Summer Science!

How is summer science looking at your house? Ours is filled with animals, insects (too many black widows!), botany, farming, chemistry (canning!), and physics (the river has been our play ground this summer)!!
I am gearing up and getting ready for our new school year but we are starting late! Stay tuned!!

And some links!

A blog post on elementary curriculum.

Mixing math and history might be just what I'm looking for for history!

TJed back to school newsletter!

Whew! We made it through the first week of school and we all survived and had some fun too! :)

After school one day we went to the lake and ended up with an impromptu science class! Jake caught this crawdad! We had some great observation, and then a little "nature" lesson... the kids caught a minnow and put it in with the crawdad... they now know how a crawdad searches, finds, and eats his dinner!
We found a random inch-worm on the beach, the little ones enjoyed watching him inch around my hand.


Today before school we learned about heat rising and wind patterns at the balloon races. It was great to get so up close and to talk to the balloonists!

And in regular schooling news we got our nature table set up and added a few new things to it!

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Yeah for on the fly learning and learning at home! And yeah for our first week being great!!!

Are you enjoying the summer sun? We are! It has been a fun but crazy summer and even though we are still enjoying it we can feel the change. The winding down. You can feel it in the early morning air, and in the anticipation of our routine. Personally I am a summer baby I really enjoy the lack of rigidity in what we have to do, but even I yearn and look forward to the return of fall and all the comfortable familiarity our routine brings.

I have spent the last few days really tweaking and fine tuning our learning plan for the year, I have been working on my new book, and searching (and finding) many of our needed books on the Goodwill shelf! I will post my pages soon, just a little more tweaking to do and then I'll print them out and have it bound!

How is your planning going?

Oh my addiction to books, it is a good thing we homeschool it gives me more excuses to buy (like I needed one)!! I found a good load of books while down at my moms last week, most from a garage sale but some at the Deseret Industries. This should help fuel our summer reading craze!!
Our Oak Meadow books arrived but I have not even gotten them out of the box, mostly because of the crazy busyness of this summer, partly because it's not time to think of that stuff yet, and some lingering doubt as I find my brain thinking about curriculum and trying to listen to the spirit! :)

I've also been thinking about making another planning book, this is really a great help to me through the school year. And as dorky as I am I get all excited about what photo to choose for the new book! :) Yea total dork...

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This summer we have done something we have never done before... workbooks. Yea crazy, we have never been a workbook kind of homeschool but the kids are enjoying the books and I think they are getting reinforcement where it is needed and will then hopefully not forget the skills they have gained but not be overwhelmed and burnt out for school to start. :)

We were thinking of ether starting school officially at the beginning of August because Dan *was* going to have September off so we were going to travel and camp and have some MUCH needed Dad time. But he's a pilot and the only constant is change and it looks like our September plans are out the door. We'll see, but I guess that is part of the reason we homeschool... flexibility! :)

I found this this week and thought it might be fun to do with the kids after the boys get home from scout camp. Plus we have a couple new mysteries up there in my book pile that would go along nicely!!

The new Rhythm of the Home Summer Edition is up! Hooray! I have read nearly all of it as I have been spending extra time with Leili nursing through an ear infection. There is so much great stuff, I even went to the craft store and got a couple supplies to dive into new projects! There are quite a few things we will be using for summer learning! We have already enjoyed THIS (link at the end of the article) and next week Riley and I will be working on THIS (you sign up for the newsletter and get a free copy of the ezine on dandelions)!

And as you can see I was inspired by ROTH's article HERE and made the girls play-dough. I used our favorite recipe from Aunt Donna but theirs is very similar! What a fun project!

Enjoy, enjoy!!

Summer has just started and we have our summer nature basket started. We have a nature basket instead of a nature table these days hopefully someday it will morph back into a table. We spent the evening of the Summer Solstice at the beach where we picked up a couple new things for our basket. Yea for summer!!

On another note with all the upheaval and homelessness we are schooling through the summer as we are painfully behind, life! So hopefully we don't get too much sunny day fever and we actually do get some work done! :) So stay tuned!!

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And the BEACH EDITION of the Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival is up! Looks like good reading!