Random stuff we've been up to

I love the internet. Especially sites like Pinterest where you can get totally sucked into all these ideas of things to do with the kids. I have to admit that I now spend a fair bit of time looking for cool things to do for homeschooling. Here are some of our hits and some misses too!

After Maddy's question about getting an iPhone because she wanted to play Angry Birds, I remembered this idea I came across from a 'Science for Kids' blog. We still need to tweak our catapult a bit, I used hair elastics this first time, but have since replaced them with real elastics. Much better. The kids are still experimenting with the proper angles to pull back on and Ethan is still working on figuring out how the catapult works. It's pretty funny to see him pull back, and then just throw the ball weakly to the ground. Haha.

A bit hard to see, but there is the little bird sitting on the bricks.

This next picture is to document our 'miss'. It was supposed to be an experiment with baking soda and vinegar. The chemical reaction between the two was supposed to cause the gummy worms to appear to float up and down on their own. In hindsight,  I think the worms were too heavy. We will try again with smaller worms, but one thing mommy won't do is to dump more baking soda mixture in the bottle of vinegar (It was Maddy's suggestion when nothing was happening to the worms). Let's just say that the kids had a good laugh and mommy had a lot of mopping up to do. I won't forget Maddy exclaiming, "Now THAT'S a science experiment!" just after the explosion happened.

A shot before. All still looks calm and under control.

With Ethan joining us on Mondays, I try to some activities that are more hands-on and something that the kids can do the same activity, but be working on different learning outcomes. Ethan was working on just recognizing the numbers and Maddy was adding dot patterns on dominos. Both of them had to search for specific numbers in the bowl of rice. They really liked this activity so it'll go on my list of things to do again.



Another hit was the Rainbow painting with salt. With Maddy, I was trying to see if she could write numerals between 20-100. For Ethan, I started with the idea of having him try to write the numerals 1-3. That quickly changed to just doing circles and lines. He was pretty happy when at one point he connected the two together and said, "Look Mama, Q!"

 

 Finally, with the shorter days and yuckier weather we had our very first "Family Game Night". This is an idea I've been looking forward to for a while. (Must be all those Milton Bradley commercials) It was a fun treat to have popcorn after dinner and to play a few of our games together. We're hoping to add "Movie Night" to the mix soon too. Just waiting for a weekend afternoon where we don't have anything to do.