School's Out For Summer!

We finished our study of Antarctica, and our school year, on July 2nd.  We didn't have an Antarctic meal to conclude our study, as Spam or whatever canned foods the scientists visting Antarctica take with them didn't sound too yummy.  Raw fish, seal, and penguin didn't sound that appetizing either.  It was fun to read about them however.  We rented Eight Below from Netflix and the kids watched that a couple of times, as well as an IMAX movie about Antarctica, which they didn't like that much for some reason.

One of the experiments we did this week was feeling the difference between our hands in ice water with and without a layer of 'blubber'.  Our 'blubber' was a sandwich bag full of Crisco vegetable shortening.  We were all pretty surprised at how well the layer of fat kept our hands warm while our un-blubbered hand froze quite quickly.

Nevermind the peanut butter covered face!

For another experiment, we froze water in sandwich bags to make iceburgs and then floated them in water to see how much of our iceburgs floated above and below water.  Beacause of my experience of watching Titanic umpteen times as a teenager, and because of the boys' experience of pouring over Titanic information books, we all knew that very little of the iceburg was visable from the surface, but it was fun for the boys to create their own iceburgs.

This sweet girl was happy to play in her bouncy seat while we did our school stuff.  She's turning out to be quite the content little girl a lot of the time.

And so dang cute as well.

We also made penguins from plates and paper.  Christopher chose not to do this craft, but the little guys aren't too cool for things like this yet.

Matthew was ready to run off and play here.  Showing his teeth is about all he had time for before he was off.  I guess I'm pretty lucky that I got him to pose at all and I'll take any sort of smile I can get.

Matthew also finished up his year of first grade.  Here he is with the time line that he added to all year long as he read stories from his Bible reader.  I still find it amazing that he learned to read on my watch.

Oh yah, this is pretty neat.  This is a chart of Christopher's geography knowledge.  The first number is how many countries he could label in the first week of school.  The second number is how many he labeled this week.  I didn't give him a list to use either time.  He did pretty awesome in my opinion.  We didn't study the location of a lot of the countries in Europe, Asia and Africa so the number may seem low, but he got almost all of the ones we did study!

So we have four weeks off of school for a summer break before we start back up on August 2nd.  I'm so excited about learning about the time period of Creation to the Greeks next year for school!