School Stuff

Yes, we are still doing school :)!! I realized as I was posting yesterday that I haven't posted an update on any of our schooling since we started our school year. We started back about 2 weeks before going to Disney. It was hard to concentrate on school while planning our trip, but I knew that we had to. The kids are now in 5th, 6th, and 8th grades. Wow, that's so hard to believe.

Jeff was so sweet and had a basket full of goodies sent to us on our first day back to school.

We are continuing with Life Science this year. We have studied ecosystems, food chains, and pollution. Now, we have started studying the human body.

We tested rain water to see if it was acidic. I was surprised at how clean it was.

Then, we tested our tap water and found it high in chlorine but not overly acidic. Here is the comparison of the two of them together.

To demonstrate the food chain, we cut into an owl pellet and found bones and fur from the animals that it had eaten before it died. This was a gross, but fun activity. We are sure we found remains from two different animals...a shrew and a bird.
During our study of skin, we made a kit to take our fingerprints. It was interesting to see the different patterns on each of our prints. While studying transportation and assembly lines in Social Studies, we made an assembly line to build cars out of candy pieces. The kids learned how much faster it was to learn just one specific task to do over and over instead of making an entire car each time. The kids are all doing well with their book work. They are becoming more and more independent with their learning. I find that they retain things longer if they attempt to understand it by themselves first. I've been working towards this since I started homeschooling but have really seen it kick in this year for them all.