Playing with Doubles in Cellular Biology In our last block, cellular biology, we ran across something in our reading that talked about how some bacteria are able to double every 20 minutes. I thought to myself, “That would be some fun math for the day.” I scrapped my previous math plans, and wrote a few…
Tag: middle school
pH Rainbows, Probability and Tricky Hydrogen
A Homeschool Science Lesson about pH, Concentration of the Hydronium Ion, and Logarithmic Scales. A pH lesson may be my very favorite lessons. It has all the best things – math, science, and rainbows. This lesson was a two day process, but I’ve been subtly leading us here for a while, on the math side…
Making Hominy
Making a Common Food for our Native American Studies Corn. It’s the center of the indigenous world in north America. As I researched various nations of native peoples across the United States for the beginning of our native American block, several consistent, unifying concepts kept coming into place. Impressions like reciprocity, the moon, and its…
Pine Needle Baskets
A Hand Craft to Accompany our Study of Native America I often pair handcrafts with our history lessons. This keeps little hands busy while we are listening to our lessons and helps us to retain our lessons more easily. One of the many handcrafts that I chose for our Native American block last year was…
An Introduction to History Analysis and Essay Form
Using Comparison and Continuity and Change over Time for Homeschool Writing This is the second year of US History. If you don’t know, we start with world history with the Ancients and move chronologically through elementary school. In middle school we start with US History. Last year, we spent the year on the Indigenous peoples…
Ice Cream Flavor Permutations
Join us as we explore a fun math activity to introduce the factorial function for homeschooling. skip to video We are getting ready to study some probability and statistics for our seventh grade math, and I thought I’d start out with a review of permutations that we’ve done before. This was a fun little exercise…
A Microscope Lab
Learning How to Use a Microscope as an Intro to Biology for our Homeschooling As part of our Intro to Biology Block for seventh grade, we are doing quite a bit of work with the microscope. One of the labs was learning about the microscope and viewing various things that we collected under the microscope….
Using Monopoly for Math
The Different Ways that You Can Use the Game Monopoly to Get in a Little Math Practice in your Home… Hello There! Welcome to The Beauty of Play. This post is for my subscription members. I currently have two subscriptions: One for all things homeschooling and another for all things math.You can learn more about…
Making Maple Candy
An Activity for our Native American History and Literature Study – The Anishinaabe Nation As part of our Anishinaabe study under our Native America History and Literature block we attempted making maple syrup candy. It was surprisingly simple and easy to make with only one ingredient – maple syrup. I wanted to use an Anishinaabe elder’s…
Language Arts for our Grade Six of Homeschooling
Resources We Are Using for Sixth Grade English. Things are changing a bit for us for language arts this year. In previous years, I’ve relied on BraveWriter style copy work and dictation for language arts in addition to our Waldorf/Charlotte Mason-style narration process. We’ve had some Michael Clay Thompson grammar thrown into the mix, and of course some Grammarland. We’ve…
Developing Number Sense for Fractions
Adding Fraction for Game Points in our Homeschooling We’ve been playing a RightStart matching game for percentages and fractional equivalencies. The way that we have been calculating our scores for this game has been by adding all the fractions from the pairs. There are many activities that I have in my math curricula Fractions Year…
A Homeschooler’s Review of the Book Painting and Drawing in Waldorf Schools
How we are using the book Painting and Drawing in Waldorf Schools to teach art in our homeschool. My daughter and I just started her sixth grade year of homeschooling. One of my favorite aspects of this year for our family is the introduction to charcoal in art. An interesting part of Waldorf pedagogy is…
Botany: Rate of Photosynthesis Experiment
In the experiment, the rate of photosynthesis is explored. This is a fun experiment, because the first time a little leaf disc rises to the surface there is so much excitement. What is being observed is the rate of photosynthesis determined by how much oxygen is being produced. When enough oxygen has been produced in…
Grade 5 Botany: Root Observation Lab
