Corning Museum of Glass

When Little Man graduated from kindergarten, he told the audience that he wanted to be an NFL player and a glass blower. Ever since then, we've wanted to take him to the Corning Museum of Glass. Last weekend, we finally made that happen.

We didn't get any pictures of the Hot Glass Show, which was our favorite - we attended two shows, watching the artists make a gorgeous vase and punchbowl out of molten glass. We also watched the Breaking Glass Show and the Lampworking Show, where an artist made an intricate reindeer from a bar of clear glass. We decorated gingerbread men, listened to an all-tuba orchestra play Christmas carols and explored the science of glass - there's more than you might think!

The pictures don't really do this tree justice. It was so striking.

This is a magnifying glass water ball.  

Love the work of Dale Chihuly!

Yes, these are glass.

Me and Little Man and Tiffany

More Tiffany

Definitely a day well spent!

The Salamander Room

The first week of school! There were some bumps and snags, but it went pretty well overall. Although I don't think it will always be the case, this week Z-Man joined in on Little Man's Five in a Row studies. We started with a book Little Man requested, The Salamander Room. I so love this book about a boy who wants to transform his bedroom into a forest to accommodate a little salamander.

We learned about the food web and started coloring this poster. We'll leave it out on the desk and continue to work on it.

We read a great book on animal classification (taxonomy) What is the Animal Kingdom by Bobbie Kalman

  

and watched a very entertaining video from Moody Video called The Name Game:

Then we tried our hand at classifying LOTS of animals. Little Man loved this!

These animal cards were FREE printables at Homeschool Creations!

Little Man was inspired to create a Salamander Room in his bedroom. Z-Man came through with the necessary "moss" for the salamander's pillow by plucking the stuffing out of a couch cushion that I've been meaning to mend. 

We'll read one more book, One Rainy Night, about a boy and his mom collecting creatures for their nature center. 

And that will wrap up our first week! 

It's Super Science Day

Today, right after basketball, we participated in a science program at a (somewhat) local university. It was supposed to be for the kids, but the whole family had a great time.

We built Lego Mindstorms robots.

And programmed them.

We built skyscrapers with spaghetti and marshmallows.

Parents got to play too!

We learned about monomers and polymers and made our own silly putty.

Mmmmm... that's some tasty DNA!

And, after a fascinating demonstration of liquid nitrogen which included shattering a frozen raquette ball (when you have boys, smashing stuff gets extra points,) we made our own liquid nitrogen ice cream!

Yeah, Lovin' that science!

It was a wonderful day... and we even managed to learn a few things. It doesn't get much better than that.

Our Week with Ping

Ping holds a special place in my heart because this Five in a Row unit was the very first thing that Z-Man and I ever did in the way of "official" homeschooling. This week, I was so happy to re-visit it with Little Man!

Some of the things we did:

• Found China on our huge, shower curtain map from Target. That was a great purchase.
• Read about China in our atlas and found the Yangtze River.

• Tried our own colored pencil sunsets, using one of the pictures in the book as a guide.

• Read the book, Ducks by Gail Gibbons and learned about different types of ducks.
• Learned how preening makes the duck's feathers waterproof and did an experiment where we tried to mix oil and water.

• Read the book, Floating and Sinking by Franklyn Branley, and did our own buoyancy experiments, using this chart from Homeschoolshare.com. We discussed what a hypothesis is and I taught Z-Man, who couldn't resist tagging along, how to calculate percentages.

All in all, a great week of fun and learning!

Science Day!

A state park in our area hosts an amazing, annual science day where groups of students visit different stations to learn about everything from earthworms to acid rain. There are many stations and each group visits six. Our homeschool group visited:

-A station where we tested solutions with cabbage juice to see if they are acid or base.

We then tested the lake to see if it had been affected by acid rain. We were happy to see that our little sample of lake water turned blue/green, which means that it was a base.

And then, of course, we had to mix acid (vinegar) and base (baking soda) because who doesn't love that sudden volcanic eruption!

