Our Week so Far...

Our week is going well. It was hard for both the kids and I to wake up and be ready for back to school on Monday morning. The leisure mornings of Christmas vacation are now behind us. I am doing well with my New Year Resolution too so far. We shall see how I am doing say March or April.

Since Saturday I have spending a lot of my free time in the kitchen. Our dancing daughter has been having a lot of recurring upset stomachs. Our pediatrician ran some tests over the summer and they came back negative for celiac, thyroid and a wheat allergy. After doing some online research of my own I decided to try out a wheat/gluten free diet with her anyway. The whole family is doing it for 30 days. Dancer will most likely stay on it longer. She hasn't been complaining of stomach aches as of late. From the research I have done she may just have an intolerance and not an allergy. It is a total life style change for myself in the types of foods I prepare and where we dine. I thought the 30 days would give me time to come up with some healthy recipes that I could carry over for Dancer. It is hard because wheat is in everything that we eat.

We are still studying Ancient Egypt in history. Science we are learning about Force and other mechanics of Physics. Art we are studying Picasso and Mozart for Music appreciation. We are hoping to plan a Egypt wrap up night sometime toward the end of this month. I will share some pictures with many of you soon.

Blessings and Happy Wednesday,
Amy

Having Fun in Science

How many of you enjoyed Science in school. I particularly don't remember Science in elementary school. I had some good teachers in High school but the teacher I had for Chemistry was a teacher that spoke in a thick accent. It was very hard to understand him and he never really taught to the class. He just enjoyed solving equations. So the year I had Chemistry are known as the Mad Scientist years and I always thought Chemistry was just too hard of a subject to understand.

Now that I am teaching the kids elementary Physics this year we are having a little dose of Chemistry in our books this year. I am trying to make it fun and creative for them to understand. Here is a fun activity to share with all of you that we did this week....

The study of an Atom and learning the Elements

Just to add we did these activities on Tuesday afternoon after we had read in our Science books on Monday.

First we talked about the Periodic Table of Elements and reviewed some of the more common ones that they may have heard before such as helium. I had the kids find items in our home or outside that were made up of elements and we located them on the periodic table. Then I had them recreate the element hydrogen by standing in a circle each kid was either a proton, neutron or an electron. Then I had the kids do a matching game that I found. They matched the element name with the abbreviation and matched it where it is found in the environment. For instance, Chlorine CL is found in swimming pools. Here is a picture to share.

Next, I had the kids work together to pick out 8 elements from the chart to find out how many protons, neutron and electrons that each of them had and to record them. After using the internet to find the information we made a sugar cookie of what each of them looks like. The kids had lots of fun with this one.

We used Reeses Pieces. The orange colored ones were the protons, neutrons were yellow and the electrons brown.

I encouraged the kids just to talk in Science terms to help them get acquainted with the new terms that we were learning.

It worked! Aside from the sugar high Science was fun and non intimidating and less boring.

Have some fun and bake up some Atom cookies they are yummy!!!