The Cult of Apple

In an effort to further indoctrinate our children in the Apple ideology, we took our FunSchoolers on a field trip to the Apple Store. Granted, given that my children live in a home with, ahem, an Apple product or ten, there wasn't much work to be done on my crew. However, there are some in our group who have not yet drunk the Apple-flavored Kool-Aid. What better way to convince a parent that she needs to buy an iMac than to let her kids play with one for an hour and a half and let the kids fall in love with it? Who can say no to a child begging for a $1,700 computer? Sneaky, sneaky, Mr. Jobs.


We could choose from one of four projects...video, text, music or photo. We had the kids make a stop action video with props they brought from home. Very cool!

 The big kid in this next photo is Adam, an Apple mind control expert  Store employee. He had as least as much fun working on this as the kids did. He was so great with them that my neighbor suggested we hire him to entertain the children this summer.

Indoctrination aside, this was a great field trip. In addition to giving each child a DVD of their project and a certificate, they got free t-shirts (sans location tracking...I checked).  

I have tried in vain to upload one of the projects but Blogger is having trouble with video tonight. Trust me when I tell you it very cool...as long as you don't play it backwards. 

Learning about Bernoulli's Principle And Flight

Have I mentioned that I really love Oak Meadow? The enrichment activities are so great. Take our lesson on Bernoulli's Principle and the Principles of Flight, for example. We had a textbook lesson that explained Bernoulli's Principle and its relation to flight, and then OM had Thing 3 experimenting with paper airplanes to gain a concrete understanding. He told me today that it was one of the best days he's had this year. But then, who doesn't love playing with paper airplanes?

Some days are good math days...

...and some days aren't. I've finally learned that it's better to let go of math on the bad math days and move on to something else.

It was a bad math day but an excellent day for flower arranging. Thing 4 spent a great deal of time carefully choosing flowers and greenery from our backyard and making flower arrangements. This was one of her favorites.

It made the bad math day a lot less frustrating.

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?

Kidipede

Our OM 3 curriculum directed me to this fantastic reference site today. Kidipede is an online encyclopedia covering topics in history, science and math. It's a great resource. Check it out!