Fun Friday!

Finally had a week where we got enough done on the first four days of the week that we could relax and spend some time having "Fun Friday" today. 

Art this week looked at the Art Nouveau movement. We especially enjoyed the works of Louis Comfort Tiffany. So we started our morning out with a little "stained glass" tribute. 

Free form with the leftover supplies

 While the artist worked, I read to her from Canvas Caravans, by Eleanor Allen.  "Based on the journal of Esther Belle McMillan Hanna, who with her husband, Rev. Joseph A. Hannah, brought the Presbyterian Colony to Oregon in 1852"  (More specifically arriving in what was then called Marysville (now Corvallis!) on October 1, 1853.)
In honor of that, and other Oregon Trail studies this week, we made "Dried Apple Dumplings" from Oregon Trail Cooking.  





Our improvised scale. We had no idea how many of our homemade dried apples would be equal to the 8 ounce package called for in the recipe. So we had to compare it to the 7 ounce package of pasta from the cupboard!






Ready to boil/reconstitute....





Finished product.  Definitely edible.   And we agreed that after a couple months of trail cooking it would be absolutely delicious!



 We finished up the exercises for this week's Latin and Vocabulary units and then decided that the late October sunshine looked too good to pass up, so we walked to a park downtown to gather some leaves for what has become an annual tradition of tracing leaves onto construction paper or making rubbings, cutting them out and taping them in the front window.

To sneak in a little bit of geography, Kayla signed up for http://www.postcrossing.com/ in September.  She sent out her first five postcards to people in Washington, Wisconsin, Georgia and the Netherlands (2) over the course of the last month.  Yesterday's mail finally held the payoff~her first postcard received!  From St. Petersburg, Russia! 



There really isn't any good way to turn Linear-Equations into "fun" but we had some review problems at the end of the chapter she needed to get through, so we packed up our bags and headed back downtown to the coffee shop.  Sitting on a comfy couch, sipping an orange italian soda at least made Algebra look like fun. 

We also read a couple more pages in the story we are working on in Spanish.  We make flash cards as she encounters unfamiliar words, but she is definitely running across more full sentences she can understand with what she knows (and using those take a guess based on context skills). 

It turns out neither of us loves history (sorry Aunt Didi)

And science experiments are fun, but theory and formulas are not (sorry Aunt Mary)

But apparently we really enjoy languages! In addition to Latin and Spanish (and the Latin/Greek based vocabulary program and Grammar) we are now working on Greek as well.  The first couple weeks the main outcome was being able to identify the frat houses as we drove through Corvallis (which is a valuable life skill on its own!), but this week we've been working on sounding out actual words written with the Greek alphabet and have a small stack of Greek words that she can read and know what they mean! 

Kayla has decided to be part of the NaNoWriMo adventure this November so she spent the last of our coffee shop time brainstorming characters and plot ideas.  (She has been taking suggestions from everyone she runs into~so far ideas include: a basilisk named Fluffy, flying ferrets, evil twins, love, princesses, hole in the sidewalk leading to another world and many other crazy ideas!  Feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments as obviously nothing is too bizarre to consider!)

I'm sure there's more I'm forgetting, as our days seem to fly by, packed with so many things to do and so much more we would love to be doing, but we thought you might enjoy a peek at today's Friday Fun!

Gumdrop Science

Thanks to Auntie, we know that the usual model of atoms with electrons spinning around nucleus like the solar system isn't really accurate, so I didn't feel like we had to do that! But I'm pretty sure that it is an educational requirement that any time you study atoms and molecules you are required to make some kind of model using common household items~preferably edible, so we went ahead (without even consulting our science advisor)  and made gum drop models of compounds: 

and salt....

 

Are You Smarter Than a Homeschooler?

I want to know if you are smarter than a homeschooler so I put together one or two questions fom each of our subjects.

Spanish
1.) What does "el conejo blanco" mean?
2.) What does it mean when you add -ito on to the end of a word?

Latin
1.) What does "e pluribus unum" mean? (you should know this)

Science
1.) How many atoms in a mole?

Reading
1.) Who are the four girls in Little Women?

Bible Study
1.) Whose fat swollowed a sword?

Vocab
1.) Give an example of an expletive..

Math
1.) Factor the expression 2r(r-7)+8r-56

Grammer
1.) Fill in the blanks
Present           Past        Past particle
Leave           ______      ___________
Sit               ______      ____________

Logic
1.) In any proposition what are the two concepts which we unite by affirming or seperate by denying?

History
1.) Who was our fourth president and what was his wife's name?
2.) In what war was the white house burned?
3.) What year did the trail of tears start?




Answers

Spanish
1.) The white rabbit ( we are reading Alice in Wonderland)
2.) Little

Latin
1) One of many

Science
1.) 6.02 x 10 to the 23 power    
or
602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Reading
1.) Jo, Beth, Meg, and Amy

Bible study
1.) Eglon King of Moab       -Judges 3:22

Vocab
1.) STOP dont say it. Expletive means obscene exclamation


Math
1.) (r-7) 2(r+4)


Grammer
1.) Fill in the blanks
Present           Past        Past particle
Leave              Left        Have left
Sit                  Sat         Have sat

Logic
1.) Subject and Predicate


History
1.) James Maddison and Dolly
2.) The war of 1814
3.) 1838