Skiving??

No the girls haven't been skiving - but I have : )
They have worked really hard with their work over the last two weeks, they've researched mountains and mountain ranges 

worked on fraction addition,

explored the differences between hard and soft water 

and practised their drawing.

Tulip has worked on her continents,

while Rose has been working with the sensorial equipment

and they've all done a mini unit on Acids and Alkali's. (full post on this later)

Meanwhile I've been painting, building and reorganising our school room and its nearly ready for the big reveal ......

Heritage History TOS Review

When the chance to review Heritage History came up I was really excited.

Why - because Heritage History have collected over 500 out of print history stories and reproduced them : )

I chose the British Middle ages CD to review - the CD contains 55 books covering medieval and early modern Europe and includes comprehensive histories, legends, biographies, historical fiction and adapted literature. Topics range from barbarian invasions, feudalism, medieval battles to church-state conflicts.

It is also jam packed full of additional resources including time-lines, maps, images, battles, era summaries and other study aids.

This is a fantastic product - you can search by reading level or genre and I really liked the overviews and images. 

Lilly and Sunflower both love to read so this is ideal for them - I downloaded the books onto kindle and left them to it. I also set it up on the PC in the school room and it gathered quiet a bit of attention there as well.

This is the first time we've used living history books (we've previously used both living math and science) and it's been a great hit in our house, history is now a leisure activity rather than a lesson.

Each CD is available for $24.99  (contains both pdf and e-Reader versions, so books can be printed, viewed on your computer or loaded to e-readers) and they have other titles on offer including; Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, British Empire and Young Readers 

Heritage History also have a collection of Classical Libraries CDs available for $19.99 each, covering Early America, Spanish Empire, Christian Europe and Modern Europe.

You can see what my crew mates thought at the TOS Blog.

Botany Week 6 - Nitrogen Cycle and Trees

This week we started with a look at the Nitrogen cycle 

I presented the cycle and then they each used the puzzle and talked through the process - they even had a 'nitrogen atom' around the board.

Then we had a good look at trees, how they grow, eat and breathe. I downloaded some great free posters from International Paper combined with a tree sample to explore.

With the information from the posters we were able to interpret all the differences in the growth rings. We finished off by taking a nature walk to identify and explore some local trees.

Space Group

We had a lovely day yesterday at our local Home Ed group. It was a space themed event so they made constellation viewers

and I did a play doh life cycle of a star (again)

but the real highlight was in the afternoon when the mobile planetarium came - I don't know what excited them more - the inflatable dome with the crawling tunnel or the fact the the 'night sky' inside moved : )

Types of Mountains

We continued with our mountain theme today. We used the Type of Mountains set from Montessori Print Shop combined with some play doh for hands on learning.

I started by getting the girls to make a Dome Mountain from play doh,

then progressed through the different types

and finished with Lilly and Sunflower doing a a matching exercise 

and sorting real mountains by their types.

Mountains in your living room

Schooling has been hit and miss this week due to a stomach bug doing its rounds with the girls - they are grumpy and just want to sleep and I'm exhausted from cleaning up the vomit : (


However Montessori Print Shop came to my rescue - they have just released a new work on mountains which made for a fun day. We started by building a mountain in our front room, labelling the parts,

creating a poster and a few group reads involving mountains (like Pika's tail)