Funnest Math Project EVER!

I love to incorporate math into baking. Lola barely realizes that she is having a math lesson.
Today we baked gluten-free gingerbread men. Lola loves to bake and is very good at measuring out the fractions for the ingredients.
It was originally going to be a gingerbread house but we ran out of time! Either way, the kids had fun. They also got to decorate their cookies and they were very excited about that.

Happy Hunukkah!

I haven't blogged our homeschooling experiences in a long time, mostly because I've been without a digital camera for a while (ours broke in Hawaii)...it's hard to post without photos!

To mark the beginning of Hanukkah this year, we decided to get together with a couple of other independent study families and teach the kids a bit about the history and reasons why certain foods are eaten during the Hanukkah holiday. The kids ate latkes, fried in oil to represent the scant amount of oil recovered by the Maccabees and how it miraculously lasted eight nights...enough time to find new oil. The kids learned about the menorah and how it is customary to light a candle on the menorah and exchange a small gift each of the eight nights.

Afterward, they played the dreidel game with their "gelt", which was the traditional foil covered chocolate coins! They had so much fun!

A day at the zoo

Today, we went to the zoo. Lola is especially interested in reptiles so we spent a good portion of our day in the reptile house. They were a few stand-outs...mainly the Gila Monster, in the second photo. Lola was quite relieved to learn that, while, they are very poisonous, it's pretty difficult to actually get bit by one since they are so slow moving.
She was also fascinated by the albino Burmese python. It was HUGE!

Word Games

I found this great educational website through Lola's teacher's blog. It has interactive games/puzzles, as well as some that you can print out. Since Lola is a big fan of word search puzzles, I found her some that had themes that she liked, such as Wizard of Oz, Dr. Seuss, recipe words, etc...She had great fun doing these puzzles and we were able to work on reading at the same time.

She also had spanish class today and learned to how to say the colors!

Diving

This past weekend, we were in Palm Desert at a hotel with a pool (thank goodness!). Lola and her sister played in the pool all day, the entire time we were there. Lola is getting super brave in the water and even taught herself how to dive off the edge of the pool! Hard to believe this is the same girl that wouldn't let go of the edge or even get off the stairs only a few months ago! Go Lola!

Spanish!

Hola!
Lola has started a spanish class, twice a week...She loves it!

Gardening Monday...

We usually stay home on Mondays because the weekends are so busy that we don't get much chores done. Today, we tended to the garden. I stripped the bottom inch off of a pineapple crown and let it air out. It will soon be ready for planting. In the meantime, we took out some of our veggies that had gone to seed & harvested some veggies that are still going strong. We picked lots of tomatoes, eggplant, chard & basil. Sounds like a great pasta sauce to me!!

Diamondhead

Today we took up a hike up to the very tippy top of Diamond Head. Scientists believe that the type of massive, but brief, eruption that formed the shape of the symmetrical crater is monogenetic, and therefore, they do not believe Diamond Head will ever erupt again.
It's about a 1.5 mile hike round trip and takes up to 2 hours. It wasn't very hard, except that it's unpaved and rocky. The hardest part was probably the stairs near the top. There are 74 of them!! Yikes! Lola was a champ and did the entire hike with me by herself and didn't require any help. She was so proud of herself when she got to the top! She took her own photos of the view. It was spectacular.

School had just barely started for Lola and we left for Hawaii for a week. Since we were already into the 2nd week of school, we looked for learning opportunities and didn't have to search very far. There were all kinds of new birds & plants we had never seen before and learned a lot about the various cultures that make up these beautiful islands.

Above photos are examples of the different ginger plants and plumeria trees we saw.

Also, Lola and I right before taking hula dancing lessons! We learned how to tell a story using hula dancing and, by doing so, learned a lot about the culture in Hawaii.

Back to School!

A very happy 1st grader on her way to the 1st day of school!

Volcano, Part 2

The explosion! Well, first we had to paint it. The girls did a great job. This afternoon was the grand finale...we poured vinegar into the top of the volcano and we got our red lava to bubble up to the top and pour out! Lola didn't like the smell of the vinegar, but she did enjoy the project as a whole!

Volcano, Part 1

Recently, Lola and I were chatting about volcanoes. She was fascinated by the fact that where her grandfather lives, Montreal, there is a dormant volcano. I told her how we used to find lava rocks as children. She wondered if they were still hot! Anyway, it gave us the idea to make a volcano from paper mache and have it "explode". I didn't realize at the time that it was really a 2-3 day project. Step 1 was making the base and the shape of the volcano. We used plastic cups and balled up newspaper glued to a box to make our shape. Then we poured some baking soda and a few drops of red food dye into the bottom of the volcano. After we waited a day for the glue to dry, we made the paper mache solution and shredded the newspaper. Lola covered it in paper mache, leaving a hole at the top for the "lava" to come out!

Baking Cookies

Lola has been asking to bake cookies for a long time. She is quite independent in the kitchen, wanting to do everything herself. I'm learning to be patient with that because I really want to nurture her love for cooking and baking. It's tough though!
Anyway, this time I let her do a lot more than I've allowed her to in the past. She is pretty competent, I was impressed! We made these great little vegan chocolate chip cookies from our favorite recipe. They were delicious!

Under the Sea!

