Week in Review - Frogs Jumping, A Meal Plan, and the Comfort of Homeschooling

We had a fairly quiet week - busy but quiet.  We have been struggling with making some decisions about changing swim teams so that has been difficult and quite the drama, but overall, our school days have been quiet.  We didn't do any really fun artsy hands-on projects this week - just a lot of read-aloud time in history and independent work for the children in their other subjects. 

One of the things that struck me this week was just how comfortable my youngest son often looks while he is doing his independent work.  Whether he's sitting by the fireplace writing a paragraph for Ancient History Writing Lessons... 

or laying stomach-down on the couch in the school room doing his spelling lesson...

or reclined on the sofa in the living room reading his current assigned novel with his workboxes stacked beside him, Duncan always seems to seek out the comfort while doing his schoolwork. 

While my older two children were at youth group at church, I visited our local library and so enjoyed seeing all of the little Christmas trees on display.

Of course, I thought the one my son made was the very cutest with all of his adorable sweets-themed Polymer-clay ornaments!  So far, he has two bids on his tree for the silent auction library fundraiser (OK - I admit it, one of the bids was from me!). 

In science with my boys this week, we focused on the parts of an atom and the different electrical charges of each part.  I dug out a really fun "frog-jumping static electricity hands-on exercise" that I made when my children were much younger to use in our hands-on demonstration about positive and negative charges.

After they were done making the frogs jump to the balloon over and over, they wrote about the demonstration in a mini-book for their Chemistry lapbooks.

Amber is finishing up Module 6 in Biology and has been studying all week.  Module 6 has definitely been a challenge for her with concepts like cellular respiration and organelle functions.  She did discover a handy study aid for her iTouch this week - Jason Wentworth FlashCards.  There are lots of flash card apps and I certainly can't recommend this one above all of the others but my daughter has been enjoying studying her biology facts in this manner. 

On the homemaking front, I managed to make a meal plan this week...and actually follow it all week!  Yeah for me!  After my desperation trip to Moe's on Monday for lunch with the kids, I hunkered down and made a meal plan relying HEAVILY on my crock-pot (a homeschool mom's best friend).  Since keeping everybody fed with homemade meals is a constant struggle for me around here, I was proud of myself for making a meal plan, sticking to it, and NOT running out to Little Caesar's for pizza this week!

That's our Week in Review!  If you would like to read about what other homeschoolers were doing this week, check out the Weekly Wrap-Up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.