All the World's a Stage. Or at Least my House is

This week we continued to learn about the Renaissance, and we focused on Queen Elizabeth the I and Shakespeare.

I love learning about English history.  I guess because my mom grew up in England and the history lessons I would get from her would all be about the Tudor family, Guy Faux, or Oliver Cromwell.  It was fun to pass on the knowledge about Elizabeth to my own kids.  And as our activity we made Elizabethan ruffled collars:

A bit over done eh?  Doesn't Daniel's face say "Mom, what are you doing, you are so silly."

As for Shakespeare, I have a confession to make.  I am not the fan of Shakespeare that so many homeschool moms seem to be.  I acknowledge that he was a genius, the father of modern literature, and brought many important human discussions to light, however, I don't think his characters or Shakespeare himself are very good examples.  I know that's the point sometimes....don't do what these guys did....but for kids, that lesson isn't direct enough for them.

Well, I taught Maxwell about "A Midsummer Night's Dream" this week anyway, and made puppets to act it out.

Our Fairy Queen:

And our Bottom turned Donkey :)  Notice Hyrum in the background having a sock-puppet-play of his own.

Science was called off because of the Canadian holiday, but I was quite good at getting Reading Writing and Arithmetic done.  Maxwell is learning how to tell time quite well.  That's exciting to me.  I remember a long time ago as a new mom trying to be a good auntie and teach my home schooled nieces and nephews how to tell time before they even knew how to count to 60.....that didn't go over well and I realized that homeschooling might be harder then I thought.  Taught in the right sequence of things, teaching time has been just fine.

Da Vinci and a dinosaur field trip

This week I was kind of sick on monday, so science was really low key.  We tasted acids (sour) and bases (bitter), and learned about ions....Enoch is eating a lemon if you can't tell...

 
For history, we learned about Leonardo Da Vinci.  My hero.  Sort of.  We read a really cute book called "Katie and the Mona Lisa" that introduces kids to a few renaissance art pieces.  It even made Botticelli's "Primavera" modest, which as a mom I can appreciate.  I wish the books I found talked more about Da Vinci's inventions and scientific side.

We made lots of different kinds of paper airplanes to celebrate Da Vinci, and we also played with a remote control submarine, and Da Vinci is credited as the inventor of the submarine.

I WAS going to teach my kids about Henry the viii, but as I studied him again I thought "a man who divorced, killed, annulled, cheated on, and hated his wives and made a religion out of it...humm....."  Divorce and murder on not on the top of the "must teach" list right now, and heavens, my kids don't need to learn the word "annulled" at this point in their lives! Yes, in four years I might teach this important historical figure, but not right now.

And for field trip we went to this amazing dinosaur extravaganza put on by the homeschool organization. Have you noticed that I've given up on field trips in general?  Last year I went on one once a week.  I could always find some place to go or something to do. Ya, well now I live in Alberta.....enough said.

ANYWAY, we were taught by a real palaeontologist, and he showed us a T-Rex tooth found right where he was teaching us!  He also showed us imprints of mammoths that were found right here, and a copy of a sabre tooth tiger's skull.

They also had fun activities like excavating your own toy dinosaur buried in plaster....

And creating your own dinosaur out of chicken bones.

I'm so glad I went.  Especially since I was so close to not going due to weather, but it turned out wonderful in the end.

A Busy but non-school-producitve Week

Okay this is for LAST week...I got behind a bit.

Last week we hardly did ANY reading, writing, or arithmetic.  UGG.  I hate not doing the essentials.  I want to get done with Rightstart math and Common Sense reading BEFORE summer, and now all I can say is that I'm glad Canadian school lasts longer then the states.  We might go on vacation soon too and then I don't know if we'll even make the Canadian deadline.

Why do I care?  I just do, okay!

We did do Dick and Jane this week at least.  I plan on doing Dick and Jane, Handwriting without tears, and saxon worksheets throughout the summer.  It will help make sure that Maxwell doesn't get too bad of a sun burn...or something.  Anyway, it should be easy.

