The black hole of homeschooling "stuff"

How is it that we do school at home, rarely take our books, etc. out of the house, yet we are always losing things?


"Go get your math books, please." "I can't find them." "What do you mean you can't find them?" "I mean they aren't on the shelf or table or in my room. I looked on the couch, in the playroom and even in the car. I can't find them anywhere." If I had back all the time I've spent looking for school books, my house would be clean and I'd never have dirty laundry in the hamper.


And pencils. What's with us not being able to keep up with pencils? In the course of our two years of homeschooling, I have purchased approximately 4,598 pencils, yet we can never find one when we get ready to do school. Are the children eating them? Today, Thing 3 resorted to doing math with a red ink pen because it was either that or a white board marker. The few pencils we manage to scrounge up always have broken lead and/or bad erasers.


I wonder if other homeschoolers have this experience or if we are just terribly, horribly disorganized? Feel free to comment. 

I love the outdoor classroom...

Yesterday was a beautiful day, so the kids and I headed to the park to take some pictures and just spend some time enjoying nature on a beautiful day. The ability to take advantage of days like yesterday is one of my favorite things about homeschooling.

We watched the squirrels.

We studied the rocks.

And we found a perfect example of phototropism, a term we studied earlier in the year.

We took a class picture.

And we enjoyed the beautiful colors of the season, (and tried to stay away from that huge bumblebee in this bush).

There's just something irresistible about rocks in a stream...

...and sticks.

"Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better." ~ Albert Einstein

Volcanoes!

A couple of weeks ago, we studied volcanoes in OM 3. I am fascinated by volcanoes. As it turns out, so are my children. I purchased this volcano kit for our demonstration. That's art and science rolled into one! My kind of activity!

We forgot to add the red food coloring the first time. Still, it was an impressive eruption.

The boy had the idea of recreating Pompeii...with army men and Native Americans. There were army men and Native Americans at Pompeii, weren't there?