Spring Break

Ah, Spring Break. The week I stay home and hit the books hard, while everyone else and their dog is out crowding up all the fun places. Go to Thanksgiving Point with 2 zillion other people? No thanks, we'll wait until you're all back in public school so we can have the place to ourselves. 

I did get is some really awesome, solid school days over Spring Break. It felt good. Here's one of our art projects. A waterfront scene, done with construction paper and watercolors. The idea was to notice how the buildings would reflect upon the water, so that water is the color of the buildings. Pretty cool. Even Adelia joined in and did really well. 

Lincoln's

Ivan's

Adelia's

Adelia has been really interested in bugs for awhile now. Almost every night when I'm tucking her in, she tells me how when she gets up in the morning she's going to study about bugs for her school work. Sometimes I feel like she gets the shaft when it comes to school, because I spend a lot of time with the boys, and they pick a lot of our subject matter, and Del just sort of tags along. So during Spring break, I decided we'd do a little bit of studying about bugs, because I knew Adelia would like it. 

One thing we talked about was Monarch Butterflies and how the migrate thousands of miles every year, from Canada and North America to forest in Mexico, and aback again. We made butterfly sun-catchers to hang in the window. And watched a Wild Kratts episode on Monarchs. Del was in heaven. :) She's been asking for bug books for bedtime story each night. 

Lincoln has been learning about the Scientific Method at Harmony, and needed to conduct a simple chemical experiment over Spring Break that he could apply the Scientific Method to.

He chose to mix lemon juice and baking soda (which creates carbon dioxide, and replaces oxygen) to put out a candle in cup. He found, and conducted the experiment all by himself, all I did was light the candle and take pictures. :)


We have a Showcase coming up on Plants. For his project, Ivan wants to show how plants roots know how to grow down into the dirt. The answer is gravity. We are trying to sprout 4 different bean seeds, each facing a different direction. We think the beans will sprout and that no matter which way they are turned the roots will go down to the bottom of the container. I'm hoping we get far enough along in the experiment by Showcase time, but I think we may have started a little late. We'll see. But here's the set up:

We're keeping our fingers crossed that they sprout. :) My other kids still haven't come up with what they are going to do for their projects. Hopefully we think of something...we're kind of running out of time to get anything to grow in time.

Lest you think I'm a slave driver, you should know that we also went up to Hooper to play with Gramma Tam for part of Spring Break. And, Aaron had Friday off, and so we decided to make a wall around our front flower beds. We only got one side done. And we still need to put in the drip line and buy plants for that side, but it looks AWESOME! I'm so excited to get it all finished so that our front yard doesn't look quite so redneck.