-A Zoo station where we met Matilda, the eastern box turtle. We learned that her kind are the only turtles able to completely close their shell, transforming themselves into little "turtle rocks." The only thing able to get them open at that point are crows, who pick them up, fly high into the air and - are you ready for this? - look for a parking lot in which to drop them. Ugh.

-An animal CSI station - this one was so clever!

We learned how an animals skull can tell us whether they are prey or predator, and then we visited some "crime scenes" to sift through the evidence and determine who the victim and the attacker were.

In some cases, samples of "scat" showed us that the victim had themselves eaten another animal that day.

-A paper recycling station where we made our own recycled paper, complete with shredded leaves, flowers and cinnamon. This is one we want to try at home!

-A forest recycling station where we learned about earthworms, bacteria, fungi and the decomposition of leaves and fallen trees.

-At the final station we met several beautiful owls, falcons and a turkey vulture.

All in all, it was a fun and fascinating day made even better by a game of beach football at the end!

We saw the monarchs!

This evening was just beautiful and we decided to spend it at a local beach.

As we watched the geese and the sunset and threw the football, we started noticing monarch butterflies.

They were all flying in the same path, in the same direction, at roughly the same height.

We realized that we had wandered into their migration path! We were so excited! The boys cheered them on and yelled, "have fun in Mexico!"

By the time the sun set, we had counted 97 monarchs.

This is number 61. He needed to take a little rest. Or maybe he just likes the camera.

Two years ago, when we did our "around the world" study, we discovered the monarch's over-wintering grounds while studying Mexico. You can read about that here. Monarchs born over the summer live 6-8 weeks, but the last generation to be born in a season lives 6-8 MONTHS so that they can fly thousands of miles, sometimes crossing the Great Lakes (think no place to land) to go dormant in one small patch of woods in the mountains of Mexico. They are so thick there that they sometimes break tree limbs! Can you imagine how many butterflies that would take? They wake up in the spring, mate and start the trip back, laying eggs all the way. Scientists have tagged butterflies, taken them hundreds of miles off course and they still find their way! God's creation is just astounding and I'm so thankful that He allowed us to see this tonight.

Mrs. Katz and the Passover

Last week, we learned all about Passover with a sweet Five in a Row book, Mrs. Katz and Tush. In the book, an elderly Jewish lady is befriended by a neighbor family and eventually adopted as their "Bubee." She tells the boy the story of the Israelites' exodus from Egypt as they share the Passover Seder together.

We covered many of the FIAR lessons, including:

• "Love your neighbor as yourself." - we memorized Luke 10:27 and used it as copywork and cursive practice.
• We read the story of the Exodus and made really cute (I know that just seems wrong, but they really are cute) little books of the 10 plagues that I found at Homeschoolshare.com
• A yeast experiment - mix yeast and sugar in a bottle of warm water and put a balloon over the top. That worked so well that we had to secure our balloon with electrical tape.
• We talked about patterns, tried drawing our own and looked at these National Geographic patterns in nature.
• We learned all about Passover with The Matzah That Papa Brought Home.
• We learned about Warsaw, Poland during WWII and why Mrs. Katz left in The Cats in Krasinski Square.
• We learned quite a few yiddish words, ate bagels and attempted to polka. :)

I like to have a picture of the books to show you. However, Amazon apparently no longer supports just the picture of the books without the purchase information. I am not trying to sell anything here. Of course, I'm not against anyone using these links, because I will get a commission, but that isn't my reason for putting them there.

Simple Machines

As part of our Iditarod-inspired arctic study, we read the FIAR book Very Last First Time, about an Inuit girl who is finally old enough to gather mussels under the sea ice at low tide - all by herself. Little Man was nervous when she wandered too far and the tide started coming in, but it turned out alright.

There are so many great lessons in this book:

• crisis thinking and what to do in an emergency
• tides
• Inuit culture
• maturity and having to wait for things
• handling fear
• inuksuks
• and simple machines.

At the end of our time with this book, we did a mini-unit on simple machines. We used the book, Experiments with Simple Machines, which had some fun and very simple activities using mostly things we had around the house.

We also watched a Bill Nye video on simple machines and found an online game here.

And finally did some experimenting with Little Man's gear set.