Week 26, MFW Adventures & K

I've been trying to transition Caleb to using regular wide lined paper.  Apparently, writing the verse was too restrictive for him and he went a little crazy with the reference number!  We've been having a lot of fun in science, using this book:

Below are pictures of raisins in a glass of white soda.  We learned about fizz!  The gas collected on the raisins, and they floated to the top (2nd picture).

This was baking soda and vinegar.

Here, we made "fizz in your mouth" from our book.  The ingredients were, powdered sugar, citric acid, and baking soda.  When you put it in your mouth, it fizzes.  It really did!  It didn't taste very good though.  Caleb didn't wait for my instructions that he should only take a little on his finger, and he put a whole spoonful in his mouth!!!  Ha!  It started fizzing in his mouth and he started yelling, it was SO funny!  He didn't try any more!  Rebekah liked it though.  I recommend only making a quarter of the recipe though, it made way more than we needed.  I bought the citric acid in the canning isle at Walmart, I'll use the rest for canning tomatoes in the fall.

In history, we learned about California and the Gold Rush.

Caleb did his summary all by himself without any complaining or whining, so I didn't make him write a third sentence like I usually do.

Rebekah finished her 100 chart this week!  We had jelly beans to celebrate.

I got the egg carton idea from a friend.  She put 10 jelly beans in each section to make 100, then we all ate a bunch!

She also started a simple addition/subtraction workbook.  She LOVES having her own math book and has been doing a lot of pages!

Here are a couple of her student pages.  She did the math page all by herself, I was impressed she understood the equations already (she did this before she started her math book above).

One morning while I was still sleeping, they both made their own ipads and cell phones out of cardboard, complete with paper cup chargers!  They've been a little obsessed with watching other kids play their ipads at church.  I have one ipod I let them play on occasionally, but not very often.  This really made me laugh.  Especially when Caleb was playing with his when he was supposed to be doing his math, I thought I was going to have to take away his pretend cell phone!

They also played a lot with this building set.

And I found this matching book at Goodwill that they had fun with too.

That's all for week 26.  Thanks for taking a peek.  I'm linking with:

Week 25, MFW Adventures & K

It was back to regular school after our week and a half doing our Iditarod Unit Study.  Above is a picture of our science book, Usborne First Encyclopedia of Science (Internet-Linked), with our cup of water.  They were a little confused about atoms and molecules, it's difficult to understand something you can't see.  But they loved making model water molecules with jelly beans and marshmallows!

We also took a look at soap using, Science in the Kitchen.  Below is a picture of how dish soap spreads out on the surface of water, moving the baby powder out of the way.  Of course, they also did the dishes for me this day... all in the name of science!  (Ha Ha Ha)

This is what Joshua does when no ones looking... at least he's cleaning up his mess!  (That's the pencil sharpener he took apart and dumped all the shavings)

In history, we covered the states of Wisconsin and Iowa!  For Iowa, we tried a corn casserole, because they are big corn growers.  Kevin and I thought it was good, but no one else did.  Oh well.

Art has not been going that great.  Below are their drawing pages, which were supposed to be done using colored pencils.  They just don't seem to care about art, they rush to finish it as quick as possible.  I think maybe I'll just do the paint and marker cards from now on, they seem to like them.  The first one is Caleb's.

Rebekah learned her favorite letter this week, R!  I let them play with a bucket of rice, because rice starts with R.  We also read a few books about rocks.

She's almost done with her 100 chart, so we started counting money.  Every day we add a penny and count what we have.  I trade her nickels and dimes for her pennies.

That was week 25, thanks for stopping by and taking a look.  I'm linking with:

Iditarod Unit Study

We took a week and a half off of our regular My Father's World curriculum to study the Iditarod.  The Iditarod is a 975 mile sled dog race across Alaska.  We had a lot of fun!  I tried to include all subjects during our study.  Both kids made posters with all the information they were learning.  Above is Caleb's poster, and below is Rebekah's.  We used the Iditarod website every day to check updates on race and follow our favorite mushers (I even splurged to become an Insider so we could see all the videos!).  We all picked our own mushers to follow before the race began.  My musher won!  Rebekah's came in 2nd, and Caleb's came in 3rd.

