In my life this week...I realized you need the rainy days because they make the sunny days that much brighter...and help you to appreciate the simple things in life, like sunshine, flowers and kids who don't give you a hard time :)
My favorite thing this week was...all of the emails and comments I got when I wrote a post about being a little down..the homeschool blog community rocks!
I am reading watching... Downton Abbey...Allie and I can not get enough! We are ravenous addicts for this show! Love it!!! I feel as though we are late to the party, but we have been catching up on Netflix!
In addition to a wonderful weekend spent exploring a beautiful place,
learning about flowers and plants
and learning how the people of Paterson, NJ had harnessed the energy of the second largest waterfall on the East Coast to power factories and power plants, making Paterson, at one time, the capital of manufacturing, we spent a good part of the week finishing up our study of the biology.
We spent September-December using Real Science 4 Kids Biology,
over the winter, I created my own little Human Biology study.
1. We used these wonderful lapbooks from Elemental Science called Lapbooking through the Human Body, which you can buy at Currclick ;-)
Instead of copying the poem suggested in the lapbook and pasting it in the middle,
I had the girls draw a diagram of an eyeball and paste it on one side; today they will draw a diagram of the ear and paste on the other side.
2. I am a visual learner, I need to see things to understand them, I drew these diagrams of neurons and had the girls copy them into their notebooks.
3. We traced the digestive system from our USBourne Science Encyclopedia, glued that on one side of an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, then wrote detailed descriptions of each part of the digestive system and glued that to the other side of the page for our notebooks.
4. We read some living books.
5. We tried our hand at creating vaccines using a cool software program on line.
6. We checked out the petrie dishes we created a few weeks ago.
7. We decided to sterilize the petrie dishes, and use them to grow more germs!
8. We were out of Agar, but found a recipe for "germ food" online using gelatin and sugar.
We've been studying a different artist each week. Last week we studied Andy Warhol, this week we read a biography about Jackson Pollock (we love these biographies by Mike Venezia, they are my favorite resource this week!), we watched a documentary on Pollock and then tried our hand at painting like Pollock...turned up the music and got "in the middle" of our paintings!
These girls have also been reading TONS. Allie highly recommends the Penderwicks books, which are about a family who lives near the ocean and all kinds of things that happen to them. Johnny Swanson is about a boy who has his own business and gets in trouble with the wrong people; this book takes place when tuberculosis epidemic. Allie chose both books on her own and was excited to share what she learned with me and interested in learning more about TB.Piper will read any American Girl book ever published! She loves everything AG!
We've been enjoying this great weather by doing school on the deck every day :)
How was your week?
What did you do?
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