The boys have been enjoying their solar kits that they received from Santa. Here’s just one of the many things they can make. Very cool. They had to make a gear box and use wires for polarity. Fun learning!
An nice interruption
Lessons were cut short today when our wonderful mail carrier (who happens to be a new grandpa to a 10lb baby boy!) delivered a late-in-coming gift. I love that. It makes the holidays feel as if they aren’t over.
Of course, the boys had to finish lunch first.????
Thank you, Aunt and Uncle!
Bubbling Wizard’s Brew
Today we are doing more science experiments. We have been using The Usborne Big Book of Science Things to Make and do. It’s a great book for fun and fast experiments.
We have some colored water I’m the freezer soon to become winter boats for our frigid -10 weather today! Brrr!
Then we took two glasses (please ignore the shape) filled with vinegar, food coloring, sprinkles and dish soap. Hmmm…sounds like fun, right?
We placed the cookie sheet under the glasses for containing the brew to come. The boys each got a heaping spoonful of baking soda and added it to the glasses. Holy excitement!
It’s always fun making a bubbly brew, isn’t it?
Enjoy your day. We are off to make sun catchers!
Making electricity
The boys got cool science kits from Grandma and Grandpa for Christmas. L’s kit is ‘Light’ and X’s is ‘Electricity’. They have paper wheels to colour, motors, alligator clip wires and more. Very cool!
X made morse code with beeps and L made it with light. Can you tell what the message says?
a little pat on the back
This is one of many homeschool blogs I follow with my trusty Google Reader acct. The quote below is at the bottom of one of her recent posts. Thought we could all use a little pat on the back. 🙂
“To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours, and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, boots, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can imagine how this can exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it.
How can it be a large career to tell other people about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.”
~ G.K. Chesterton
One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp
Just one more excerpt.
I just want time to do my one life well.
Time is a relentless river. It rages on, a respecter of no one. And this, this is the only way to slow time: When I fully enter time’s swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here. I can slow the torrent by being all here. I only live the full life when I live fully in the moment. And when I’m always looking for the next glimpse of glory, I slow and enter. And time slows. Weigh down this moment in time with attention full, and the whole of time’s river slows, slows, slows.
You may want to read it. She had me in tears on the second page by her childhood ache and her poetic writing. Transfixed.
One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp
An exerpt…she clears the confusion of my ever-wondering mind. She is poetic.
I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I’ve seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for the early light dappled through  leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives. Why would the world need more anger, more outrage? How does it save the world to reject unabashed joy when it is joy that saves us? Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn’t rescue the suffering. The converse does. The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring the fullest Light to all the world. When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? For us? The clouds open when we mouth thanks.
New Age Chess
It’s amazing what happens when I leave the boys to their own devices. Not that this is an incredible example but I find it’s full off imagination and innovation as well as classic childhood ‘doings’.
A fort plus chess. A chess game plus some new pieces. How they can tell who is now who is beyond me. But that’s okay. It’s not for me to know. It’s for children’s brains to create, assign and understand.
It’s for me to love and to always be reminded how precious childhood is.
Henry David Thoreau
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.
One for the wall.
The first cuke.
It’s our first cucumber of the season! We were all so excited that we ate it right away – even though it is a pickling cucumber.
Eating the cucumber made me feel like a little girl again and I remembered all the pickles my grandma would make. I felt like I was suddenly back in her kitchen again crunching down on the freshest cuke ever. Almost like time never passed. I like that.
…
One of the boys said, “Mommy, you forgot to peel it first”. So I happily explained that we don’t have to peel the ones that we grow in our garden.
And they happily ate their very first cucumber from our garden. Thank you, Grandma, for passing the love of a garden onto your daughter who has perhaps unintentionally passed it onto me as I do to my children. May they do the same.
Yum!
