Exploring and the Jell-o cell

The other day we went to a friendly park nearby that has a little walk through the woods.

Trails were blazed. Treasures were found.
For heaven's sakes, they were so excited to be there it was like they had never seen woods before.

 Life is good.

This was a fun way to spend the afternoon.

 Nate and Viggo are working on building some new low ropes elements for Lake Beauty.

Svea works on some geography.
For some arbitrary reason we always do geography on the floor.

 Elin works on grouping word families.
Not quite sure what is going on with Svea here . . .

 Viggo, Svea, and Elin make a cell out of lemon jell-o.

A couple years ago Nate and I made the brainy decision to buy a lab box for science. It was a blessing from above. It is always the first thing in my shopping cart when we plan for the next school year.

The lab box, or should I say Holy of Homeschool Holies, contains everything you need for projects and experiments. Everything is neatly labelled. God bless the lab box and the people that make it. I love it so much; when I look at the lab box, I get tears in my eyes over all the errands I won't have to run.

I pulled out the bag for Lesson One's project and found Jell-o for the cytoplasm, various candies and a fruit roll-up for mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum and other various cell organelles.

 Svea finds the nucleus.

 Completed cell!

Yum, right?! Can you find the golgi bodies?

Herding pigs, moldy apples, and monks

This week we had co-op, which Viggo, Svea, and Elin can't wait to be a part of every week.
The theme this week was farm.

A super-fun activity that my friends Amanda and Beth planned was herding pigs. Four dozen balloons, pool noodles cut in half, and only one minute to get all the pigs into the "pen" made for a good time.

 We could have probably herded the pigs all morning, but eventually moved on to some other fun things.

Milking a cow.
Unfortunately we were unable to get a real cow into the church for co-op.
So we settled for a latex glove instead. Almost the same thing.

 Please observe Elin's crossed legs. She milks the cow with grace and poise.

 Crafts and snacks for the littles.

 Drawing and writing for the bigs.

 And the mummified apples! The epsom-salt only apple was moldy and yucky.

 Viggo removed each apple and scraped extra salt and baking soda off, so we could weigh it.

The biggest loser of most moisture: well, there was a tie. Jar 4 had a 1/4 C epsom salt and and 1/4 C table salt. That apple lost half its weight exactly.
Jar 5 had 1/2 C table salt and 1/2 C baking soda. That apple lost 4/7 of its weight.

Aren't you glad you know these things? The next time you feel like mummifying apples, you'll know just what to do.

So this little experiment begs the question, do you think this was how the Egyptians figured out how much salt to use in the mummification process? Did they do a test first? To see which mummy comes out moldy and which one is all shriveled? Just wondering.

 Viggo did a great job of the apple removal.
Others wanted nothing to do with that part of the process.

 In other news, history was a lot of fun this week with learning about monks in the middle ages.
Monks, as it turns out, are pretty cool. They are gardeners, artists, writers, cooks - pretty much everything I want to be. Too bad I'm a girl . . . and Protestant. And married. Well, that dream fizzled pretty quick.

These monk outfits were hastily sewn together in five minutes because I didn't bother to do it the night before, so quality is on the slim side. But the gold cording was a big hit.

Tonight we're having a monk supper. I'm so excited. We are making split pea soup, and will also enjoy bread and cheese. Monk apparel is encouraged but not required - so stop on by!

Celtic Warrior Reenactment

The girls have been learning about the Roman Empire, and the Celts.

We decided to reenact the Celts defeating the Romans, and driving them out of Britain for good.

This meant we needed some new duds.

Viggo generously donated some old t-shirts to paint in Celtic colors.
The Celts would paint themselves blue and yell a lot while brandishing their weapons.
This scared the Romans out of their wits.

Everyone loved painting.

When the shirts were dry the next day, maybe we thought our reenactment would look a little something like this.

Turns out we were more like these guys.

 Fierce warrior faces.

 Viggo fends off the Romans with his bow.

I was the only one without a blue-painted t-shirt.

This was an unfortunate oversight on my part, because that meant I had to be the Roman.
The kids ran around screaming and chased me out of the field Britain.
I was defeated.

 Viggo gives Svea some tips.

 While Svea worked on the bow, Elin challenged Viggo to a fight for freedom.

 Elin surprised Viggo with her hitherto unsuspected fencing skills!

Everyone loves learning about the medieval ages, so this will probably be the first of many staged battles where I play the bad guy.

What we do

 Svea works on a few math sheets after breakfast.

 Cute girls.

 Every day Svea gets a little card with her assignments. Some things she does independently, some things she does with me, and some things we do as a group.

Viggo reads his math book, Life of Fred.

Let me tell you: if I had read Life of Fred when I was a kid, things might have been different for me.

Fred is a 5 1/2 year-old genius with a triangular head who is a college professor. He uses stories to teach math concepts. They are kind of hilarious. This is the first time ever, in my entire life, I have been interested enough to pick up a math textbook and read it for fun. That's kind of monumental.

 Elin works on perler beads. Keeping her busy while I help Viggo and Svea with things they need help with, and then working with her while they work, keeps me on my toes.

 We also got some foam magnetic mosaics, which everyone loves.

Everyone has loved creating cute scenes.

Svea and Nate work on addition and subtraction with a card game.

We are mummifying apple slices for an anatomy experiment.

There are eight jars containing different amounts and combinations of baking soda, table salt, and epsom salt. And one jar with just the apple slice. We weighed each slice and recorded that info, then mummified it according to instructions.

We started this on Monday and will take all the apples out next Monday and weigh them to see how much moisture they have lost during their week of mummification.

I am voting for straight table salt, #3. Viggo is voting for the larger jar of salt/baking soda combo, #5. We'll let you know the results.