DAY 5 Planning, the Internet, and experiment

Last night I finally finished planning out the year. I'd already spent hours on it. Think of it: I know I want to get in 32 weeks of schooling between now and the end of our homeschool year. I have curriculum I want to follow with each boy for science, math, science, social studies, and grammar. I had to go through each of these and find out how much needs to be covered each week in order to finish up by June 10. Throw in novels, art electives, typing, Spanish, cursive writing, economics, spelling, and logic that also have to be worked in. My head hurts!!

Weekly schedules

I have decided at least for this year to largely follow the Wake County traditional calendar since J&J began that way and our neighbors are on this calendar. However, I prefer to take off an entire week at a time just to make it easier planning wise (since I don't have the mental capacity right now to break up my weekly plans). Thus, there will be 8 days we are in school that Wake County will have off. I hope this goes okay! What if all the kids are outside playing? Maybe I will have to move school to my parents' for some of those days. All the logistics are overwhelming challenging.

I have two favorite things from today: the Internet and our Apologia Science Curriculum (thanks to my sister-in-law Rene and niece Katy for filtering through the curriculum and arriving at a winner, saving me work, heartache, and time!!). Since we homeschool in the kitchen/ dining room area and keep the laptop on the kitchen desk, we can spontaneously look things up on the Internet and not even get off task for long. Today, Pangaea came up in Joel's curriculum. I was explaining how the continents nearly fit together like a puzzle. Jason was on a break so he immediately searched the Internet and found a website with a wonderful graphic of the continents put together as they once were. Also, Joel was to find a few interesting facts about one of the animals from the Ice Age and stumbled across a YouTube video from BBC that had an animated video of what the woolly mammoth, sloth, and saber-tooth tiger looked like and how they moved and hunted.


Pangaea




looking up Ice Age animals on You Tube

Jason got to do a science center experiment today on density. It was simple and I had everything he needed on hand!  Jason recording data in his notebook.

conducting the experiment

Final results of experiment involving layers of vegetable oil, water, and corn syrup. The rock he dropped in went all the way down to the bottom through all the layers, the grape tomato stayed on the second layer, the ice cube stayed on the third layer, and the small piece of cork stayed on the very top. Cool!