variety of grade level lists), and over 3 days, the kids copied them, studied them, then had a mini spelling test of 5 of the words from their appropriate lists. Ladybug and Mister Man share a list. Brother, Beowulf, and Baymax share a list. Lola has her own list. It was surprisingly easy to do the spelling list aroun...

 After I posted last Sunday, Brother got angry over a Lego.  Long story short, violence happened, and he ran. It was a long, tense evening of searching, calling 911, and finally finding him. He was not happy to be home, but he chose to be home, so we settled in the best we could. We were tired, sore, and on edge, so we all went to bed by 9:00 pm. When we woke up, it was the first day of 2024. Our study theme for January is astronomy, and even though it was not technically a "school day," we went to the downtown planetarium and caught a showing of Destination Solar System . No pictures were allowed during the show, but before it began there was a slide show of various pictures from outer space.   Awe set in almost immediately. The actual show was silly and fun.  We managed to learn a few things we didn't already know, and I was happy to start the month in a joyful manner. We got started on official school on the 4th.  Just history for the high schoolers and ...