Oh ya, and School

Oh ya, and we've been doing school too. :) The kids finished up their animal books, which was our writing project for September. Lincoln's book was on dogs, Ivan's was on several poisonous animals, and Adelia's was on bugs. All three of them did a great job. I was proud of their work.

Our writing project for October has been to make lists. The first list we made was a list of possible lists we wanted to make. It included things like:

Favorite Books
Place we want to visit
Star Wars Characters
Birds we've seen fly over our house
Words that start with the letter G
Planets
Nicknames for Ruby
Potential Halloween Costumes

We've also been talking about Simple Machines this month in Science. Our first project was one on friction. We made a ramp using a couple of my Norton Anthologies and a cookie sheet. Then we put different things (carpet square, dish towel, piece of cardboard, etc.) into the cookie sheet to make surfaces with varying amounts of friction. Then we rolled matchbox cars from one end to the other and timed them with my iphone stopwatch (probably not the most accurate, but suited our purpose) to see which surfaces allowed the cars to move more quickly down the ramp. The kids had fun, and played with the ramp long after our "official school time" was up. :)

Another day we learned about levers. Here are Lincoln and Ivan demonstrating Class One, Class Two, and Class Three levers.

Lincoln and Ivan had to do animal reports this year for their class at Harmony. Ivan chose crocodile. He wanted to make a life-sized one to show his class just how big these guys can get. It was quite the undertaking. On a roll of butcher paper Aaron help Ivan measure out the length. Then Aaron drew the body lightly in pencil and Ivan traced over in magic marker. Ivan wanted to color his croc, but since it was over 20 feet long, I told him he really didn't, and that he'd get sick of coloring it part way through and stop, and then he'd have a croc that was only a little colored and it would look silly. Ivan came up with the idea to paint it instead. So we did. And that didn't take very long at all, and the paint gave the croc a really cool texture that made it look more life-like. When the croc was done drying Ivan wrote 10 facts about crocodiles in boxes around the outside of the body. It turned out really cool.

Lincoln picked to do his report of frogs. I was mean and made him type his 10 facts into a report format with paragraphs and such, because I figured he's a third grader, he can be held to a little bit of a higher standard. He decided to make a frog habitat in a box and did that part all by himself. He also had some party blowers with velcro that he was going to let his class you to pick up little black pieces of paper on the table to demonstrate frog tongues, but somewhere over the course of the week we lost the party blowers and cannot find them anywhere. So he had to do without. Linc also chose to display his Dog Book writing project on the table with his frog report.

We spent one afternoon talking about basketball. I drew a basketball court on the whiteboard and we labeled all the positions and all the lines on the court and talked about what they mean. And I explained the rules a bit. There are just some things that little boys need to know. We'll call it PE. ;)

One night we had tickets to go on campus and see the BYU Chemistry Magic Show. It was pretty fun. The kids really enjoyed it. I didn't take many pictures because I had to leave half way through to go to my volleyball game. I missed the best parts, apparently, where they lit things on fire and made a bunch of loud bangs. Ivan drew a picture of it after in his journal. 

 Our homeschool group had a talent show this month. It was awesome. Except for the part where Ruby decided to puke all over everything and we had to leave early. :( But luckily my kids went near the beginning, so they got to do their talents before Ruby's puking episode. Adelia's talent was making up interesting characters to go in the stories she tell. She made a poster of her characters and told the audience all about them. It was sort of hilarious, and soooooo totally Adelia. Ivan told riddles, but I didn't get a picture of him because I was helping him and holding a wiggly Rue. Lincoln played three of his favorite piano pieces. They sounded way better on the baby grand than they do in our living-room. :)

And then there was art. My kids had been whining about our very obvious lack of Halloween decorations. And I saw a really cool blog post by my friend Arianne about painting with corn syrup and food coloring. I decided that was going to be our vehicle to decorate for Halloween. The kids loved it!

 
Our city has proposed a bond to build a new Rec Center just a block away from our house. I took the kids with me when I went to vote. They got to see the process and ask a million and one questions. We're just going to chalk it up to Political Science and move on.