Brickapalooza!

Jayden LOVES legos! When we heard about a basic engineering class that meets twice a month and was taught with legos, we knew it would be perfect.

May will be taking Hayzel Jr. as well, and kindly offered to take Jayden with her to the class. I wasn't there so I am going to pretend that's the reason why I have no knowledge about what is going on. This is an excerpt from the curriculum that they will be using from now until November.

"... students will build simple and motorized machines learning about levers, pulleys, measurements, gear ratios, and much more. Children work in small groups to first build mechanisms based on lesson instructions and when familiar with the challenge children will
be asked to improve on the design."

All I know is Jayden came home ecstatic! He loved the class, loved being partnered off, and loved using legos!

Cait and I spent that time alone together reading, playing, and just chit chatting. I wanted to sign her up for a preschool class during that block of time but it hasn't worked out so far.

School days

Caitlin has declared her Bob books to be too easy (I disagree!) and has decided to branch out to other titles. She continues to practice her reading daily, whether it is her reading to me, her babies, or to herself.

Jayden is super excited about math more than ever. He has finally reached the multiplication/division section of his math textbook. He is literally begging me to do extra math work on a daily basis!

The unifix cubes have proved to be very useful with multiplication and division!

We also finished up our history unit on Hammurabi by making our own Hammurabi Code of Laws. We bought a red foam board and cut it in a weird looking shape (since clay tablets weren't always perfect, not because I am awful at cutting straight lines).

We added our own family rules to the code and, of course, added it up to our history line.

Park Day

A couple of weeks ago we had a park date with a huge group of homeschoolers. We saw old friends and met new ones!

 

 We have decided to do it again, before it gets too cold.

Apple Picking

I love fall! The air is crisp, the smells are amazing, and it means the holiday season is near.
We began our autumn season by going apple picking at Cider Hill Farm. We are definitely going back!

 We met up with friends and had a great time!

 Of course we sampled the merchandise.

When we got home we made apple butter with our apples with this crockpot recipe (I cut the amount of sugar in half). It tastes so amazing. We use it on waffles, pancakes, peanut butter sandwiches... the possibilities are endless!

Science & History

We were in need of some new books so we hit up one of our favorite spots- the library!

 We started a new unit in science- the circulatory system.

After reading this book, we started with our lab.

 We had to record the kids' heartbeats after various activities.

 Afterwards the kids filled in their graphs to record their findings.

We are now in our 7th chapter of Story of the World (history). We are learning about Hammurabi's code, ziggurats, and Babylonian cuneiform. 

We used this website to translate a bunch of different things from English to Baylonian cuneiform.

 Here are the ziggurat coloring pages on the line!