Sunday, May 6, 2012

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:

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