A little bit of everything

I have a lot of random things from the last few weeks that we've done, that I wanted to share, but haven't had the time to sort it all out.  So, here it all is in one great big random post :-)

We have been doing a lot of astronomy, and will continue all year long.  Aaron's science (Exploring creation with Astronomy) focuses on astronomy for the whole year, and he's already into chapter 2.  He's loving it!  It also helped a great deal when we received Aric's first BabbaCo preschool box, and it was all about the sun, moon, stars.  This inspired us to do the oreo cookie moon phases...

In the box was a calendar to keep track of the moon with pictures of the moon phases.  It reminded me of oreo cookies, and so we pulled out the oreo cookies and started creating the different phases of the moon.  The boys loved this!  And, I do think I've seen this activity somewhere on line, but I don't remember where.  Like I said though, I thought of oreos and the moon as soon as I saw that chart.

First we gathered some cookies...



and, got to work carving the white stuff.  Aric enjoyed eating the white part as I scraped it off.  We practiced the names of each moon phase (waxing gibbous, waning crescent), but for him it was a little confusing, so I mostly focused on the shapes, crescent, half, new, full.
 

 As soon as Aaron saw us doing this with cookies, he couldn't resist anymore.  He wanted in too!  He did it mostly on his own.  I was impressed.






Aric's completed moon phases, although this picture is upside down.  It's supposed to start with the new moon.


Also in the babba box came some of the solar paper like we used earlier in the summer, and some star stickers to make a star picture.

We could have made some constellations, but they just wanted to make their own star pictures.  It was pretty fun though.  We also read a story that came in the box about "twinkle the little star."  Can't remember the name of the book, but it was a cute story.


Some coloring pages from the box as well.  Aric colored this moon very quickly!

Other stuff...

I can breathe a sigh of relief everytime I look at my bookshelves!  Every shelf was re-organized except one.  Can you find it?  That's hubby's shelf, and he is supposed to take care of that one.  But, the others look wonderful, and I love how easily I can locate a book.  It's not alphabetized yet, but it's organized by types.  I was also happy to find that our library baskets fit nicely onto shelves of their own!  I just love looking at the shelves now.



I pulled out our road letters recently.  The boys like them again, so I was inspired to finish the rest of the alphabet, printing and laminating them, where I left off so that we have them to pull out all year long.  


 I was so excited to get the first lego quest challenge for the school year, and had the kids get to it right away because they were excited too.  It was olympics, try to make an olympic moment or event from legos.  They did super, but I never got around to sending them in.  So, here they are, just here...

Of course April's is equestrian, and she had it easy with the already made horse and rider.
And, Aaron made the Olympic rings.  This was pretty tricky for him.  I helped him a bit.

Little Aric, bless his heart, wanted to make canoeing.  This was his version of canoeing.  He really tried some different things, and this was what he decided on.  Some water on the bottom, and a boat.



I was going through school work one night, and this made me giggle.  You might too if you knew how much my 6th grader loves horses...  Although I'm a little surprised she didn't put Quarter horse down for the quarter.

Another astronomy project...a balloon solar system.  This was part of Aaron's science, and pretty fun.  We were supposed to measure the balloons, but I found that kind of difficult, so we just made them relative size.  This is Aric's solar system (he wanted to do it too)...
 

This one is Aaron's.  Can you tell?  Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.  I love that this science book still talks about pluto even though it's not considered a planet anymore.  We tried to match the colors as best we could, but you can only do so much with balloons :-)

And, finally, we had a super great "Not back to school" gathering at the park with our huge homeschool group here in town.  I say huge because we have never had anything this close to us before, and it's quite amazing.  It was said that we had about 55 people at this gathering, huge for our town!  We had ice cream too!  It was a real treat, and fun time.  These girls were so happy to hang out, and they even made some new friends.  April and her BFF (who is also a homeschooler, love it!) eating their ice cream.  It was such a relief on that super hot day!


Desiree