You Capture - Red (and Yellow and Blue)

As the resident phake photographer, I suppose when I am given the You Capture assignment RED, I am expected to post pictures of shiny ruby-colored apples and lovely crimson cardinals. However, since we've all been taking turns enduring the Crud in our house, I have been unable to take the kids on any field trips to the local orchard or on any nature walks.

The assignment did, however, inspire me to do a hands-on lesson with the Princess which I have been putting off. (I think I may have gotten this idea from Mitzi, but I'm not positive. I do know we did this at our old co-op. Anyway, just trying to give credit where credit is due.)

So the lesson was about primary and secondary colors...a little color wheelin'. Of course, all of the children wanted to "learn" this when they realized it involved icing and vanilla wafers. So why not? They could use a refresher course.

First, we mixed the three primary colors: red, blue, and yellow.

Then we mixed a little red and yellow, a little red and blue (and a little blue and yellow) to make our secondary colors.


And then the icing was carefully spread on the wafers.

And the wafers were neatly consumed.

(Note: For the convenience and economic value of the experiment, I employed my cheap, generic Wal-Mart food coloring rather than my pricey Wilton colors. Therefore, my red is not the reddest red, nor is my blue all that blue. I could have cheated and re-colorized the pictures, but that would be, um, cheating.)

For some real photos of RED, visit Beth at I Should Be Folding Laundry.

Bloggy Friends Award

Many moons ago, I received an award from my sweet friend, Courtney. I have never physically met Courtney, but we have become acquainted quite well, for she hails from the intangible world called the Internet and, more specifically, from the Kingdom of Blog. My sincere apologies to her for not publically accepting this award in a more timely manner.

Here are the rules of this award:- This award is bestowed on to blogs that are exceedingly charming.- These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends.- They are not interested in self-aggrandizement.- Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated.- Please give more attention to these writers.- Deliver this award to other bloggers who must choose others to pass it on to and include this cleverly-written text into the body of their award.- I will pass this award to some of my bloggy friends that I find exceedingly charming...

So without further ado, allow me to introduce to you my bloggy friends whom I find exceedingly charming:

TeacherMommy at Diapers and Dragons is my oldest friend. Not in age...she is actually (ahem) a few several years younger than me. But I don't remember not knowing her. Strange as it may sound since I grew up with her, I wish I had gotten to know her better then; I'm glad she allows me to get to know her better now.

Crossview at Down a Red Dirt Lane is my very sweet, funny homeschooling friend who lives in my state but whom I have never had the privelege of meeting face-to-face. Hopefully that happens one day.

Another bloggy friend I would love to meet is sweet Annie at Having a Ball. She is a former English teacher like me. What's more, she's a homeschooler, even though she doesn't know it. Her kids go to school, but all of the amazing things she does with them at home to further their learning makes her a homeschooler!

Speaking of former English teachers, there is Arby at Boarding in Bedlam. Arby is a stay-at-home homeschooling dad. His wit and sarcasm doused with his honesty and sometimes even a touch of nostalgia make him a fun bloggy friend.

Mitzi at the Road Less Traveled is my homeschool co-op friend. I have actually met her for real and am enjoying getting to know her better this year.

I also personally know Darcie at Darsea Dyamics. We used to go to church together. I miss seeing her at church, but I'm happy to keep up with her.

Finally, over the last bloggy year or so, I've followed Rebecca at Beautiful Feet. Her blog is called beautiful feet because "...beautiful are the feet of those who preach the gospel..." (Romans 10:15). She and her husband preach the gospel in Mexico. As a missionary kid, it's easy for me to relate to her tales.

I'm sure I've forgotten someone. Now I know how the celebrities feel...not that I'm a celebrity, mind you, but as they're rattling off all those names of people they wish to thank, I'm sure they inadvertently leave someone out who gets offended.

Oh, the award. Here it is:

Celling Out

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had all sorts of great science adventures planned for last week, but we ended up losing much valuable academic time when the Crud hit us. So I made up for it by cramming it all in to yesterday.

We are beginning a unit on Human Anatomy, so we of course started with the smallest, most basic part of our fearfully and wonderfully made bodies: the cell. We began by watching a film about cells, their function and their composition.

We watched the film from United Streaming. A couple years ago, I got a password to United Streaming, but for some reason I did not take the time then to explore what I had right there at my fingertips. In the last couple of weeks, I've heard conversations in various homeschool groups and forums about United Streaming. So I dug my password out of the archives and logged on. I had no idea there was such a wealth of information at my disposal! And for FREE!! In many states, membership to United Streaming through Discovery is quite pricey, but here in Georgia, we have free access to it through Georgia Public Broadcasting. God bless GPB! With hundreds of thousands of films now just a click away, there will be more videos to accompany my lessons. And, since my dear husband hooked up the larger monitor and some pretty def speakers to my laptop, it's not so bad watching a film from the computer! (I almost said "filmstrip" because these types of educational films remind me of the ones we used to watch from a filmstrip during Biology class in the olden days.)

Anyway, after watching our introduction to cells, we discussed the function of each cell part. From there, we dissected an onion, stained a small sliver of it with red dye (did you know that iodine is clear now; they no longer sell the red kind that you're supposed to use to stain science stuff?), and examined it under the microscope. Michael thought it was "cool!", but Alex wasn't impressed.

After drawing out our observations, we set out to make Cell Cookies, which was the primary objective for all of my little scientists in our afternoon of studies. Our cell was composed of peanut butter cookie dough. We used a Hershey's Kiss for the nucleus, a peanut for a mitochondrium, mini-M&Ms for lysosomes, and sprinkles for golgi complexes.

