Earth Day - April 22nd

We had a great Earth Day with our homeschool community! It was simple and thoroughly enjoyable -- being as the day was nice and everyone was up for an early season park day. But this couldn't be just any park day because of course it was Earth Day! We showed up with our gloves and garbage bags and after a little bit of playing we all walked the park and picked up trash. I would guess our little Earth Day get-together took out about 20 pounds of garbage from our neighborhood park! Very simple! :)

Geology Rocks!

Geology Rocks! was a great success! We posted to our homeschool group to see who would be interested in a geology class with us. We had six awesome, engaged and participating kids -- a great group for our little house. For day one, I had all the kids bring their magnifying glasses and I borrowed a rock kit from a fellow homeschool mom (another great reason to have your homeschool community -- sharing of materials). For this first class we examined the rocks which where divided into three categories; sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic. First we looked at metamorphic rocks and came up with a list of adjectives; we continued this on for each group of rocks. After, completing our observations of each group of rocks we talked about what we know about how rocks are formed and made some predictions about how we thought they we're formed. This was great because the kids were able to share what they knew (one girl knew metamorphic meant change from one thing to another and one boy knew all about how sedimentary rock was formed) with all of us -- I love these moments in homeschooling! :) Some of the kids made lists of all the adjectives we came up with and some didn't -- it was their choice. We also examined sand my sister brought to me from Virginia -- it's very different that our west coast sand. Class lasted about 1 hour and there was time and good weather for playing afterwards!