Back to School

The summer has flown by unbelievably fast and both public and private schools in our county have been in session for at least a week now. We started up with homeschooling this past Monday, and so far it is going just swimmingly! Gabriel is using Sonlight's Core B (with some substitutions for religion) and John is using the PreK 4/5.

So far our favorite part of the day is definitely tea time. Every day at 3:30pm, the kids pick out a herbal tea, and we sit down with our mugs and a baked goodie while I read one of Gabriel's books aloud. Right now we are a few chapters into Charlotte's Web and all the kids are enjoying it.

On Thursday we did our first science "experiment", which involved magnets.

His first task was to discover which objects will stick to magnets.

For each object he marked his hypothesis, and then the result.

Then he gathered cans from our pantry to see if they were aluminum or steel (magnets will not stick to aluminum).
To our disappointment, all our cans were steel.

Finally, we created a "sock" game by cutting out many sock-shaped
pieces of construction paper and adding a paper clip to each one.

The boys each held a magnet attached to a length of sturdy thread, and used these to fish for the socks.

Whoever had the most matching socks at the end was the winner.
I think Christian is a winner for managing to stay in his pajamas all day long. ;-)