Yes, true celling out: if you can't get them to learn a lesson through a video and the use of a microscope, throw in a cookie. Lesson learned.

Nuts

I'm a big Glenn Beck fan. Yeah, sometimes his Doom and Gloom unnecessarily feeds by tendencies towards worry, but I appreciate his humor, his parody, his honesty, and his curiosity.

If you haven't been following him, you have missed all of his investigations on the community organizing group ACORN. Apparently, it hasn't been lost on my 4-year-old, though (and don't worry--we turn off any inappropriate content):

Today I turned on Beck's show and Audrey said, "Hey, there's the guy who always talks about nuts!"

Pond Water, Math Facts, and the Flu

Pond Water

Tuesdays are by far our most crazy days. We leave by 8:00 to get downtown for my Bright Futures class. After class, I take on the tricky maneuver of changing clothes in the car because I do not want to chase 3-year-olds/2nd graders/3rd graders all afternoon in my high heels and dress. Then because there's not quite enough time to go home, we grab lunch somewhere and then head to co-op.

This past Tuesday the lead teacher for two of the three classes in which I assist was out, so I had to teach them. We're studying the ocean, but to illustrate the fact that there are critters in the sea that we can't see, this time we had to grab lunch at a drive-thru and then head to the park to steal some water out of the pond.

It's been awhile since I've done much with a microscope, so I wasn't quite sure what I was looking at when I prepared the slide. I'm pretty sure my first class--the first graders--viewed some microscopic air bubbles. They thought they were totally cool, though. Thankfully, the 2nd and 3rd graders were able to actually view some microscopic critters swimming across the slide. Pretty cool.

On a side note, I mentioned above that I also teach 3-year-olds. You do remember, don't you, my awesome people skills with 3-year-olds? Thankfully, I'm in there with my friend, Mitzi, who found it very amusing that I got stuck in there. I know she won't mind my speaking for her, though, when I say she's not all that comfortable in there either. Tuesday we were with those precious little people by ourselves, minus the lead teacher who, incidentally, appears to be much more comfortable with the little people than the two of us. There were only 5 little 3-year-olds, but that was plenty, especially when one of them would not stop putting things in his mouth, taking off his shoes, climbing on things, and yelling.

It was a tiring day.

Math Facts

Again, let me emphasize the fact that I got my degree in secondary education for a reason. When I think back to my 1-year stint as a teacher of the second grade, two things come to mind. One is the tattling, the endless tattling that is not so prevalent in a high school classroom. "Mrs. Pierce, she's sitting too close to me." "Mrs. Pierce, she is using my pencil and won't give it back when I ask for it."

Another thing I recall are the short attention spans. Let's say we're in the middle of Charlotte's Web, maybe at the point that Charlotte dies and I as a teacher wish to have a deep discussion with my students about life, death. You know, deep stuff. So I pose a question about life and death. A hand goes up, and I think, Wow! We're really going to have a real discussion in here. Then student-with-the-raised-hand says, "Mrs. Pierce, we're going to Wal-Mart after school this afternoon."

Yes, those are the things I most disliked about being a teacher of the second grade. Now, it is a little easier teaching my young children because they are my children. However, I am finding I enjoy this homeschooling thing much, much more as the years go by. My 4th grader can now do her own research and almost all of her work independently. And I can hold deep discussions with her about books, current events, and the world around us.

But with my younger ones, I still have all of those pesky things to teach them: reading, math facts...The good news is that the boys have made great strides in their reading. In fact, this past week, they both got hooked on the Magic Treehouse series, hooked enough to read them for pleasure. Today, though, we've begun tackling the math facts. They haven't gotten them up until now. Alex was the same. But with her, I just told her she had to learn them NOW, and she did. On her own. But the boys. Oh, the boys. Long story short, I've decided to suspend all other math work next week and make it Math Fact Boot Camp around here. They will learn them next week. Yes, they will.

The Flu

Well, I got my flu shot on Wednesday. Apparently, I should have wrestled the kids into the doc's office as well. I had all sorts of wonderful things planned for science this week, including making Cell Cookies and doing some microscope work of our own, but these plans have been pushed to next week. Alex came down with the flu Wednesday and is just today finally beginning to feel a bit better. I suspect the Princess may be the next to succumb to the flu. My suspicions lie in the fact that the ottoman is not ordinarily the place where we tuck her in at night:

You Capture - Fall

The calendar does indeed say it's fall:

But I live in Georgia. And in Georgia, we're a little slow about certain things. Quick to spring into spring, but always slow to fall into fall. Which is certainly fine with me. If I had my druthers, I'd skip fall and winter and maybe even spring and live a life of perpetual summer...

Anyway, here in Georgia, everything is still green:

We have really only encountered two things that give us an inkling that fall is on the way. The first is cooling temperatures, but even those will probably rise again before fall is really, truly ushered in. And, of course, cooling is such a relative term. Today's high in the mid-70s is cool to me but probably warm to someone up north.


Secondly, there is the matter of this mini-Darth Vader we have loitering around the house:

Yep, 31 days and counting.

To see some real fall pictures, visit Beth at I Should Be Folding Laundry.

Weather Forecast

OK, so today it's raining. Again. And tomorrow it's supposed to rain. Again. And Monday it's supposed to rain. Again.

But yesterday...

Yesterday was only Cloudy...

with a Chance of Meatballs.

Throw in a warmfront of Fun, barometric pressure rising on the huge IMAX screen, and some Best Friends precipitation, and you get the Perfect Storm of three dimensional delight.

Of course such a storm would have been better preserved had Mom remembered the good camera, but since Mom ditched her purse (and thus the good camera) and opted to bring Mama's Magic Bag instead, camera phone it was.