Solar System Science

I love the six weeks of science during our second quarter! It's so much fun!

This week we built a proportional solar system outside. We used different sizes of balls to represent the planets & measured them out on that nice long roll of black paper I bought. Ray had so much fun helping me write out the measurements at home that he wanted to find out how long the black paper would have to be to reach the nearest star.

In keeping the proportions with the planets in our model, the roll of paper would have to be 63 MILES LONG just to reach the nearest start to the sun!!!

I joined one of the classes while they were outside putting together the model. One of the lovely moms was the sun at the beginning!

I'll have to post pictures next week - we'll be building a solar model again, only on paper & the kids will be able to take it home!

Medieval History Projects

This our history for Classical Conversations Cycle 2 begins with the medieval period. Studying medieval history lends itself to all kind of awesome projects.

A couple of weeks ago we had been reading about the Haggia Sophia, which was the largest church in Constantinople, & the mosaics within. I decided a fun project would be to create our own "mosaics."

I had only planned on the girls making them, but, Clay really wanted to make one as well. He did a great job! On the other hand, my oldest became frustrated & ended up throwing her gems across the room. Needless to say, she didn't get to join us for the project after that.

In order to make our mosaics we used old large glass jars, gemstones from the Dollar Tree & my hot glue gun. (this was a constantly supervised activity)

The kids loved it & had so much fun! Because we used jars we can also use them as pretty candle holders.

For another project I was inpsired by another homeschool friend & the kids made rice krispie treat "castles."

They really ended up looking a little more like mounds, but, the kids loved it & it gave them something for their presentation at CC the next day!