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!

Australia

G'day mates!  We had a beaut time studying Aussie for two weeks.   In fact, it's been requested that we take a vacation there someday.  Yah, we'd better start saving up!

It was fun to learn about the animals there that we don't see very often here, even in zoos.  We made koala bears out of peanut butter, powdered sugar and cocoa, adding chocolate chips for eyes, arms and legs.  The boys thought it was fun, and although their globs of peanut butter/sugar mixture might not have looked quite like koalas, they still tasted good.

Our koala bear treats in the making.  Mine, Gabriel's and Matthew's.

We rolled them in cocoa per the instructions, but I think they looked better without it. 

My kids already had some knowledge of Australia, whatever they picked up from watching Finding Nemo about a hundred times in the last few years.  They did recognize the Sidney Opera House, and it was fun to build a paper model of it.  "Laa-aaa-aaa-aaa," always sings in my head whenever I think of it.  Yes, I've also watched Finding Nemo one hundred times (or at least parts of it). 

We finished our study of the land down under with a dinner of Australian Meat Pie, Damper Bread, Grilled Sweet Potatoes (not really Australian, but I did cook them on the "barbie"), strawberries and kiwi (an Australian fruit), and finished dinner off with some Pavlova (for which according to Google there is an ongoing argument about whether it originated in New Zealand or Australia).  The meal was delicious and even Matthew said, "Everything is better than I expected."  It was nice to have a meal that no one complained about at all, from start to finish.  I think the fact that I made the dessert first might have had their attention elsewhere. 

The sweet potatoes on the "barbie".

We've found a new way to encourage Leah to try eating new things that she otherwise doesn't want to...with baby food.  We now sit Anna at the dinner table with us and feed her baby cereal mixed with fruit.  Leah loves it and wants to finish off what Anna doesn't eat.  "Eat your dinner until Anna's done and then you can have the rest."  And it works.  I'm not sure what we'll do when Anna finishes off the whole jar...I hadn't thought that far ahead when I started letting Leah have the leftovers.  In the meantime, Leah's eating a ton of veggies that she was starting to fight against eating before. 

Yummy...Pavlova

We also really enjoyed reading beautiful picture books about the Great Barrier Reef and we found a Netflix DVD about it as well.  Christopher was also excited that an episode of Curious George that they watched on PBS was about a coral reef too.  Perfect timing, right?

Next stop, Antarctica!

Russia.

So, we've traveled to Russia for the past two weeks.  Whenever I used to think of Russia, I thought of the bad Russian mob guys from movies.  Pretty dumb, right? 

We learned a lot of interesting things about Russia and read a lot of great little stories from the library.  It's amazing that after 15 years of schooling, I didn't even know some basic geography facts about Russia, like it's twice as big as the second biggest country in the world (Canada), and the west coast to the east coast of Russia covers eleven time zones.  Or even what permafrost is or what the difference between the USSR and Russia even was.

Or more likely, I did learn things like that but didn't care enough to remember?  Either way, I enjoyed learning lots of things about Russia over the past two weeks with Christopher. 

Some of the things we did:

Tried out some basic ballet moves...none of us were very good at it.

Colored Faberge egg coloring pages.

Listened to Tchaikovsky.

Calculated the amount of clams a walrus eats in one year...1,095,000 clams!

Made permafrost using jello, soil, and ice.

The jello is the layer of ground that stays frozen even in summer.  The soil is the unfrozen layer above the permafrost.  The ice is the snow that melts in the spring.

Below, the "snow" melted and the dirt is now mud above the frozen ground (jello) underneath.  In other words, Russia is muddy in the spring and summer where there is permafrost.

We also made a set of Matryoshka Dolls.  They are usually wooden dolls but we made ours out of cardstock.

The boys posing with their hand guys.

The boys really enjoyed reading about the animals that live in the arctic region of Russia.  Polar bears, seals, caribou, arctic foxes, lemmings, etc.  We read a Magic School Bus arctic book and that was their favorite of the many books we read. 

And finally, to celebrate the end of our Russian unit, we had a feast.  It was yummy.

We ate bierocks, babkas, smetana mushrooms and pirog.

Bierocks (Runzas aka Meat Pie)

Smetana Mushrooms

Babka (Russian style mashed potatoes)

Pirog (Russian apple pie)

Matthew is continuing to practice reading and other than that, he's basically done for the school year.  I'll be reviewing his addition and subtraction math facts with him over the summer as well.

Gabriel has asked me about a bajillion times to teach him how to read, so we are slowly working on that.  He's so funny in that he really emphasizes each sound way too much when he tries to put them together.  He is trying way too hard but I know he just wants to be able to read like his brothers.  When we go to the library, he refuses to get anything but the fiction chapter books or the non-fiction books like his brothers and then "reads" the books by pointing at each word and pretending to read.  Silly boy.

Next week in school, we will start our unit on Austrailia.  More school updates then, mate!