Coping

It’s been an emotionally harrowing couple of days around here. The kids are confused, angry, scared, and sad, and I don’t have any good answers for them. I’ve done my best to comfort and support them, and I feel positively heroic for managing to contain my own feelings about what’s happened while helping them deal [...]

Read Full Post »

The Zoo Question

Overcoming my ambivalent feelings about zoos, I took the kids to one today so that they could learn about frogs and toads. A particularly timely topic given our tadpole project. Our zoo doesn’t have much of a reptile house, but we were shown an interesting powerpoint presentation, saw reptile skeletons, and afterwards, took a [...]

Read Full Post »

Owl Pellet

Dissecting this owl pellet was the highlight of the morning. At least for Jay. Tee was more interested in the book he was reading.

I’m pretty sure that the skeleton was of a mouse, not a rat, based on the size of it, but it still had very impressive incisors.
Jay squealed with excitement at every new [...]

Read Full Post »

Wonderful Wetlands

Look! Isn’t that a beautiful little bird? She/he’s eating right out of my hand! It’s my Mother Earth dream! I’m so close to nature that all of the little animals come right up to my skirts to eat the fresh bread crumbs I’ve collected in my apron for them.

Here’s another one! I even know it’s [...]

Read Full Post »

Cooking Up Some Fun

Kids sure like a fire. The big boys were home, and they were eager to help when the little boys wanted a fire to boil up the ink they’d made.

I’ve donated one of our indoor paintbrushes to the ink project. Seems like a small contribution to such a worthwhile endeavour.

This is their work bench.

In addition [...]

Read Full Post »

Bird’s Nest Cookies

These were fun to make. Sugar cookies rolled in toasted coconut, then baked. I think they would have turned out more “nest-like” if we’d made dough balls and just made thumbprints in them before they were baked, instead of trying to shape them into nests, because they just flattened out in the oven. J had [...]

Read Full Post »

Making Peanut Butter

We learned that it’s way cheaper to buy peanut butter (even organic, nothing-but-peanuts-peanut butter) than it is to make it. That was a mini-lesson in itself. Why the unit price of a truckload of peanuts is cheaper than the unit price of a bagful of peanuts.

Read Full Post »

Paper Chromatography

Cut a strip of coffee filter
Mark a dot on it with water soluble marker
Fill a glass with water just high enough to wet the end of the strip of paper when it dangles into the glass
Attach the strip to a pencil so that the pencil will bridge the mouth of the glass and allow the [...]

Read Full Post »

Spring Break

The Canada Geese are back, winging low over the still-frozen river in search of open water. Spring is here, Spring Break is here, and while many people will be off on some sort of exciting travel adventure, we’re still here.
That’s okay though.
Realizing that it might be in my best interest to have a semblance of [...]

Read Full Post »

Isn’t that a cute little beaver? The creature in the background is a moose.

Read Full Post »

Decisions

L and her dad and I are at a bit of a crossroads.
It’s the time of year when grade 6 students have to apply for the schools that they want to attend for junior high. L is in school for grade 6 this year, and she’s been hearing which schools each of her friends will [...]

Read Full Post »

Cracking the Nut

When Tee was ready to begin baking his birthday cake, he asked me which of the pans was 9×13. I showed him, and asked if he knew what the names of those dimensions were. He did, so I asked if he knew how to find the area of that rectangle. He did, so I began [...]

Read Full Post »

Insulation Experiment

Bare Hand In Ice Water

With Blubber

The blubber was Crisco. I was trying to show the kids how a layer of blubber keeps arctic mammals warm in icy water.
Then I forced Tee to look up the word insulation in the dictionary, and we did an experiment with glasses of boiling water, to see what kind of [...]

Read Full Post »

Symmetry

This is a fun art idea.
Cut a black and white picture in half, and glue to a page. Try to draw the other half. L did this cat for homework last night. I think I’ll try it with the Littles.

Read Full Post »

Feeling Good

Skating in the morning….beautiful weather, the rink to ourselves, both kids independent on their skates, and after an hour and a half, me saying time to go, them begging to stay. A nice change from years previous, with at least one kid cold and miserable, someone else crying because they’d taken a bad fall, and [...]

Read Full Post »

Funny Homeschool Video

 Short, fun-poking video here, set to the tune of the Addams Family.
I found the link at Making This Up As I Go.

Read Full Post »

What I Learned the Hard Way Today….by Tee

Warning do not put magnets in front of a computer!
If you do the magnet will pull some pixels to the magnet and if you move it or keep it in the same place it will make your computer skreen multicoloured and shiny or worse 
How to fix it
 if you do do it, get a drill and tape (or [...]

Read Full Post »

Why To Homeschool

Oh me. Oh my. I just read the very best explanation for why to homeschool at Ideas, which I of course immediately added to my blogroll. If you do read that post, be sure to check out the comments, which were very interesting too.
The author is an academic economist who teaches at a law school, [...]

Read Full Post »

Shout it Out!

Here’s a variation on one of the multitudes of card and dice games that reinforce math skills:
Need: 1 deck of cards, face cards removed, and 1 die.
One player rolls the die. Everyone looks at it. Another player flips over a card. Everyone multiplies the dice number and the card number in their heads, and the first [...]

Read Full Post »

Crystal Snowflake Update

This is the most crystallized of them all. I don’t think we put enough Borax into solution.
As for the sugar crystals, nothing is happening at all, and we put a TON of sugar into the water. Might be time to do a little internet research.

Read Full Post »