Science - Heart, Blood, & Circulatory System

I am very limited in what I can handle in a week and I have learned I can not teach all subjects every day, or even every week, so we rotate. That is part of the amazing thing about an living education is that you remember it well, NO meaning less, needles reviews win win for everyone! 

every two or three weeks we take a week off from our Travels and for science we are studying Anatomy the boys have been asking for some time and I thought it fit well since we are studying people, around the world why not study our bodies in science. I have LOVED it and have learned a TON I never new. This week the Heart! we read books and listened to each others heart beat.

On another day we made a model showing how the heart pumps blood.

On the next day we made play bough heart models and labels the parts and they kids narrated their functions, and what they do.

Ethan at work

Aaron at work

We also learned about the blood and what it does- so fascinating! We watched THIS amazing song and sang it each day. I saw this super cool activity making a model (super big) of the blood. And I wanted to do it, but what I thought was red water beads ended up being pink, (oops) and you were suppose to use white ping pong balls but I forgot and was not making a trip to the store just for that so I used clear water beads, then purple for the hormones (not accurate size) but I wanted them to remember that the blood is a message delivery service too! water for the platelets and they remembered that the blood also takes out the garbage too.

We did this on Friday, and they narrated everything they learned about heart and blood as they played with this. Loved it.

this was one of my favorite science weeks so far, I learned a ton!

Adventure Reading Kick Off!

For Drawing into the Heart of Reading - this month we did Adventure reading. So to kick this off we had a fun school day of adventure. This was eye opening to me. We really did all the same things we normally do we just started off "heading out" on this train of adventure. And fallowing our "map" which I made ahead of time

the boys LOVED it! I thought they would see right though it, and complain but they didn't they imagined right along with me and it was a lot of fun. After taking off on our train we head over the "mountains of math" and did our math work, then we went on the "reading rail road" and did reading lessons (for Ryan) and the older ones started their DIHR assignment. Next we journeyed through the "land of Language" and did our LA assignments. Last we dove deep into the "cleaning waters" and cleaned up the house. We had breaks, and snacks and lunch etc. The boys made up creative names for these things.

At the end of it all we talked about and cover the questions in the DIHR teachers guide and they got there treasure. Fun pencils and new books! We also talked about loving to learn in the real treasure in life because then your possibilities are endless!

Dallin did not want to be in the Pic so Aaron is holding his book and Ethan is holding the two older boys books. These are fun stories full of adventure, the younger boys LOVE the snowman books.

At the end of the 6 weeks or so that is takes us to finish a section of DIHR they do a book project. This was Ethan's he likes to do this, he makes the charters and seen from card stock and then you use a hole punch to make little circles then snap on Lego's to hole it up. Yes I too got this idea from Pinterest.

Then he Narrated his favorite parts of the story, and went over the character development things we covered this month.

Legos are a big part of our homeschooling life.

Legos have been a very exciting part of our homeschooling, and I will be sharing a lot more of the ways use use them in our schooling but here are just some we have done together 

 Boston Tea party- later we made this into a Pirate ship!

 These are the LDS conference center (made by my oldest, Ethan) Bellow is the LDS Temple, we did this as a family- mom was the mater designer.

 Here is a truck I made for Ryan

 This is a Truck Ethan made- we did have instructions for a truck and he used that as a guide but made it his own "flying space truck"

 Here is a Castle  I made for Aaron

 Ryan and Dallin LOVE to make marble mazes

 Ethan building with instructions which IS a great skill, learning to read and fallow directions and laid out plans is a great thing, this teaching them stills of working independently.

 Ryan (this is from a long time ago) used them to "show" amounts on the number line from 1-20 He created different things using "that many" Legos

 Here is another time we learned about the Eire Canal, read some books and learned a fun song they on their own decided to build, and act out the story of how they would build these boats and have them pulled by oxen along the Eire Canal.

I will share many more ways we use Legos or some of the boys Lego creations as they come.