Weeks in Review - Icelandic Art, Cutting Up Dead Animals, and Ancient India

I'll start this two weeks in review with a little dissection humor from my daughter, Amber.

Why is an earthworm so mean?

Because it's heartless!

It's funny and it's true!  Earthworms do not have hearts, they have aortic arches - I just learned that this week.  Learning new things all of the time is one of my very favorite parts of homeschooling!

Amber performed two dissections this Friday - the earthworm and the crayfish.  I feel so blessed that a dear friend of mine is working through Apologia Biology this year with her son so her son and Amber are doing all of the dissections together.  They both did an incredibly thorough job on their dissections and encouraged one another throughout the process.

Definitely the most exciting news of the past two weeks - Amber and Mason were both so unbelievably excited that their art project took first place in the art contest at the Edge Games!  Their artwork earned Team Iceland 60,000 points!  Wow!  They worked so hard on their giant painting and I was happy to see that their hard work paid off for them.  The Edge Games were held three Fridays in February for the junior high ministry (Edge) at our church.  Amber and Mason had an INCREDIBLE time at the games!

Mason and Duncan have both been doing hands-on activities to go along with their science textbooks.  Mason investigated the impact of adding salt to water on whether an egg can float or not.

He also investigated using different "motors" on the motion of little cardboard boats.  The activity required that unsoftened water be used, though, so Mason had to bring the water in from our outside spigot.  After bringing in two buckets of water from the snowy outside, he commented that he was thankful for the running water in our home!  The cardboard boat powered by a small piece of soap won the race.  None of the other "motors" - a piece of paper toweling, chewing gum, or no motor - caused the boats to move at all.

Sometimes what my children think is REALLY fun surprises me.  I was surprised by how much Duncan enjoyed the chapter in his science text about weights and measures.  We did the weighing and comparing activities suggested in the lesson and then added quite a few more weighing activities!  Throughout the process, Duncan kept telling me how much fun it was to weigh things and he was so interested in comparing the weights of different objects to each other.  What I thought was going to be a dull chapter turned out to be Duncan's favorite science chapter yet!

In history we finished the weeks on ancient China and ancient India.  We've watched several interesting videos to go along with our history studies, all of which I would recommend.

• Discovery School Ancient China:  Journals Through History
• Ancient India:  A Journey Back in Time, Lost Treasures of the Ancient World
• Families of India.

For the remainder of the year, we will be studying ancient Greece and Rome.  After a full year of studying ancient history, I am starting to look forward to early American history next year!

That was our two Weeks in Review!  To read about what other homeschoolers have been doing, visit Kris at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers for the Weekly Wrap-Up!