Our First Week of School

I am so excited about this school year!  The Academic and I started "school" on Monday and it has been a great week.  Starting school means that I pick a novel or other literature for us to study and plan science and history lessons.  

We also started doing math activities from Family Math and the Academic is reading The Life of Fred Pre-Algebra with Biology in addition to his work in ALEKS.  This is math on the first day of school.  He is doing an algebra problem with those cubes and beans!

We are using the Kingfisher History Encyclopedia as a spine for our history studies and reading other literature to round it out.  We'll be doing related activities and writing.  I will also be organizing our Earth science studies to connect with history.

For science we are using a text book supplied by the charter school we have enrolled with.  I have some other resources, but I don't have as much confidence with science.  The text book includes demonstration activities and experiments.  We started with chapter 8 because it fit the pre-history unit that I had planned. Here we are on the first day doing an introductory activity.

First we put equal amounts of water into two clear cups.  Then, the Academic added salt to one of the cups. Next, he added food coloring to the saltwater cup.

When we poured the salt water into the plain water, we could see the green salt water sink to the bottom. The top layer was still mostly clear and the bottom was green.

Ok... that was what was supposed to happen.  The first time we tried it, the salt water just mixed evenly with the plain water.  The whole thing turned an even shade of green.  So, we tried again and added more salt to the salt water (a LOT more) and it worked.  This illustrated how the more dense parts of Earth sink to the bottom.  We're learning about Earth's layers and plate tectonics.

We're currently studying plot and character development by reading Boy of the Painted Cave and working through questions and activities that I put together. (I am hoping to have this unit completed and ready for sale very soon.)  The Academic is also doing Vocabulary from Classical Roots A and Easy Grammar 6+.

Within the next couple of weeks we'll be adding guitar lessons and Rosetta Stone Spanish lessons.  The Academic will also be participating in classes one day per week and group history/science activities that complement our studies.  

It's going to be a good year!