Homeschool with pictures and other anecdotes

Here is a horrible picture of what the book shelf now looks like. I probably should have just stuck to a description, but there you go. About a month ago I realized that the Childcraft Series that Nana and L'Opa gave to Dom when he was born will be an excellent resource. It has all sorts of information about the world and science and literature and math. The boys love looking at the science based ones. We also have a copy of "The Book of Virtues" that I will get out and read from. The boys favorite story is "The Selfish Giant". Mainly because it is about a Giant.

Last week we worked on the letters C and D. The boys make letter collages and Dom practices writing the letters. I'm so proud of how he is doing with this. I was really nervous that he would refuse, but having him write on the white board makes a big difference. Plus, he sees that he is perfectly capable of it. We've also been practicing counting to 50 by 1's, 5's, and 10's. In the picture, Will is putting the number of stickers indicated in some circles I drew. Dom is helping him. I loved it that Dom took the initiative. Cooperative Learning at its finest.

We did a couple of science experiments. I've been wanting to try the first one for a while. It is experimenting with density. You make layers in a clear container of syrup, water, and vegetable oil. The picture in the book makes the layers look quite distinct, however, after dying the water blue, the water and syrup just looked dark. The boys were pretty excited about the snacks, but were even more excited about throwing them in the concoction. I will probably try this experiment again with Caro Syrup. Most of our testing items floated on the oil, the peanuts floated on the water, I suspect the raisins floated on the syrup, though dark raisin were hard to spy in the abyss of dark water and dark syrup. The coins sank to the bottom. I unfortunately forgot about this as I dumped the whole concoction down our garbage disposal. I unfortunately also forgot about the rubber gloves under the sink as I fished out the coins from the disposal. Live and Learn.

Our second experiment was seeing what would happen when we put raisins in a cup of Sprite. The boys loved this one. Especially Will. The raisins immediately sink to the bottom of the glass, but as bubbles collect on them, they rise to the top. At the top, the bubbles pop and they sink to the bottom again. One suggestion is to have people pick a particular raisin and see whose will rise first. This was made impossible by William's throwing in several raisins. Still, the boys had a good time, which is the whole point of this entire exercise in homeschooling.

Finally we have the display of all of our hard work. At the bottom you can see the art project for the week. They no longer look like this as the boys took pens to them earlier today. Ah well. My plan is to keep these in a three ring binder. Though I may tape them up in our hallway as we currently have no other works of art on the particular wall I am thinking of.

The boys have picked out what they want to be for Halloween and thanks to ebay I will have their costumes in plenty of time. Spiderman showed up last week. It is on the big side for Will, but Dom fills it out pretty well. Stay tuned for when Darth Vader makes an appearance!

And here we have a picture of Molly-girl. She is cooperating pretty well about taking naps around the time we do classes. And I discovered yesterday that she is pretty content to hang out in the exersaucer if her nap schedule is off. As long as she is fed and changed ahead of time. Molly is crawling up a storm and is a happy little camper (as long as she is fed and changed). The thing that I can't get over is how she will ignore all brightly colored toys, but will make a beeline for a scrap of paper across the room. We've been vacuuming much more frequently since she turned 7 months...