Veteran's Day Hodge Podge

We had a eclectic day of school today, reminding me after some hard days recently, why exactly we decided to do this in the first place.

Since Kevin was off, he took Bram out for the morning, and while we certainly love having the "Little Prince" around, it was a nice change of pace to have a few baby-free hours and we certainly moved faster than usual.

We talked about Veteran's Day and why we celebrated it, talked about the family members we've had that have served and are serving still, and did a couple of coloring sheets and worksheets with patriotic words. And the lesson juxtaposed nicely with the Spanish-American war that we're studying in social studies, and the sacrifices soldiers have had to make throughout history.

We also measured the Mayflower. Lucy Clare and Molly are working on Pilgrims this week and next so we took Daddy's tape measure out to the back yard and measured out the 1,080 inches of the ship and talked about living like that for 9 1/2 weeks. Turns out it would have *just* fit in our back yard.

At various time of the morning, with various kids, I played 5 games of Mancala, 2 games of Dora Candy Land (as if CandyLand wasn't already annoying enough they had to add Swiper??) and 3 games of Mastermind, one of my faves.

Everyone did well on their weekly math tests. We had a day off from spelling and science and we touched on the 25th president, McKinley, which set us up nicely for one of my favorites next week-Teddy R.

But the cherry on the home school ice cream today was that Belle just came downstairs to check some dates for WWII out of the blue. I asked her what in the world she needed them for during rest time and she said she's working on a story and needed to know the exact dates for Germany's invasion of Poland, D-Day, the atomic bombs, etc. Now I have no idea what kind of story she's working on, it certainly wasn't something that was assigned since I only work linear-ly and WWII is still weeks and weeks away in our curriculum, but I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised that this reluctant writer and reader is using her downtime to work on such an intense project. It was a happy reminder after some serious doubts this week, that they're learning even when I'm not in their faces and that sometimes being left alone to their own devises is better than anything I can plan.

Science

It's no secret that science is one of my weakest subjects so I was happy to find a pretty easy curriculum last year that worked for all 3 girls, despite a few drawbacks. We studied the planets and space all year, at different levels, and really seemed to retain the info and enjoy it along the way. So this year we dove into the same curriculum with a new subject for Belle and Lucy Clare, while Connie moved on to bigger and better (harder) 7th grade Biology.

I'd love to report that we're having as much luck as last year but sadly, that is definitely not the case. Poor Connie has HATED her new stuff and we've had to invite Aunt Karen in for back-up and will most likely need to again soon. Science has consisted of whining, crying, bad grades, confusion and general misery.


Belle and Lucy Clare aren't doing much better, albeit with less tears. They're studying animals, and while that sounded like it would be relatively interesting, the details are mind-numbingly boring after awhile. And the religious draw backs of the curriculum that I was able to work around fairly easily last year, are much more (glaringly) apparent in this text.

The high-point of the year has been 2 experiments. In the first one we used m&m's to show how easy it is for animals to hide in certain environments. For the 2nd one we tested how people's sense of smell and taste is affected by color using jello with food coloring.

Diving for m&m's in a colored construction paper habitat.

Sorting and counting the rescued m&m's.

So today, about to dive into another tedious lesson on primates (and the accompanying lecture on how evolution couldn't possibly be scientific fact) we just quit. I told the girls I just couldn't face one more animal and we found a wonderful book about the human body that we are going to work on instead while I research curriculums again.

Poor Connie has to stick with Biology, though, and we'll be calling Aunt Karen to rescue us again soon.