This week was a fun science week! We read from the Rock book from Marlene Petersen's collection of science books. We learned about fire/lava and water are involved in making rocks. We did a couple experiments as well. One was about how obsidian is made and another on how pumice is made. This is an experiment we did making slime. This was a representation of how obsidian is made. Obsidian has much less water in the lave when it is formed than pumice.
We also went to the Geology department over the weekend to a rock festival they were putting on. We saw all sorts of rocks and learned how they were created. We saw and studied the Mohs hardness scale, florescent rocks, and learned more about metamorphic rocks. A rock starts out as a sedimentary rock like mudstone and through metamorphasis, can become something like granite.
We learned about water contaminations and Artisian Aquifers and about how erosion evolves a landscape.
We saw lots of fossils and talked with an artist who created a Utahraptor statue.
We learned how they dig for fossils at night and why and about prehistoric fish. We had a lot of fun! We saw a stuffed piranha of our day and a prehistoric piranha. This was one of Elsie's favorite finds.
Here is our family in front of a cross-cut of where we live!
As a family we all had a fun time listening to the 6th book of The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place. We love discussing the mystery and how we think it could be solved and we always pause the story if we think we have listened to anything that might be foreshadowing the future. Peter also read on his own about 50 pages of The Man Who Counted, and he gave an oral report on Socrates. He wrote about 200 words to his science fiction story and shared it with his writing class. Elsie read about 80 pages of Wind in the Willows and did 4 pages of handwriting, practicing her cursive. She is writing the names of the states and their capitals, the presidents in chronological order, and little poems as copywork. Kimball finished his book How Science Works, reading the last 20 pages. He started a new book about the Solar System and read the first 45 pages of that book. He did several chunks of copywork and studied the words for spelling. He read several pages outloud from Dinotopia as well to me. Anna read 3 pages from her First Steps book from the chapter, "A Name for the Colt". She also read a Beginning Reader Barbie book called "Let's Plant a Garden." She did a couple handwriting pages and a little bit of copywork as well.
For math Peter finished his Pre-Algebra book!! We are really happy for him. I have yet to correct his tests, but he took a 4 page unit test and a 6 page final test. We are proud of him. Elsie is getting close to finishing her math book. She finished chapter 30 and took the test. It was about Arabic numerals. She also reviewed roman numeral numbers and long division. She also did several conversion problems wrapped up in story problems. Kimball finished chapter 26, but has not yet taken the test. The chapter was finding factors of numbers. He reviewed fraction basics, multi-digit multiplication, and multi-digit subtraction with regrouping. Anna also finished chapter 8, where she was learning to solve for unknowns. It was hard for her to remember whether she was adding or solving for the unknown. She also reviewed her addition facts as well as counting and building numbers.
For music all the kids practiced the piano and either the cello, violin, or viola. They went to their classes at Bows and Bridges and worked on fine-tuning their performance pieces for the string festival. Peter, Elsie, and Kimball also went to the homeschool choir and practiced singing their songs. In Pyramid Project they had a guest speaker come and talk to them about how music affects the mind and why people listen to certain music and composers.
For History we learned a little bit about Fransisco Coronado and mapped out where he explored. We also labeled major rivers found in the United States. Peter also studied the European nations and took a pretest on where they were.
Peter worked on his Minecraft this week and built the buildings where he had outlined from the map he had made. He turned in this assignment as well. Elsie, Kimball, Anna and I learned about how it is important to attract customers, and ways to do it. We all picked one way to attract customers. Kimball picked allowing the customer to experience the product at little or no cost. Elsie chose to provide information either through a video, blog, newsletter, or article, and maybe even partnering. Anna mostly just listened.:) We found out how to measure your success in one's advertisement effort. They also all wrote down (or with my help) their business message. This includes the name of the business, the product, and the reason why your product is better or different.
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