Geology Day and Sensory Bins

 Last Friday we were lucky enough to attend geology day at Lava Beds National Monument. This was supposed to be just for school groups, but since I have somewhat of an in with the supervising ranger there we were able to tag along with one of the public school classes.

This year we are studying Earth science, however, we are several weeks away from the topic of geology.  But I felt the kids would get more out of a geology day if we knew what exactly geology was went over some of my well planned lessons ahead of time.  And since we found out we could go to geology day only 2 days beforehand, we did a last minute crash course in geology the day before.

Here the girls are smooshing moistened graham crackers together to mimic the movement of tectonic plates to make mountains. They thought this was awesome. 

And here they learned more about tectonic plates using jam and graham crackers. I let them cover the crackers with dyed whipped cream (because I was not motivated enough to make frosting), then they put the two graham crackers on top of strawberry jam and pushed them together to mimic magma rising from under the Earth's crust. This one wasn't quite the amazing visual that the mountain graham cracker activity was, but they still liked it and of course asked to eat it at the end. 

We also read some books, looked at rocks from our rock collection and learned the difference between the three types of rocks, studied the rock cycle, looked at pictures of the layers of the earth, and read more books. 

Here are the girls at geology day. We went with some homeschool friends and you can see our four girls off to the side. They had such a great time with all the hands on activities.  I feel like they learned a lot too! And hopefully when we come back to geology in a few weeks they will remember this!

In other news, I've started the addicting process of making sensory bin activities for Hanna! Here she is with her ragamuffin hair (we are in that wild hair stage of toddlerhood) playing in the blue sensory bin. I colored rice blue using vinegar and blue food coloring (I just mixed enough in with the rice to coat it, then laid it out on cookie sheets to dry) and added blue pom poms, blue silicon cupcake liners, blue fake flowers, and any other small blue toys I could find. I am planning to make more of these with other colors to help her learn the colors, plus some seasonal and just for fun using other fillers besides just rice. There are so many amazing sensory bin ideas out there- just a google search away! When I was looking for ideas I also read a lot about how great sensory activities are for toddlers, so I am really excited to have these for her. Plus, it keeps her busy during homeschooling. The only problem is that the older kids would rather play in the rice than do their work!

Our Summer

We are back to the blogging world! I honestly don't know where the summer went.  We were busy all summer but I don't feel like we had a lot of plans or trips or anything.  I guess Summer is just like that. And after living in Death Valley for four years where summer is an endless and extremely HOT 10 months, I think summer will now always feel very short anywhere else. 

At any rate, here are some highlights from our summer.  And now that we have started school again, I will hopefully be back to weekly blogging!

Day trip to Crater Lake

The girls and I were SO excited to get all of our homeschool materials for this year in July. They wanted to get everything out and look at it, so we made piles on the floor before I organized it all. We are so blessed to live here where we have a great homeschooling program and can get all these amazing books for our homeschool!

Yes, I forgot to turn my pictures before loading them on the blog. But it's late and I don't feel like redoing it. So turn your head please. This is the girls at Junior Ranger day at Lava Beds with Daddy.  

One day we discovered that we could stick balloons on Hanna's head with static. The older girls thought this was great. I thought it was pretty funny too. 

Camping trip to Redwoods in August with our good friends the Rasmussens

The kids had a great time again this year at the Tulelake fair

We started school at the beginning of September, and I quickly realized that Hanny didn't care if I had spent hours on school plans or that I had a daily schedule all laid out that seemed absolutely perfect on paper.  So after about 6 days of trying to do school my way and Hanny screaming at me every one of those days, I realized that I would have to be more flexible.  Instead of getting everything done in the morning on my schedule, on day 7 we got out the dried beans and measuring utensils and we all played with Hanny.  After a long while of just playing, I took one of the older girls at a time and we got our lessons done.  We did our literature at nap time and we finished science just before dinner, but we all had a really good day instead of a frustrating one.  Lesson learned: be flexible; listen to your toddler; ENJOY your children instead of just checking things off on a list of things that must get done that day. 

We just returned from our last trip of the summer around the Pacific Northwest, which, by the way, is my favorite place ever. This is Kaiya at a  beach in Olympic National Park.

Another sideways picture. Sorry. Another beach at Olympic.

Someone offered to take a family photo in the forest at Olympic. So nice. 

The Girls at Mount Rainier.  Pictures do not do it justice. This place is beautiful.

The girls getting their Junior Ranger badges from Lewis and Clark National Historic Park. 

We hope your summer was great as well!

Barbie Mummy

Last week we studied Egypt, and I really wanted the girls to understand more about mummy making.  Although there are some great science activities where you can mummify a whole chicken or a piece of fruit, I felt that at this age they would get more out of learning the rituals of mummification.  I hope to do one of those other activities when we come back around to Egypt in a few years.  But for now, we focused on the process and Barbie made a very willing participant.

First we prepared Barbie by placing the organs from a squishy body set on top of her.  The girls then took turns pretending to pull them out and placed them in jars.  Leah especially loved pretending to pull out the brain with our pretend brain hook.

Next, they pretended to wash her and then sprinkled Barbie with salt to dry her out.  Normally, this process would take 40 days, but we used our imaginations and proceeded after about 40 seconds.

Next we began wrapping her up in our faux linens- tissue strips.  They worked out pretty well.  Kaiya was able to do a lot of the wrapping on her own, although I had to help where we connected the wrapped pieces together.

And here's Barbie, all mummified in her shoebox sarcophagus.  Unfortunately for her she did not remain a mummy long.  The girls had her unwrapped within the hour.  I suppose that the plastic will preserve her into the afterlife, even if the wrappings won't!

The Great Pyramid

This week we are studying Northern Africa and focusing on Egypt.  Yesterday we read about the pyramids, then decided to try our luck at making one out of rice krispie treats.  I had seen an idea to make pyramids from rice krispie treats, but it used a pyramid mold.  I do not own a pyramid mold (does anyone own a pyramid mold??).  So we used waxed paper and hoped for the best.  And it came out great! Well, great enough that a 7 and 4 year old were super excited about it anyway.  I always hope when we do fun activities like this that some of the actual lesson will stick.  I guess only time will tell.  In the mean time, we had fun!

Micronesia Flag Cookies

For the past few weeks we have been studying Australia and the Pacific Islands.  The girls really loved learning about the different cultures, and, surprisingly, cannibalism, which occurred in some of the islands long ago (or more recently in the case of Papua New Guinea...Yikes!).  Anyway, we wanted to make these sugar cookie bars into flag cookies (which we made last fourth of July with the American flag... super cute!) and searched for a flag that wouldn't be too difficult to turn into a flag cookie.  Micronesia won.  Blue background, four stars.  Thank you, Micronesia, for having a simple flag that we could turn into a cookie.

Asia Projects

Henna Hands

Afghan kites. And yes, Leah is wearing a ballet recital costume.

Paper Mache Earth


These are some of our Asia projects.  We are working our way around the world for geography and spent a lot of time on Asia.  I thought I took more pictures, but I guess not. We also made a Ger when we studied Mongolia, made Chinese lanterns, made camels for Kazakhstan, and we also colored maps and flags and made food from some of the countries.