Week Six, Seven and a Note on Organization

I'm glad I started the school year early because it's been hard with all the appointments (speech for Howler is now twice a week plus all the extra OB appointments here at the end) to do everything I wanted to do. We're about three weeks behind on science, but oh well. They're enjoying it and that's what matters. We're still on schedule for basic work which I can't believe. Two months in and all I've had to shuffle is science. Oh, shuffle, here let me explain a bit better how our system works. I have a monster 2" binder with two sets of binder tabs, one for each of the older kids.

I put a week's worth of work under each tab, when this binder is full I am planned five weeks out. The girls have their own binders (color coded so they know immediately which is their's) I fill Sunday night. Since I have the days of each week separated by post-its, it's easy to move each day over to the tabs in their binders.

I've already stripped the binding off all the workbooks and three hole punched them so they are in the back of my monster binder. When I get down to one or two weeks prepped, I start shifting pages around to refill the vacant tabs.

It's been a serious time saver. I don't have to find all the workbooks, tab which page they are on, make sure no one skips pages (which always happens when working IN books), etc. They also know exactly what is expected of them for the week and in some cases happily do a week's worth of their independent work by Tuesday.

Did I mention in my last school post how much I am LOVING REAL Science Odyssey?? Because seriously, I am LOVING this and so are the kids!

Crustaceans

Playing with rolly-pollies is one of my earliest memories. And I have to admit they are just as much fun as an adult as they were as a child. If you can't tell from the pictures the girls loved this science lesson!

It took a lot of convincing for them to release them.

One of our red claw crabs happened to meet an untimely death (no, not on purpose, but it did work well into our plans) so we got to look over his carcass as well.

Fish


We used my infrared thermometer to check the temperature of the water and fish so they could see that they were the same. We didn't expect the fish the think the laser sight was edible. They thought it was hilarious and have been teasing the fish with it all week.

Measuring fish in a tank was harder than expected, but what better time to teach about estimation. I don't advocate pulling fish out of a tank to measure and weigh. It stresses them out so estimation will do.

One of the books had a picture of a large walk through aquarium which caught Tamarin's attention. I wish we could go to the Oklahoma Aquarium, but right now my bladder is not up to road trips (haha). I'm lucky to make it thirty minutes before the baby starts bouncing on my bladder so an hour and a half road trip is just not in the cards. Dragging four kids into gas station toilets is NOT my idea of a good time.