And this year's science project award goes to the Christensen Family for the VOLCANO WITH CHOCOLATE MOLTEN LAVA...
What a fun and messy science day. We learned about magma erupting from volcanoes. When it reaches the earth's crust it is called lava and then hardens to form igneous rock. After the girls had their fill of hot lava--with enough evidence on their shirts, we put their chocolate volcanoes in the fridge to let them harden. Our little nerds then spent their sugar buzz watching video clips of erupting volcanoes from nationalgeographic.com I knew the concept sunk in when after an hour of that, Adrie yelled, "Let's go eat our igneous rocks!"



Kate and Brynn went to Liberty Girls on Tuesday. It has been great to get together with other k12 families and homeschoolers and yeah!--there are some functional and cool families out there. It gives me the little boost I need to think, Okay I can do this too! The girls have been reading and learning about slavery from the American Girls Series, Addy.
Addy, a colored girl, and her family says things like, "We done real good" "You is going to learn to read" and " It ain't fair, mama." It's fun to throw all grammar lessons to the wind and really get into the part.
Kate and Brynn came home each with a bag of cookie dough to make letters out of--just like Addy when she was teaching her mom to read. The dough, although not tasty because it was made from some very "healthy" wheat flour, was very entertaining. The girls probably spent an hour rolling it out and playing with it. Then they said, "Mom can we SEW?" Sew???
Apparently , again like Addy, they learned to sew stitches on fabric. Sewing has become the new craze around here. As long as I thread the needle and tie a knot at the end, they will happily sew rags together, scraps of fabric, whatever they can find. Luckily, we had some fabric around (from our Chinese silk lesson.) They got the grand idea to sew purses out of them and use a ribbon for a handle. They have become quite the fashion trend on the street.

We also made a makeshift barbie dress for Adrie. It's more like a toga or a mumu, however you spell that. Either way, as you can see, they are very proud of their newfound sewing skills.


Sewing just happened to fit right in our Art and Language Arts lessons. Kate read aloud Josefina and the Story Quilt. It told about a girl crossing the plains to California as a pioneer. Also, about how important quilts were to pioneers. They were like the family journal or scrapbook. For Art, each girls got a square of white fabric to draw on with markers. We just happened to be babysitting a couple of neighborhood kids that day so they also got a patch to draw on. Next week the girls will stitch them together to make a mini quilt--without the backing or filler or quilting bee--none of us know that much about sewing!


Kate also had to learn about what it takes to write a book. The first lesson was a word web where she had to think of an animal and write ideas about it in the outlying word bubbles. The next day she made 5 complete sentences from her wordbubble, a rough draft, you could say. Next she learned about PROOFREADING--correcting her sentences with puncuation, spelling, etc. Finally, it was time to PUBLISH her story in a book. Kate decided to elaborate BIG TIME on her 5 sentences and write a whole dialogue and everything complete with illustrations. She spent a good hour on her book and in the back there was even a section "About the Author, complete with a picture of herself. Ha ha, I'll have to get a picture of that. So, I guess it is still a work in progress. We'll have to publish the final draft on the blog next week after a few corrections.

Friday ended with a neighborhood block party at our place. We had probably about 75 people show up--our driveway has never been so exciting. Everyone brought potluck, and their own meat to grill and there was plenty of feasting and visiting. This was the second official block party and I think we're going to make it a yearly tradition with maybe some games and prizes in the future.