Friday Wrap-Up ~ Week 8

It has been an exhausting week. However, it was a good week. This was our first week with our full dance schedule included into our normal schedule. So far, that is going smoothly. Little Red Riding Hood has dance lessons for 2.5 hours twice a week. She is in the dance studio's Tween Company. Tom Sawyer is taking 2.5 hours per week and is considered to be a part-time student in the Tween Company. They are in classes at the same time so everything is streamlined. The only appointments that are causing me stress right now are the ones at 1pm or in the mornings. I am not ready to be done teaching school and feeding lunches in time to be on the road for 1 pm appointments. Luckily, we only have one day each week that we have a standing 1 pm appointment. I am really struggling to keep the infrequent appointments to later in the day. Goldilocks' school is not on board with my plans at all. Without consulting me, the school keeps making appointments for the middle of the morning. I told them I am trying to educate in the mornings, but they don't take my homeschooling seriously. Hopefully, if I cancel/reschedule enough appointments, they will figure it out.

Chinese Dinner ~ We made egg rolls for the first time this week. They were much easier than I expected them to be and came out nicely. We had some wrappers left over and made apple fritters the next day. Yum! Our Chinese dinner was our last activity with the book, The Cricket in Times Square.

What happens when your family's tooth fairy is a scientist? Little Red Riding Hood lost four teeth in the past few weeks. The tooth fairy has been working overtime around here. She is a science minded tooth fairy that doesn't want to miss any educational opportunities. So she set up a science experiment for the children. What happens when you soak baby teeth in containers of either water, orange juice, vinegar, or soda? It isn't pretty, folks.

Day One

Day three ~ coke tooth very discolored and vinegar tooth kind of chalky

Day 5 ~ vinegar tooth has no more enamel and coke tooth very discolored

We decided to see if mouth wash would clean up the teeth. In just 5 hours our baby teeth looked like this. I was amazed at how improved they were. I still would not advice soaking your teeth in any soda or vinegar!

 

Frederick Law Olmsted and Central Park ~ I do love Central Park and New York City in general. I hope I get to share it with my children during their childhoods. Tim has been to NYC twice, once as a baby and the other when he  was granted the trip by a wish organization for medically-fragile kids. Hopefully, we will get there in the next five years. Between the Melendy series (The Saturdays) and The Cricket in Times Square, we have talked a lot about NYC. I decided to do a mini study on Frederick Law Olmsted and Central Park. I found the official website for Central Park to be helpful, and there are lots of documentaries on YouTube about Olmsted. We also have a Cobblestone magazine about Olmsted. After looking over all of our resources and watching clips of people enjoying Central Park, we decided to design our own dream park. Each of the children designed a park that would have enough activities that one could spend the entire day there. I couldn't help but get in on the action, too. We had a grand time day dreaming about all that we would include ~ wave pools, duck ponds, statue gardens, beaches, fruit forests and on and on.

September 11 ~ We did not watch any documentaries to commemorate the event this year. Part of my overall plan for this year is to keep trauma and drama to a minimum. Our family needs to heal and feel more secure. We did, however, read the sweet book, The Little Chapel That Stood. This book covers the topic in a gentle way.

Physics ~ We covered lesson two in our physics program, Real Science-4-Kids. We learned about force, energy and work. We conducted a fun experiment with a slinky and some fruit to see how force and energy create work. We wrote down a hypothesis of which fruit would do the most work. Then we weighed our fruit. Next, we tested how much work each fruit did by how far it pulled down a few rings of a slinky.

Frugal Living ~ I really needed a new pair of sneakers and hadn't purchased a pair of shoes of any kind in nearly two years. Since I want to start walking during the kids' dance classes, a new pair of shoes was a must. So I found a pair on sale that was comfortable and then noticed that there was a mark on one of the sneakers. It was a small mark, like spilled oil or grease from the factory. Normally, I wouldn't care at all about such a thing. However, I asked for a discount, since it was damaged, and am so glad I did. They knocked an additional $10 off the sale price. What a sweet deal!

Blessings, Dawn