We did have some fun this week though.

We went to this amazing Museum in Calgary since daddy had a doctor appointment up there anyway.

We also had fun in a swamp collecting frogs and getting incredibly muddy.

We also had a poetry recitation.  Hyrum was so excited when it was his turn.  I thought he was going to do his little name song, but no, he made up his OWN POEM!  It was the cutest thing I've ever witnessed.  Granted, the poem made no sense at all, but every line rhymed, he had the rhythm down, and for the last stanza, he had the perfect intonation and expressions.  PRICELESS.

We also did science.  We followed up on all our crystal experiments, which all worked!  Just look at our sugar crystals:

And then we learned about emulsions and collides.  We made home made mayonnaise, whipped cream, we even made cheese to reverse homogenized milk!  I've never made mayonnaise or cheese before, so that was fun for me.  Our lemon cheese:

This lesson was scientifically a little too complicated for my crowd, however.  Our youngest guest blurted out "I just don't get it!"  Well, maybe the older ones did....and maybe Maxwell will in four years when we do it again, because although he didn't say so, I'm pretty sure he didn't get it either.

We aslo started our journey of learning about the Renaissance.  I combined both Gutenberg and Martin Luther into the same day.  Maxwell is a fan of Gutenberg, and loves learning about inventions.  I couldn't find any good books about Martin Luther, which is a shame because I think he was one of the most important people in history.

Anyway, we tried making our own printing press from stamps.  This didn't work well because I could only find cheap stamps, and I wasn't willing to drive two hours to get good stamps.  Oh well,

I think Maxwell got the general idea.

You know what, looking at this long post, I guess last week was more productive then I remember it being.  Woo hoo for me and my hooligans!

Oh, also, I just heard about a book that is coming out soon, check it out:


http://www.encouragingbeautifulmotherhood.com/2012/05/10/do-you-know-how-to-homeschool/

Crystals and Joan of Arc

After Monday, this week went a lot better.  Reading this artical: The Bad News About Homeschooling really helped. I guess because someone else shared why homeschooling is a complete life sacrifice and struggle, but that it's all still worth it.  I needed that right then.

So for science, it was a bit crazy.  (That's the day I posted last week's post.) We learned about chromatography (separating pigments of colour) and the experiments worked and were cool.

But we also learned about crystals.  If any of you have done crystal experiments, then you know that crystal experiments take days, weeks, and even months to see results.  Thus we spent the day STARTING experiments.  This was not as fulfilling as our usual experiments.  I guess that's why it was a little crazy at science.

Of all the experiments, the one everyone was the most excited about was making crystal sugar candy.  NOTE you must put starter crystals on your string for crystal sugar candy to work, so we did:

There is over 15 cups of sugar in these jars!  But it IS working!  These thin strings are now at least 3/4 of an inch wide with crystals.  Perhaps next week I'll post an "after" photo.

This week was also our last week for learning about the Medieval Ages.

We learned about Joan of Arc.  I love her story.  I believe she really was inspired.  We read a book by Demi as part of the lesson.  Can I just say: I LOVE books by Demi!  They're beautiful, accurate, inspiring, and the story is short enough that the kids can grasp every word.

Also, we made armour (I just found out Canadians spell it that way) to celebrate Joan.  We had just one twin that day to be our Joan of Arc.  I was kind of glad there was just one twin, because making armour turned out to take longer then I thought it would.

Our last day we learned about Medieval dungeons (because we had a children's book about that.) I wanted to watch one of the movies I got about the Medieval ages, and we started this discovery channel one, and I had to turn it off after about three seconds because it was too gruesome.  I'm glad we are not living during those times!  Anyway, we made crowns, because throughout this whole unit, it's been obvious that the King rules.

Doesn't Maxwell's crown kind of look like the Pope's?  I thought that was fitting because often, the Pope was more powerful then the king.

Now bring on the Renaissance!

Oh, and here is Maxwell reciting his latest devotional scripture: