Posted by Cindy on September 7, 2007
Studying Ancient Greece has been so much fun! We could’ve spent many more days lingering in the Greek hillsides, but it’s time to move on to Ancient Rome. Here are some highlights from our week.
On top of the regular reading about Ancient Greece, map work, timelines and such, we did lots of hands-on activities, too. My kids gain so much more from the “exciting stuff”.
The philosopher Aristotle is known as the father of the scientific method. Thanks to JoAnn, we had a really fun and simple activity that taught the scientific method.
The Story of the World had a really fun sticker making project. We colored Greek symbols, then made our own sticker solution to paint on the back of the symbols. After it dried, all we had to do was lick and stick!
The kids made happy and sad drama masks and created their own play.
Math one day was spent finding patterns for square numbers, triangular numbers, oblong numbers, and gnomon. My worksheets came from a Teacher Created Materials unit on Ancient Greece. You can probably do a quick search on the web for some free worksheets. I bought my book for a quarter at a homeschool sale. I wouldn’t recommend buying it unless you can find it as cheap as I did. Almost all the activities seemed to center around the gods and goddesses of Ancient Greece. That’s not something I wanted our family to focus on. But, I did find a few things worth adding to the unit, so my quarter wasn’t wasted! 
And we made Baklava. Yummy!
Posted by Cindy on
We are SO pleased with the first edition of the Westward Gazette! I bought a $20 software program from WalMart called Perfect Pro Office that made our computer work simple. (Word Perfect is the only office-type program that came on my computer and it stinks for projects.)
The newsletter includes a story or journal entry from each child that they wrote in August, a Bible verse we’ve been memorizing, an August weather wrap-up, a brief review of our unit study and some fun experiments we did, plus a book review written by Mahayla. (I’ll admit that I did most of the typing this time around. We were getting used to the new software and I was trying to teach them how to add clipart and pictures, so I didn’t want to overwhelm them with the typing. Next month, they’ll take over more of the work.)
We’ve all decided that a monthly newsletter is a fun idea. I hope all the relatives who get bombarded with them think it’s a good idea, too!
Posted by Cindy on September 5, 2007
Grandma, read no further!
Here’s an idea from the Holidays Around the Year book that we did as part of our seasonal Friday lesson last week.
We learned the science behind suminagashi art (marbling paints) and created beautiful card covers. Inside the kids have written letters to both sets of grandparents for Grandparent’s Day. We finished them off with some raffia decoration and, voila, a great keepsake for the grandparents (and a nice science and writing lesson for school!)
**Editing to add: I bought a marbling ink set several years ago that has lasted me forever. That’s what we used. You can find something similar here. I’m sure you can make your own inks, but I haven’t been successful finding a recipe on the internet. If you find one, I’m sure others would appreciate you passing it along in the comments!
Posted by Cindy on
Here are several great links for chromatography experiments! I think we’ll dive into the candy experiment next.
Why Do Leaves Change Colors? Go down a bit for the chromatography experiment
Chromatography Forensic Science Experiment
Paper Chromatography
Paper Towel Chromatography
Candy Chromatography
Posted by Cindy on September 4, 2007
Our Fun Friday activity last week was an experiment from Science Projects For Holidays Throughout the Year on chromatography. That’a a big name for separating mixtures, or in this case pigments. As complicated as the word sounds, the experiment was really very easy.
We started with chromatography of a black water-soluable marker to get a good picture of how pigments are separated during the process. Black markers are made up of many other colors and they all show up brilliantly during the experiment.
Then, to tie the experiment in with autumn, we did the experiment with green leaves. Since they’ll soon be changing colors, we talked about photosynthesis, chlorophyll and the true pigments of leaves. The chromatography experiment allowed us to take the current green pigment and find out what other pigments were in the leaf. In other words, we were able to get a sneak peek as to what color the leaves will be in a few weeks! Unfortunately, we’ve been in a drought this year, so the leaves are rather dry. It took quite a bit of effort to get enough green rubbed onto our coffee filters for the experiment to work. Even though the results weren’t as brilliant as the markers, we were able to tell that the leaves we chose will be yellow this fall.