Today was a great day to visit the aquarium....especially since it was a free admission day! yay! We checked out all kinds of sea creatures, from jellyfish to sharks. It's always a fun day there.

Melons...

Lola has been asking to plant cantaloupe for a long time. I decided today would be the day, but the problem was we had no prepared garden bed space left. The melon seeds required 4' spacing and we have a tiny, tiny yard. But I didn't want to let her down so we made a new garden space today. It wasn't easy to dig out the grass, but it's worth it to see if we're successful. I hope it's not too late in the season, though...I wish we would have started a month or two ago.
We worked all day and got it done. We even threw in a couple of corn seeds (kernels) to see what would happen! Next week, we need to get some peas going and our sweet potatoes.

Reptiles, oh my!

Today we went to the zoo with a friend to check out the insect house and the reptiles. We learned a bunch about snakes, spiders and bees! Too bad there were not a chrysalis to be found in the butterfly garden...we were too late for that.

Wanna sleepover?

Today, Lola made invitations to her friends for a pretend sleepover party. She can't wait for the day when this party will stop being the pretend party that she fantasizes about and become reality!! Anyway, on her invitation, she listed the items that she thought her friends should bring: slippers, sleeping bag and pajamas! So cute.

Tulip Town!

While in Washington, we took a trip to Tulip Town. We barely made it while the tulips were in bloom...they only bloom for about 3 weeks! Most tulip farms had already cut their blooms, but Tulip Town still had some fields that were uncut.
Tulips are huge in the Skagit Valley. In the mid 1920's there was an embargo placed on bulb imports by the United States government, so many growers in Holland began to send family members and friends to the US to establish farms and possible growing locations. Many of the Dutch growers had heard of the success in Washington State and came to the Pacific Northwest, settling mostly in Lynden, Washington. After discovering that Lynden winters were not suited for bulb growing, they began checking into the success they had heard about in Skagit Valley, about 30 miles south of Lynden.
The fields are beautiful. Too difficult to describe in words. The contrast of bright colors were like nothing we had ever seen!

Our trip to Washington state

We went to Washington for a week and stayed on one of the islands off the coast for most of our trip. We rented a house with a huge front yard that was close to the beach, which provided a ton of opportunities for learning about the local wildlife, both land and water-bound.

The beaches there are clearly far more "untouched" than any beach I have ever visited. For most of our beachcombing expeditions, we were the only people there. Of course, it wasn't exactly beach play weather. It was cold and it rained. A lot. Maybe it's different in the summer, but whatever the case may be, it was wonderful to see nature nearly completely unspoiled. There were treasures all over the beaches. Crabs, oysters, mussels, clams....not to mention the beautiful rocks, quartz and shells.

There was also a cute rabbit family living in our front yard. We saw them out and about everyday. We learned about some new birds...Lola learned about robins and red-shouldered hawks. We were also very lucky to see a bald eagle at the beach! She has seen some before, but she was too young to remember. Later on, while still at the beach, I tried to show her what I thought was a crane, Lola quickly pointed out to me that it was, in fact, a blue Heron and NOT a crane!

Scavenger Hunt!

We had just arrived to Washington, day 1 of our 7 day trip...The house and surroundings were beautiful! And what better way to get familiar with our new environment than doing a scavenger hunt?
We helped Lola to read the list of items that she needed to find and collect around the house and off she went! She was quite successful the first time around so we made a harder one next time!

Your name in Japanese....

We discovered this fun little website....it translates your name to Japanese. Lola had a lot of fun with this and enjoyed copying the Japanese characters. She did every name in our family!

Millipedes in the garden!

Here is a fine example of why I love homeschooling....opportunities for little ones to learn are literally everywhere! Their brains are are like little sponges and they just love information. They are keen and smart as whips. It's not till we get older that complacency sets in...environmental factors fog our desire for learning. But with children, it's still all pure and bright. Call me sappy, but I'm having a great time learning right alongside with Lola.
Here's a new specimen we learned about today. I snapped a photo of this member of the arthropod family, wandering on our front path, just a few feet from our garden. Other family members include spiders and crustaceans.
Millipedes are really helpful in gardens because they prey on common garden pests. I was really happy to run into one and placed him right back in the garden where he belongs as soon as his photo session was over. I assume he was displaced temporarily because I had just recently transplanted my failing gardenia bush to the backyard.

Lola's Lemonade Stand

We've been learning a bit about coins and their value lately, so I thought it would be fun to have a lemonade stand. Lola's been asking for one for soooo long. There's actually more involved in having one than I anticipated, so today we staged a practice round.
We made the lemonade, the cookies and the lovely sign, but we just invited our friends and didn't actually collect money. Our original intent for the practice round was to have a bowl of spare change that the children could take coins, learn how to count them out and "pay" for their purchases...but that didn't happen. We were so involved with the making of the products and the presentation that we didn't actually get around to the financial aspect of it!! Oh well! We've done so many workbook exercises and games lately that I feel like the concept was well understood all the same...and soon we'll do it again for real.

The bay

We were going to do something related to St. Patrick's Day, but, in the end, it was so hot today that we decided to head down to the bay. It was surprisingly cold once we got there. There was a great information board describing all the wildlife in the bay. We played at the playground for a while then walked over to the bay beach. The water looked and smelled a little...er...funny, so we didn't actually get in the water, although there was another family who were totally swimming.