History-
We learned about Edison. I love how his teacher said he was stupid. There is such power in that story for anyone who has been told that they are not good enough. It also inspires me to be a mom like Edison's mom.
A lot of people say that he was dyslexic, but after studying him, the fact that he would read from a young age everything he got his hands on, made his own library as a child, and wrote his own newspaper that he sold at age 12, yeah, not sure about that, but regardless, his ability to prove doubters wrong is inspiring.
We tried to make our own lightbulb as our activity, but we couldn't get it to work. If I remember right, we were able to get it to work four years ago. I'm not sure what happened. At one point we were using power too strong, and the filament would just break with a flash, but at other times nothing would happen. Oh well, it shows how hard it was to get a working lightbulb, right?
The next person we studied was Tesla. Now HE could have been dyslexic (but it is more likely that he had Aspergers.) Such a fascinating guy. Wonder what would have happened if he had been a good business man and had PR skills. I think this world would have been very different.
We talked a lot about the rivalry between Edison and Tesla. I tried not to be too partial to either, and my boys started taking sides.
For our activity, they played with a plasma ball. This one hasn't actually died or broken yet, which is a new thing for us. They usually die so fast. This one even fell and is still ticking. I think it's Discovery brand.
We watched "Current Wars" to go along with our ACDC unit.
We did talk a bit more about inventors, but then we moved on.
We talked about immigration. We talked a lot about Ellis Island, and it was perfect, because Chelsea served her mission there and was able to give a lot of insight about what happened there. I'm excited to take my kids there someday (not that I have anything planned...COVID blah....) We have the cutest book about Ellis Island:
We made Lady Liberty crowns as our activity.
Such a controversial topic, that I'm glad I'm the one teaching my kids about immigration.
Then we talked about the infamous Robber-barons. Yes I call them robber-barons instead of "captains of industry." Maybe that's because I'm super frustrated with the modern "robber-barons" of information ie Google, Twitter, and Facebook. We talked about them too.
We talked mostly about Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, JP Morgan, and Carnegie. We read the part in History of the World about stocks and Carnegie, which I love. I love how Susan Wise Bauer has the ability to write in such a way that it makes things interesting and engaging for kids.
For our activity we played Monopoly, but I didn't take any pictures when we actually played, so here's a picture after the fact:
Science!
Soooo sad. We are stopping science club at least until the new year because of the stinker COVID19. I really hope we will be able to commence again soon, but I am honestly not very hopeful. Not until we can start going outside again will this spike go down (I HOPE I'm wrong.)
I wish we could at least do our last club about animal classes (mammals) but we just couldn't.
We had a lesson on reptiles. We didn't have any dissection for reptiles, but I had students bring in REAL LIVE reptiles for show and tell. That was super fun, and the older class brought a turtle that kept pooping all over!
I think this is the turtle from the younger class, he's 35 years old!
We had fun little activities such as putting snake "tongues" on our noses so we could "smell," and putting balloon lizard "tales" on ourselves that we tried to take off....yeah it was a crazy game I made up, but I think they loved it.
I also knew I wanted those sticky hand flinger things to pretend to be lizards' tongues, but they weren't at the dollar store. I knew were I had seen them in town. I took a ton of quarters and went to the dentist's office and asked if I could buy their prizes! I remembered they had the sticky hands as a prize in a gum-ball machine. I felt really awkward, but I got my sticky hands!
Then we talked about birds. We looked at different kind of feathers and talked about warmblooded animals and we looked at a real nest and other things, and then we dissected owl pellets!!!
One of my favourite activities. It's like a treasure hunt.
This is my friend, Amy, who's been helping me lately. I REALLY appreciate it. She even brought extra owl pellets from her back yard! My owl pellets were from Amazon cost $70 bucks! And even then I wasn't going to have enough for everyone. But with Amy's we did! THANK YOU!
I love how excited the Youngers were when they found a skull or jawbone. The olders were a little grossed out (I just need to brake them in more I guess, silly kids) but most got into it, and look at this cool bird foot one of my science kids found in their pellets:
And now we will wait--and wait--until we do mammals. I guess we could do it virtually, but honestly, you could just watch youtube videos instead. It's about being together in person, seeing things and touching things! I'm bummed.
As for core subjects, here's a little writing by Daniel that was inspired by write into winter:
And some write into winter by William:
Umm, yeah, I guess I didn't take too many core subject photos this week.
However, here's a video of William doing his math. The way he makes up a story to help himself understand long subtraction cracks me up:
Moving on-
Abraham, always the artist, gets my phone or iPad, which is always locked, and takes a photo (which you can do when locked) and then that opens up the ability to edit the photo. This all means that he found a way to do art on my phone any time he wants without permission and I'm always finding new creations such as these:
Don't you love the sparkle in the little boy's eyes?
Abraham also encourages me to do random activities. He saw this fruit train in a random book that I didn't know we even had and begged me to create it.
And then Hyrum gave Abraham a lesson on how to do iMovie. This was Hyrum's example:
Hyrum is always having fun making movies:
And as for holidays, we were able to meet with the Thulin extended family over zoom. I sometimes love technology. I saw more people than if I had been there in person in a normal year! We ended up talking for hours. It was so good.
But, to be honest, I never wait for US Thanksgiving to decorate for Christmas. I don't even wait for Dustin's birthday either. One fun thing we've done this year is to help our local Youth Centre with stockings for teenagers.
We made an assembly line to fill all the stockings, which is perfect since we are going to learn about Henry Ford soon.
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