Makin' Changes and Makin' Rain

After the long Christmas break, this week back in school went surprisingly better than I had planned. My little brother, S, will be homeschooling with us from here on out now which brings along a few changes. He uses the Abeka DVD program and we do not. I beat my head trying to figure out how we could fit in all of the things my kids were doing plus the things he was doing. There was no way I could do it all and still keep my sanity! (We use Abeka too, but only for math and language. For history, Bible, and science, we use other curriculums. ) My dad has already paid for the entire year of Abeka DVD, plus S's grades are all sent stright to Abeka. (I keep track of my kids' grades myself.) Anyway, I didn't want to mess up S's records for this school year or anything, so I had to come up with some sort of compromise.

I think we've got a plan though. Since my husband does MFW Bible in the evening with my kids, we just get in the Abeka Bible lesson with S through DVD in the mornings. We are taking a break with our Apologia science (this was the hardest part for my kids because they loved learning about the planets) to finish up S's Abeka science with him through the DVD. We also do S's Health, Safety, and Manners Abeka lessons with him and he does MFW History with us. Soon, S's Abeka history lessons will start up and I think we will have to split up at that point and S do his history lessons with the DVD teacher while I do MFW history with J and A. I don't know...we'll think more about that obstacle when we come to it I guess. 

Now for what we did this week....

In history, we learned about Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. Sadly, we did not get around to picking the fake seeds out of the cotton balls though like we had planned, but some things just fall by the way side I guess. The kids did have some fun this week "making rain" in their science experiment though.


The steam coming from the boiling water represented a cloud.



The ice cubes in the dish represented cold air.



Warm, moist air (the steam/cloud) met up with the cold air (the ice cubes)...

...Thus creating "raindrops" .

And the "raindrops" begin to fall

All in all, it was a good week :)