Our weekly triumphs and accomplishments

We had a very busy week.  We started off by finishing off our Celebration of National Popcorn Day!!  We visited a Popcorn Museum.  One of only two believed to exist worldwide.  It was such a cool experience.  We saw so much popcorn memoribilia and ways that popcorn was sold throughout the last 100 years.

 The kids asked to take some pictures.  Here is a self-service popcorn machine.  You put in a quarter and in about 5 minutes you had a serving of popcorn.  There were several different ones of these.

Joey and I have been studying about popcorn using the Amanda Bennett Unit Study.  It was really cool!!!  This is our experiment of growing popcorn kernels.  We have two small plants growing right now.

 

And as a homeschool family, what kitchen sill would be complete without a few more "Experiments" growing in the windows.  These were from our visit to see Side the Science Kid.

Each child has a project picked out for World Travelers this month.  The country is Ethiopia.   So this week, we did a few little activities to see their culture.

We read folk tales from Ethiopia and played with Geographic patterns to create art.  We actually did this twice.

 This time they traced the blocks and then colored in their designs.

Here's their finished art.

They use gourds as storage, so we found some dry gourds and they decorated their own storage bowls.

 This was good and bad. We learned about coffee.  I let Caty play with moving coffee beans with her chopsticks.  She got the bright idea to use the trains to create piles in the living room floor.  It was funny and cute!

And we read this really great book!!

 They all worked on math...Lydia is working with Ernie on tally marks in MUS.

 This was a project for both Health and American Girl Club-Josefina.  We learned about Herbs that Heal.  We read a book about different herbs that can help us.  We then separated them into the spots they would help our person.

On Friday, I rewarded Joey with working hard on math all week by playing a game we have had for a while.  He wasn't really able to figure time well before.  He has made great improvements in this area, so we tackled it.  This is going to be a regular for us.  Even Brayden came out of his shell long enough to play.
 

All the kids are getting bored with science, so they want to switch to a few more experiment style activities, so we are going to switch to a chemistry program.   This was an experiment we pulled out because I am working on getting their chemistry unit ready. We did the invisible ink with lemon juice.
We drew our designs.

 We tried light bulbs and hair dryer...nothing.

Then we tried the toaster oven.....SUCCESS!!

So even though a hair dryer worked for Nicholas Cage in National Treasure....it didn't work for us.  Now the only variable that we have that could change our results (because not all our pictures showed up), is the type of lemon juice we used.  I had store bought Real Lemon juice.  Supposed to be 100 percent...but you never know.  And it was also refridgerated.  Both these elements could change our result.

We learned about the State of Georgia...and then made gluten/dairy/egg free peach cobbler!!  It was yummy, even though I almost forgot it in the oven.

 And of course we had an fun week learning about the history of Groundhog's Day and the groundhog.  I went a little nuts ordering lots of books off of ebay on Groundhogs.  My new favorite author is Gail Gibbons.  I love her books.  She takes all different topics (including science) and turns them into such fun, story style reading.  Kids don't even realize they are reading "non-fiction"...highly recommend them to you!

We did the lapbook from Homeschool Share.

 We made our predictions.  And then Thursday morning we watched the live Internet stream from Pennsylvania to see what Phil had to say!  Lydia actually cried, it was kind of sad and cute all at the same time.  She was upset because she didn't want to be wrong and on the other hand she didn't want anymore winter (as if we have had a hard one yet).  I told her spring would be here before she even knew it, and we haven't even gotten to build a big snowman yet!

 Someone on a group posted a blog that had these really cool 100s boards to color.

 I found a Groundhog cookie cutter on ebay.  So we made gluten free sugar cookies and homemade frosting.

 The kids had fun decorating and eating their cookies while we watched Curiosity Quest.

 And we also learned lots about shadows.  We used flashlights to draw shadows of a favorite toy, and then we colored them in and compared the shadow size to the true size of the toy.  It was fun to see the size difference.

We had a fun week.  And looking forward to next week.  We have a cool field trip on Monday, Lydia has zoo class and we have World Travelers.  Whoohoo!!!

Linking up with other homeschool families at