Stars and making More Maps

Okay, it's late. This needs to be quick.

We studied about stars in science. My class seems to be growing. We even had a little girl join us, but I'm not sure if it was her cup of tea.

We did experiments about the brightness of stars, the movement of stars and the birth and death of stars. One experiment was putting some "stars" on an umbrella and turning the globe to show how it's the earth, not the stars that move and why to polar star stays constant.

For geography, we made our own maps of made up countries. We learned different geographic terms (such as archipelago) and then included that in our country. This is one example of some of the maps we made:

We aslo had our first ROBOTICS CLUB!!! fun fun! My friend, whose husband does robotic clubs professionally, is hosting this club that is sure to be educational and just plain awesome.

I thought I would show this video proving that we are learning geography songs. First one: The Continents! :)

September: Homeschool's best kept secret

September. It's still summer weather. The world is at school and at work. The beaches and parks are empty. And Homeschoolers? They are not at home. Here's a little secret: Those beaches and parks aren't completely empty. Someone is still enjoying the summer. Those someones are homeschoolers.

Let me brag about my week:

Monday:

We went to the creek with three other homeschool families and built a bonfire and had hot dogs and s'mores while the kids splashed in the creek.

Tues:

Well, okay, so maybe we didn't go outside too much that day.

Wen:

We went to the lake's beach that we had all to ourselves. It was warm and sunny, and we stayed up late singing songs around the campfire and finding star constellations.

Thurs:

We went back to the beach because we didn't get enough the day before. We also went geo cashing when we got home and had a sleepover.

Fri:

We had homeschool field day. There were all sorts of tack events and every kid got tons of ribbons. There were echoes of "good job" heard all around, and my boys loved it. We also went to a county fair and ate lots of junk food.

Okay, so could a public schooler have done the above list last week?  Well, perhaps some of it, but really, with bus schedules, homework, school night bed times, and new transitions, I doubt it.

September is God's gift to homeschoolers, and I'm grateful.

We DID do school too. We got in our three "R"s.


And there's a reason we didn't get outside very much on Tuesday. My homeschool administrators came over and then we had science club where we learned about galaxies and redshift. We drew "stars" on a balloon and blew it up as one of our experiments to show the universe expanding:

We aslo learned about black holes, and tried to show how gravity suckers draw all marbles (I mean planets) to it. 

On other days we continued to learn about maps and we drew globes on oranges and peeled it so we could lay it flat and talked about how warped our world maps are.

But really, it was a glorious week full of sun and sky.

Week One! Here we go Again!!!!

Here we are at the beginning of another school year! Oh yah!

This year will be different because instead of studying history, we will be learning geography and modern cultures. We'll focus on the good in all the world, so perhaps it won't be learning current events, but it will be educational none the less.

My detailed plans will have to wait until next week. Tweaking is still needed.

Science this year is going to be fun. It will cover astronomy, geology, meteorology and good stuff like that.

This week we started our science class! Oh yah, I am on the ball!!!

We learned about the atmosphere, why the sky is blue, and all about telescopes. One fun experiment was making a pinhole camera to talk about telescopes making things upside down.

For geography, we started learning about maps. We started our continents song as well. Composed by yours truly :) We learned about different kinds of maps, longitude, latitudes etc, and made our own topographical maps. We spent one day making them out of salt dough, and another painting them.

Hyrum's had a hill, volcano, mountain, and tornado---tornado? Yah whatever. Maxwell's was the Earth, with the pacific ocean in the middle so he could show the ring of fire. See his red circle of dots? Those are volcanos. Perfect year for my kids to learn earth science eh?

And cubs started back up too. A mother son activity. We went canoeing in the middle of a thunder storm (!?!) no leaders seemed concerned. We also made branded wood and did archery. Maxwell loves scouts.

I think the whole family is happy to be in the swing of things again, but no one as much as Daniel, who I have decided is ready for kindergarten even though he is only four. He's doing great, and is super cute.

Have you noticed that my quality of photos has deteriorated? Yah, my camera was stolen. We will survive until I get another one, but I am totally bummed.