My homeschool mother's journal: Jan. 25

In my life this week...

This week was good.  Except for the constant quarreling between my children.  I need to address that, and I'm pondering this weekend how I can help them be better.  But, the week ended with some fun.  I had a great time making some cakes with the kids today.  They each wanted to make their own cake for our church's cake auction.  Our Saturday pretty much consisted of baking and decorating.  It was nice to work one on one with each child though.  I did a lot of the decorating part for the little boys, but they all mixed up their own cakes and helped come up with ideas.  April made hers all on her own.  I think they all came out pretty good.  I think I also discovered that I really like decorating cakes.  I used to hate it, and thought it was too time consuming.  I think I'm getting better though!

Aaron's minion cake.  I really like how this one turned out.  He really wanted to do a 3-D cake, but I'm not ready to tackle that yet!  The little black hairs on top made me chuckle.

Aric's Ninjago cake.  He did NOT want to take this cake to the auction.  He was especially distraught when we left the church without it, and we didn't get it back.  I have promised to make him another one real soon.

April made this compass cake completely on her own.  She had a different plan in mind, but it didn't work out.  She wanted to make a piano cake with keys on the side, but it wasn't tall enough (we would have had to bake more layers).  We might have to make the piano cake sometime soon.

In our homeschool this week...

We fixed our picnic table.  Remember last time I mentioned that I really needed a solution to the slats in our table so we could do school easier.  Well, Hubby and I talked, and he reminded me about getting a solid white board to put on the top until we can find or make what we want.  So last Saturday I went to Lowe's, and came home with 2 panels of white board that works as a real white board.  We just cut one side down to width, and put a thin layer of glue to hold it down.  No more worries about pencils, pieces, and food falling in the cracks!  It's also easier to write on.

April has been working a lot on Khan academy this week.  She was even on it at times when she didn't have to be.  I am impressed, and glad that she's making an effort to get further in math.  I am loving Khan academy, and so is she!  She especially loved that some of her word problems are about some of her new favorite stories and characters.  This one for example is about Bilbo from The Hobbit.  She was very excited, and had to take a picture.  A few other word problems involved Harry Potter, another of her favorite books right now.

 
Here she is working through a problem.  She's taking full advantage of our new white board table covering.  Love having a solid table for school.

Some of the math for Aaron and Aric.  These sheets are great.  I love the idea of taking one number and doing all kinds of things with it.  They had a good time doing this worksheet.

We also read this book called Math-terpieces this week.  I really love the living math in this book.  It looks at some famous art pieces, some the boys recognized, and makes a math problem out it.  Great book!  I found this one at the library this week.

Our science this week.  We started a new book, One minute Mysteries, 65 Short Mysteries You Solve With Science.  This is pretty cool.  We read 3 of them in the first sitting, and the kids really liked trying to figure it out. 

Aaron finally got his ants in the mail.  So we spent some time this week watching them.

This was just after we first put them in the ant farm.  I have to admit I was a little creeped out, and scared to get them out of the little container they came in into the ant farm.  Luckily they suggest putting them into the fridge to slow the ants down, and then I was able to dump them right in.  I sure had visions of ants crawling all over me though!  Those things are huge!

The boys are all fascinated with the ants.  Here they have started tunneling.

We also discovered how the light shines through a magnifying glass.

We played with ice one day.  I froze a pan of ice to let them slide objects across it.  It went along with our penguin theme last week.

We started learning about mexico this week.  We are following the Friend magazine's, Friends around the world passport program.  So, I pulled out our geopuzzle with Mexico in it.  We also learned the names of some other countries in South America.

Places we're going and people we're seeing...

The boys started a wrestling club for kids at the local high school this week. I know nothing about wrestling, so this will be a new experience for all of us.  They really like it, and they can definitely use the wrestling time being the busy boys that they are.

We also went to the local homeschool group at the library on Friday.  It was art day.  We love art!  The class was pop art by Andy Warhol.  Since we are also studying the great artists we read about Andy Warhol before we headed to the library, and I printed up some ready to color projects for them to do during the art time.  I'm so glad I did, this really helped them to be able to participate without feeling overwhelmed about re-creating a picture on their own.  I printed up a campbell's make your own soup label, and a few other color in pages here and here.

I gave Alex a few pennies to play with because he was getting bored.  When I gave him the cupcake sheet to color he put all his pennies on the cherries.  I thought that was cute.

My favorite thing this week...

Getting more organized, and getting these maps up on the wall. 

That wraps it up for this week.  I'm linking this up to The Homeschool Mother's Journal.



Desiree