Starting Fresh Monday

Starting fresh Monday

I have been in a schooling stand still lately not loving what I am doing and feeling unmotivated to do anything school like. I am guessing it is has something to do with the fact that I am  31 weeks pregnant but maybe something is in the air. Some of my other homeschooling moms have been feeling the same way and they are not  pregnant.

After over a month off of school we jumped back on the schooling train. Japan style on a Bullet train!

Speaking of Bullet trains here is favorite song of mine. Don't judge!!! This song is peppy, fun and is just fun.... I am totally a mom and rock this song out in my sweet van full of kids at full blast. As I type this Falcon is singing the song right next to me while on his computer playing Skyrim.

We started our morning  with our favorite yogurt 

Whole fat plain organic yogurt

Chia seeds

Flax seeds

Cinnamon

Coco powder

Raw honey

Then we headed to the library to get some books. We were also meeting a local astronomer there that Falcon has been in contact with to look at my telescope and figure out why it has not been magnifying well. He gave us plenty of answers and now my telescope is functional and no longer a $600 dust magnet.

As a fun treat  (I had BOGO coupons) we all went to a local coffee shop and got super yummy decaf lattes. It was the best one I have had since getting pregnant I am seriously;y going back tomorrow. I have to go back to the library anyway to pick up my books on hold that I forgot all about and it just so happens the coffee shop is just across the street

Back home at 12:00 for lunch, yummy leftovers from the Olive Garden then onto school work.

 I got the little  boys back on learning to read.

Robin  got back to her regular school work, I realized today we need to work on nouns again she seems think everything is an "idea". Robin also worked quite a bit on her Girl Scout badge work since she only has 6 ish more months left to finish out all her badges. We are working on a fun shape book all about Oranges right now for her "snacks" badge. We had fun finding Orange farms in the US and figuring out how many miles away they are from us. Oranges travel a LONG way to get to us.

Robin is also reading the American Girl Rebecca books for our homeschool book club. I invited over a friend of hers who is in that club and they worked on an art project that goes along with the books.Here is the art lesson we used.

They also wrote facts that I looked up about lady liberty on the backs of the art projects.

Falcon has been playing with power point and getting a presentation ready due next week on a founding father. He is also just finishing up Algebra 1, Oceanography and American history.

Hoping for a great productive day tomorrow, as for now this mama is going to snuggle in bed with her daughter and read Rebecca with her.

Engineering for Girls- The Marshmallow Spaghetti Experiment

So have you heard of the marshmallow spaghetti experiment?

You must watch this 7 min Ted Talks video then.

After  hearing about this from a friend of mine who had tried it during his last year as an engineering student I knew I had to try it out with some Homeschoolers to see how they did. 

Finally a perfect opportunity came up and I tried this with our Homeschooled Girl Scout Troop.

12 girls broke into 3 teams of 4.

1 team of 5 moms (I wanted to see how they sized up against the kids)

 I broke them up into ages, as I read that the youngest  kids actually always do better at this. Most moms were confused at this point why I wasn't mixing up the ages so the older kids could help the younger ones. 

Here is how they did:

There was no parental help allowed at all!

Group one 5-6 year olds:     6 inches

After a lot of sitting and talking and all the moms thinking that there was noway anything productive was going to happen at this table. They Triumphed!!

                                        

                                       

Group two: 6-8 year olds:       0 inches

There as a lot of talking going on here, and a lot of ideas but no clear way to make it happen. They had some very unique ideas that they tried at first without much success. I think the problem in this group was there was no clear leader established and not much got done. They did try to make a teepee type structure but were unable to get it to stand up. Given more time I feel this team would have gotten a structure up with a marshmallow on top. There were some very unhappy girls at this table when I said time was up.

Group 8-9 year olds       0 inches

These girls had a slow start but were full of ideas just as time was up they had a pretty tall structure but it would not stand up.

Group Moms:                 20 inches

I have no idea what their thought process was but none had done this before and this is what they had in the end. Maybe it was the extra person that made all the difference.

This was a fun experiment and I enjoyed hearing all the thought processes going on, I am hoping to bring more team skill building activities into our monthly meetings to get these girls to think outside the box more.

Thank you Ray for telling me about this.

If you are interested in Engineering for girls I just came across this company and it  is now  on my daughters wish list for Christmas. 

Looking for more? Click link below.

      100 Awesome Engineering Projects for Kids

I am hoping to do more of these with my kids possibly our Girls Scouts as well.

Happy Homeschooling!

Playing catch up.

Schooling? What is that? Oh that's the thing I said I would do this year. I am a bit of an over achiever and when I say we haven't really done schooling we have just very light lately. I am 28 weeks pregnant ,I think. It's baby #5 so until labor starts I really don't think to much of what week I am and what the baby is doing like I did with #1. I seem to have a harder time schooling when preggo than when baby is a new born. I am just so tired when I am pregnant and big and uncomfortable so as soon as baby pops out ( I wish) I throw him/her in my moby wrap and am ready to seize the day.

So what have we done?
Well we started the little house in the Woods series all the kids are enjoying that. We got some venison from our neighbors so we can eat that just like they did in the books. We also met up with some friends for a playdate and visited a little cabin just like the one we are reading about. ( Sorry no pics)

We chopped down our Christmas tree, okay we used a saw but chopping sounds so much better!

Then we went to our favorite sub place to eat with our tree strapped to our handy dandy minivan. We were having fun with Papabird while we waited.

Our Elf of a Shelf brought us some fun things to do, she brought us a set of 10 puzzles that we need to finish before Christmas eve. So we have been enjoying a lot of family time putting those together.

We went to a homeschool Christmas party that was wheat free, so that was fun that my kids were allowed to eat everything they saw.

Falcon and I just finished reading Divergent  here is the trailer. I need to go get the next book in the series from the library today, but feeling unmotivated.
We saw Catching Fire at the theater, it was AMAZING!

Speaking of Falcon  he left this morning for Chicago with his Boyscout troop. I am feeling quite uneasy about him being so far away from home and hoping he doesn't starve while he is there. I did send him with lots of wheat free snacks but who knows if he will eat them and will want to eat junk like the rest of the kids. I just hope he doesn't eat too much wheat and make himself sick.