We read a lot of books and watched several movies about the Iditarod, sled dogs, and Alaska.  We didn't get to all of the books in the picture, but we looked at most of them.  The read aloud book I chose was Julie of the Wolves, which we really enjoyed.  Although parents beware, there is a couple paragraphs about why she ran away from her husband that need parental discretion.  In 1925, a few children in the town of Nome came down with diptherea.  The only way to get the vaccine to save the town was for some heroic dogs and mushers to deliver it.  The Iditarod is run in their honor.  We read about the sled dogs of that run, Balto and Togo, and then watched the Disney movie, Balto.  (The movies is not accurate at all!)  Our favorite movie was a 2008 documentary called "Iditarod".  It followed a few mushers for the entire race.  Some of the mushers in the movie were competing this year as well.

I taught the kids what a Haiku is, and then we tried to write our own.  I had to help them a lot, but they liked clapping out the syllables.  Below are drawings they did to illustrate their Haiku's.  The first one is Caleb's.

I also had a lot of copywork for them to do.  These were part of a unit study I got for free from The Old Schoolhouse Magazine.  We talked about what qualities a good musher needed to have, then we read and discussed several bible verses that taught us about good character.  Hebrews 12:1 was our main verse though.  We want to finish our race to heaven strong!

The unit study from The Old Schoolhouse Magazine also had a few fun pages included that we did together.

For science, we learned about the different types of dogs, looked at the parts of a sled, and tracked the weather of Nome versus our hometown.  It was colder in our hometown than it was in Alaska at the start of the race!  At the end of the race I helped Caleb make a line graph so we could compare.

Besides the graph, I found some Iditarod themed math fact sheets for Caleb.

The race is 975 miles, so I had both of them count out 975 beans!  Caleb has been learning about hundreds in his math lately (Singapore 2A), so this was a perfect exercise.

Caleb also found some time to build with Legos!

This was a really great week.  I'm so thankful that I get to homeschool my children and take time to do things like this!

Week 24, MFW Adventures & K

We had a lot of fun in science this week.  We continued to use Science in the Kitchen as we learned about which foods are acidic.  

We made purple cabbage water (pour boiling water over purple cabbage leaves and let it sit) to test for acid.  When an acidic food/juice is put into the cabbage water, it turns pink.  I had some white plastic dixie cups that worked perfectly!  Our control cup is next to the pot in the top right corner.  From right to left we tested: green bean juice, lemon, grapefruit, milk, vinegar, pickle juice, ketchup, honey, and sour cream.  Even I had fun with this!  I was surprised that the honey turned it just a tiny bit pink. It was neat to see some turn bright pink right away and others just have a tinge of pink.  Below is the data.

And then, since I bought a whole purple cabbage (6 lbs!), we tried a sweet and sour cabbage recipe that was quite good.  Caleb loved it, Rebekah and Joshua didn't.  I also made venison stroganoff which was very yummy!

We also made homemade glitter jewels that you can see in the first picture.  Then we used our jewels to make a crown that had our bible verse on it.  "Jesus is Lord of lords and King of kings".  I didn't get a picture of the crowns before they got thrown away, oops!

Here's Caleb using dominoes for some math fact practice.

In English, Caleb wrote some sentences by answering the question Why?

The kids made drums out of oatmeal containers and then we listened to "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "Stars and Stripes Forever".  I had a few flag stickers that they decorated them with.

We started our history this week with Samuel Morse and the Morse Code.  Caleb has some walkie talkies, so we had fund trying to send each other messages in morse code.  He loves learning about inventors.

We learned a little bit about Florida, and then watched a documentary on the Everglades.  I also had time to read this book:

Lastly, we covered Texas.

Rebekah is doing great in Kindergarten.  This week we covered Z for zebra.  Recently, we all watched a documentary on zebras as a family (we watch a lot of nature movies around here!).  We read a book about animal disguises too.

This is the saddest project ever...  I was really busy doing something in the kitchen I think, so I drew a quick outline of Africa for her to put her animals in.  I was going to have her trace the outline in marker, and then write the word Africa on the top of the paper.  She had her paper turned sideways, so they are all the wrong way.  Some you win, some you don't.

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