Muscles and the end of World War II

For science, only one kid showed up!  That was easy ;)  We learned about muscles.  We experimented with our own, especially our hand muscles, and we played with our muscle model.  It wasn't too hard to make, and it really helped visualize what is happening in your body.

What it looks like when your arm is somewhat straight:

and bent:

By the way, the three main resource books we're using for science this year are the Reader Digest books "How the Body Works" and "How Nature Works" and Janice VanCleave's "Biology for Every Kid."

And We are done learning about WWII.  Whew.  It was getting a little too intense in our history lessons.  Glad to be done with it.  Hyrum, who is pretty emotional and sensitive,  was in denial about the whole holocaust. "They weren't real." He would say.  I don't mind.  He is five, and such sadness should be beyond his comprehension. BTW, "I Will Come Back For You" by Russo is another good holocaust children's book.

We made gas masks. Idea from here. I told them about my mom and her green gas mask.  She was born in 1940 in a factory town in England.  Bombs and gas were part of her daily life as a child.

We talked about how the war changed the world.  Woman now worked away from the home, and the US culture was spred throughout the world.  We made star flags for the windows to remember this.  I told them just to glue them together, but Maxwell insisted on sewing it, and I thought he did a great job.

And to wrap up the WWII, we learned about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I had rented this children's book to help explain things, but I thought it was too intense for my audience.  I just read from "A History of US".  So so sad.  Did you know that 700,000 pamphlets were dropped on Hiroshima the day before, warning them that their city would be destroyed the next day?  Well,  at least we did that.

As I was learning about it all, I found out that Hiroshima has a memorial day every year where they write the names of the dead on lanterns that they send down the river. 

When we made our lanterns, we took pictures of Japanese people from the war, and glued them on paper sandwich bags. Maxwell said we couldn't put them in the river, because that would be littering, so we needed to do it in our tub.  This was great in my opinion, because the rivers here are frozen over!

Now on to the rest of modern history---if only it was war free :(

PS-this is my 100th post!  Whoo Hoo for me and homeschooling!!!