I got the best book from Rainbow Resource. It is called Healthy Me and is by Michelle O’Brien-Palmer. It is for ages 5-8 and is just chock full of wonderful activities to do. It has sections on cleanliness, teeth, nutrition, exercise, and safety.

Yesterday we did an experiment with tomato soup. The girlies learned about microbes and hand washing. I rubbed their hand with a cotton swab, then rubbed that in some tomato soup in a low bowl. We put that in a ziploc baggie and watch it every day for 10 days. They say the second or third day you should see the microbes growing. We check it every day for a week and then throw it out.

Today we made soap. I got two bars of glycerin soap. The recipe calls for unscented but the store I went to was out of unscented. I bought muffin tin with heart shapes so we are making heart shaped soap. The girlies picked out lemon oil to scent the soap and the lady at the store (we love this store and they know our names!) gave the girls a tester of Freesia. So we have lemon and freesia soap.

I feel so oh..Little House on the Prairie-ish.

Here are some pictures of the process.

Beanie stirring the melting glycerin.

Goober stirring the melting glycerin.

Half of the amount we made cooling.

On a different topic. We use Story of the World for history. (thanks, sis!) I love it because it’s easy. The girlies love it because it is written in story form. They get coloring pages and maps to do. Here are some pictures of them doing their map work.

Beanie doing her map.

And Goober with her map.

We watched our science “video” this morning. I picked an animal we learned about to study further this week.

I’d like to make a unit study of the lion, but I need some ideas and suggestions. What do you do when you do a unit study? I’ll hit the library for books, use the internet for more information. Am I leaving anything out?

Of course we just started back to school after Christmas but so far it is going very well. The girlies were excited. Probably because is the first day back. I know it is a lot later than most returned but isn’t that the beauty of home-schooling? Life is allowed to happen as it desires and we get to hang on for the ride?

I was sharing with another homeschooling mom this evening how we had just gotten started and you should have seen her eyeballs pop.  I love not being schedule driven, or tied to someone else’s schedule, a school schedule or even another homeschooling family’s schedule.

We accomplished all I wanted to accomplish today. That makes it a success, right? I even managed to write a “what we’ll do each day” schedule.

As much as I know my loosey-goosey self with a great disdain for all things scheduled, I know I have accomplished the easy part. The hard part will be implementing it.

Here is what our schedule (and I use that term loosely!).

Monday………Homeschool Cooperative Day. This takes all day, and as President of the board I need to be there all day.

Tuesday………This will be our heavy schooling day. We will do Math, handwriting spelling, grammar, history, and Latin.

Wednesday…..Science, Math, Handwriting, review Latin. This is the lightest day because of AWANA in the evening.

Thursday………History color page/map and test, math, review Latin.

Friday……………Fun day. This will be our science experiment day, field trip day, art day and we’ll review Latin. Now the only thing that will happen every Friday is reviewing of Latin. The others will be as they come up.

Can someone help me, I’m trying to think of field trips to go on. We only have one museum in town and the girls have been there a lot already. I’m thinking of a FT to the library, maybe a fast food restaurant. (in non-peak times obviously!) What are some other things? I will be planning a weekend trip to a large city nearby for their wonderful museums. I plan on making it a couple of days worth of museums. I just thought we could tour the police department, sheriffs dept. Fire station.

For science we are going to be watching Planet Earth. I recorded it from The Discovery Channel and just love it. I watched the first on today.  We’ll do it in science tomorrow.  The girls might freak out a bit. They show predators and well they meet with success. I’ll have to explain that part before we get there.

The girls will get to pick an animal from the episode and we’ll study that this week. Next Wednesday we’ll pick a different animal to study. We will look up what we can in our Usborne Science Encyclopedia.  I know the one for tomorrow talks a lot about grass so we’ll learn more about that as well.

I’m excited too.

I thought I would share some scenes from our Christmas.

We had a lot of snow already then it started snowing Christmas Eve around midnight. It turned into a blizzard, and snowed all morning on Christmas day. We have truly been blessed to be inundated with snow.

The girlies in their Christmas Jammies

The girlies are working on the puzzle Beanie (the little one) got for Christmas from Goober, the older. (I can’t remember if I’m using real names or nicknames here…tee hee)

Beanie in the candlelight. I love this picture.

Goober in the candlelight.

Our centerpiece. If you look closely in the back you can see Dear Man’s hand.

One of the best gifts ever given!!!

Is it possible to post videos from photobucket here?