Our Homeschool Report, June 27-July 3: Summer Session, week 1 (All Things Beautiful)

June 27-July 3
Summer FunWatermelon Cake

What says summer more than watermelon? We had fun making this chocolate watermelon cake to celebrate summer!

We pitched the tent in the backyard to celebrate National Backyard Camp-out and to celebrate...

James' birthday is December 28, and tends to get lost in the Christmas aftermath, so we always like to celebrate his 1/2 birthday on June 28.
Celebrating National Ice Cream Soda Day

which is June 30th, in case you are wondering.

Wibbly Wobbly Weight Loss -Living The Healthy Life: All Carbohydrates Are Not The Same
I have been enjoying joining up in the discussions, Wibbly Wobbly Weight Loss – Living The Healthy Life! at Angelicscaliwags. She has started this discussion group at just the perfect time for me. I have been exploring a healthier lifestyle ever since I was diagnosed with breast cancer in November 2012. My goal is not to lose weight, but to be healthier, however I think that a healthier lifestyle will probably result in weight loss, however slowly. I wrote a post about what I have learned about healthy eating, weight loss and carbohydrates here.

week 1
With all the celebrating and with Independence Day to prepare for, we did get as much as we wanted to done this week in terms of our summer learning, but we did get to a few things.

Science

Biology

Squid Mini-Study

It is interesting how inspiring reading has come full circle with this gift of a homemade squid toy. The first one was made by Almost Unschooler's mom as a gift to her son to inspire him to read and learn more about kraken and squid, and now her gift to our family has inspired some reading and learning about squid here, all the way across the country.

The Mulberry Project: Raising Silkworms

I stumbled upon this gem of a book because I love some of the author's other books, A Single Shard and The Kite Fighters, which are among my very favorite books. When I saw that she had written this book, I checked it out and read it and loved it so much, it inspired me to want to do a similar project as Julia and Patrick have completed in the book. So, we now have our own copy of the book to read together, and I have ordered silk worms to raise.

Astronomy: Summer Constellations

source
We worked on learning some summer constellations. We looked at the "summer triangle" which is a triangle formed by three constellations; Cygnus, Aquila and Lyra. After studying them in books, we then went out after dark and used Steven's smart phone to locate them in the night sky, and so we know where to look, but it was too cloudy for us to actually see anything but one bright star, which we think was Vega, in the constellation Lyra.We will keep looking each evening until we can locate them. We have all summer to work on it!

Geography

Squished Pennies Virtual Trip

We began our Squished Pennies Geography Album by sorting all the squished pennies, we inherited from my brother, by state or region. We decided to start our album with Hawaii, and to start our virtual trip in Honolulu/Waikiki. We made maps and looked at the places from which the pennies came, before it all came together in an album page.

Latin Roots

The Latin roots we learned this week were Centum (100) and Mille (1000) as well as Ignis which means fire; Vulcanus the name of the god of fire and Aqua which means water.

Phyllis Bergenholtz

Our Homeschool Report, June 27-July 3: Summer Session, week 1