Friday, October 13, 2017

Mosaic Art, Swimming, Cave Science and Nature Art



I'm trying hard to keep up.  This week started a busy season.  I'm torn.  I hate seeing the calendar fill up with lessons and activities, but at the same time I love watching the kids faces at bowling and at swimming.  This week starts back the brief swim season.  The girls loved it last season, so they definitely wanted to start back!



Brayden loves Tuesday bowling.  This week he got 2 strikes in a game.


This week was Cook Night at our local Special Needs organization.  Brayden loves this night.  This month they made chicken gravy and biscuits with apple dumplings.


Science Club

This week we tackled caves/caverns.  We started our week off with a field trip with our friends to a local cavern system.  It was a bit of a hike to the lowest level of the cavern system and climbing back out again.  But we had fun.


Some of the areas were tight to walk through.  I hit my head a few times and so did Joe.


Very tiny stalactites.


The river at the bottom of the cavern.




Caty was definitely exhausted like we all were when we got to the top of the stairs.


Then all the kids did some gem mining.



We spoke a little about a cave's ecosystem and did a few experiments.  The first one was a clay mountain that was filled with baking soda paste.  There were some fractures added and as the kids added an acid (vinegar), the cave started forming in the mountain.



I also wanted to show how when rock is washed away, other rock loses stability and go spilling about.  So I made rice krispie "caves" and filled them with sprinkles.  It didn't work out as well as I hoped, but the kids got the point and had a yummy snack.




Then we talked a little about bats and the kids pretended to be bats and had to use their sense of hearing to find the others int he backyard.




Some of the videos we watched:









Art History

This week we studied the history of Mosaic Art.  We are working our way through Vincent's Starry Night and building projects from each lesson.  First we watched this video:


Then they had a choice of making a design on a jar or use a 5x7 frame.  The frame was much easier than the cube jar.









Joey designed rays of sun.


It was a week of outings.... the day we went to Seneca Caverns we ate lunch at a local state park, which is also a fish hatchery.  We fed the rainbow trout and enjoyed watching the ducks.  The girls had a ball playing with the fish and trying to catch them.







When we got home from the cavern field trip, we had a chili cookout in the backyard with our friends.  It was a great evening!




The next day we took the kids to our annual trip to the Pumpkin Train.  This is a huge thing for Brayden.  He loves it.






They also shot the corn cannon.
 And Pumpkin Trebuchet
 Great family time!


Eggs from our chickens this week!!  They are not all laying yet, I can't wait until they are!


Joe and the girls hung up the bat house they put together.


Lydia and Caty had a sleepover with one of their friends from Science Club.  They did the BeanBoozled Jelly Belly challenge.
 Played with Perler beads

And I made them rainbow flower pancakes for breakfast.



I felt a little overwhelmed this week, so I relaxed a few requirements.  They all started working on their Geography Fair projects.  That was the big deal that they needed to complete.  Each of them had to research facts/figures and information about their specific country.  Next week we'll put together their project boards and plan their snack/share they want to do at the actual fair.  Caty is convinced she must make food to share.


Nature meet-up

We met with our Scout troop to work on our Outdoor Art badge.  They went on a scavenger hunt:






Built cairns




and learned about Andrew Goldworthy.



We used the same River rocks to make instruments.  It was based on this video:


Caty finished up yet another Life of Fred book, she is done with Life of Fred Dogs.  She's enjoying the story, and we are working on some of the work...but I'm not using it as our base math.  We are using Living Math Book 3 as our backbone, with practice work on CTCMath and SuperTeacherWorksheets.

We crammed in all our work we needed to finish so the girls could go to an early showing of the new My Little Pony movie.  Caty was soooo excited!



Brayden also had to help with the model train set up with our model train club.  This is all of us staring at the layout and deciding how to put it together (You'll see Brayden running his train next week.)


Saturday am we had a wonderful program at the Kingdom Hall.  Then we went to visit Joe's sister and her kiddos.  We went to their local street fair.  After they took advantage of the girls, we decided to leave because it was just not fun.  It was also dirty.  But the girls did win small stuffies at this game.



Caty decided this is her future vehicle.


We had a very long week, but I'm glad we were able to accomplish all we did.  I normally do not make a year long plan, because in the past we would change subjects and ideas of what we wanted to learn every couple weeks.  It wasn't worth the time.  I am soooo glad that I did sit down in July and spend a couple days writing up a year long lesson plan for all the kids.  I've made a few changes, but nothing too major.  Generally I under-scheduled their time and we have worked through a few subject areas quicker than I thought we would.  This has been my life-saver with all the adjustments and upheaval we have been through.  I can definitely tell about new seasons of life coming upon us.

Hope everyone had a wonderful week!!  Linking up with other moms at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Weekly Wrap-Up




No comments:

Post a Comment