Happy Halloween!

Spiders, a Snake, and an Owl

The boys newest facination is with all things spider. So I put together a little unit just in time for Halloween. These are not my favorite of all God's creature but I hate to miss a learning opportunity!


Here are some of the books we used this week.






We learned about several different kinds of spiders and what kinds of webs they use. As well as, how they use camouflage, and how beneficial they are to humans and the environment.



Conventiently enough, the library had a presentation scheduled with our local nature center and the guests of honor were...spiders! I love those kind of "coincidences"!

And just for fun..... a snake.

and an owl.

We also used several of the lapbooks components from Homeschool Share.

Spider Room has some fun spider activites and quizzes and you can find lots of spider info on Spiderz Rule.

More Fall Fun...

We decided to try our hand at some Fall Tie-Dye shirts. I think we will try this project again in the summer so we can work outside! They turned out pretty cute.


Rider's Shirt


Noah's Shirt

Micah's Shirt

I found some cute games and craft projects over at The Ramblings of a Crazy Woman. She has lots of great ideas over there! If you havent visited her blog, you should definitely check it out.

This is a game that all the kids enjoyed. It was quick and easy to make and inexpensive too, which is always a plus!

All you need are some ping pong balls and colored markers. The object of the game is to bounce the "eyeballs" into the pumpkin or in Rider's case- to throw them all over the house! Its harder than you might think...unless you play Rider's version. Ha!

The boys have laughed and laughed about this one. It was another idea from Jenn's blog.

Josh's turned out perfect --right down to his purple pants!

We also made these pumpkin and ghost decorations for the front yard. They were so easy and turned out sooo cute.

These are a few of the fun fall things we have done so far. This is one of my favorite times of the year. I love the colors, smells, and temperature of fall! I have a few more ideas for this last week of October and then....on to Thanksgiving!

Corn Mazes and Pumpkin Carving

We had a great time at the Corn Maze. You had to make your way through the maze and get 5 different stamps to form a pumpkin face to get a bag of goodies and be entered to win a free I-Pad.

There was also a hay slide which the kids really enjoyed. As you can see, there were threats of rain and thunderstorms but fortunately the storm came before and after our 3 hours there. Yeah!!!!

Everyone did some carving and painting but some how I only managed to get pictures of Noah doing the hard work!

Here is Micah's....

Noah's...

and Rider's....

Here they all are on the front porch... I Love Fall!!!!

Human Body...God gave us a brain!

This week we started a unit on the Human Body. Each week we will be focusing on a specific area and this week we learned all about the brain. We are using this book from Teacher Created Materials and when we are finished we will have a paper replica of our bodies.

Each week we will add body parts to our life size mural. Micah decided he would volunteer for the tracing while Noah took the pictures.

These are a few of the books we read to learn more about this amazing part of our bodies.

We finished up the week with some fun experiments.

This first one is called "Reading Rainbows" . We read the words on the list as fast as we could and then we read the list again saying the color that the word was written in. Which one is easier to do?

Explanation: Different areas of the brain have different jobs and it sends the info to two different places so your brain gets confused. The dominant part of your brain is the part that understands language so it is easier to name the color that the word spells out.

We tried "Think Fast, Act Faster" to see how long it takes for our bodies to react to messages from our brain.

And of course, we had to try to spin like a top and learn about how our bodies balance themselves...all in the name of science!!!

Micah taking his turn. We had to try this one about 10 times to make sure our research was accurate. ** smiles**

We also learned that not only do we have a dominant hand but that we also have a dominant eye. The boys were also very interested to find out that the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice versa.

This is the book we are using for a lot of the experiments we will be doing over the entire unit. It has some great ideas with easy to gather materials which is a must around here!

I picked this book up at the library and we have had a lot of fun with it. Some of the tests include....

• Optimist/Pessimist
• Introvert/Extrovert
• How observant are you?

We also checked out some optical illusions online and talked about how and why they work.

We had a great week and the boys are looking forward to next weeks topic....the heart!