This has been one of most cool projects of our botany block. In this lab, we used a polymer from Miracle Grow, promoted as water crystals, as a germination and growth medium. These polymers are marketed at hydration crystals that help keep soil from getting too moist or too dry. They do this because they…
Botany (Grade 5): Celery Stalk Demonstration of the Vascular System
Matching scientific demonstrations accurately to the explanation of their concepts is important to me. Science is cool, fascinating, and amazing! But even more amazing is scientific literacy and why these demonstrations work the way that they do. It’s essential to match those concepts with clear, accurate concrete examples. Dying the leaves of celery or carnations is…
A Time-Sequence Graph
When my son was in eighth grade, I compiled several resources to make a “How We Learn/How to Study” course in preparation for High School. It went over thinks like memory recall, reflection, interleaving, and notetaking. One aspect that we spent some time on were graphs and using them for study, understanding, and notetaking. In…
Grade 5 Physics: Magnets
This was the section of our physics block I was most uncertain about. I did not have a clear plan for this one. We did not spend much time in her early years exploring magnets, so my plan was to play and wing it. I did prepare however by going over the material on magnets…
Making Mushroom Spore Prints
We love to go mushroom hunting. Our mushroom hunts are for spore prints. We do NOT eat our mushrooms. I wish I knew which ‘shrooms were edible and which were not, but alas… Goals! Spore prints are a favorite around here. I do not know how I made it all the way through my college…
My Favorite Educational Apps
The homeschool world abounds with opinions on electronics. Some think that electronics should be limited, while others think that electronics should be embraced. My family falls somewhere in between. We do limit our screen time at my house to encourage and promote outdoor (and indoor) play, but I do use them for educational purposes occasionally, especially on…
“Notice and Wonder” with Cuisenaire Rods for Homeschool Math
Today for math we did one of my favorite activities, though I will admit, it is not always my children’s favorite. My daughter, now 10, build a structure with the Cuisinaire Rods, and then we did a “notice and wonder” activity. The structure that she build for today was a pyramid. I could have guessed…
What We Are Using for Foreign Language
In this post I talk about what we are using for foreign language and how it works for us.
Planning for our next Homeschooling Year
I love seeing how other homeschoolers plan and what their schedules look like. I’ve shared mine in this blog post.
My Switch to Living History Books
“Well, this one country, they were mad at this other country, because of this dictator, you know.” This was my son’s response to my question about what he had just read in history. We discuss what he reads after he is finished to help work it into his memory and so I can judge…
Leaf Prints for our Tree Study
Leaf prints are not difficult to do, but so gratifying when you see your creation, even for the youngest artist. We are studying trees for our naturalist unit, and leaf prints were an easy way to get a lot of new trees on the pages of our nature journals. It was a messy project taking…
Sumi-e for Japan
This year we have been doing a “travel buddies” geography for my youngest who is doing kindergarten, mostly because she doesn’t want to be left out of “school” and needed something like her brother. It has been so much fun. We were approaching Japan, when I had a spark of inspiration. Scrolling through my instagram…
The Math Book by Clifford A. Pickover
I am loving this book! Each day after our math lesson, we read a page from this book. It had been a gateway to arithmetical adventure. Today it had us discussing and researching the 4th dimension. It has also led us to experimenting with abstract Calculus concepts, studying the statistics of dropping toothpicks, magic squares,…
Master Gallery-Exposure to Impressionism
I try to pair music, art, and literature with history. The reasoning is that perhaps this pairing will give them a reference, a framework, if you will, to how the art developed and existed in context. That is my hope anyway. A mother can dream. In history this session we studied Story of the World…
Easter pH play
This Easter I had the lofty goal of dying eggs with food, using beets for pink, turmeric for yellow, and red cabbage for blue. Like many things, my kids had different ideas, thus we did not dye eggs. That didn’t stop us from having lots of fun with colors. I took the cabbage juice to…
Using Prime Climb for Math
Using Prime Climb for Math for all ages.