Homeschooling with morning sickness

If you've read my other blog you know that we are expecting our fourth!  We're so excited!  I am having a lot of morning sickness and fatigue, but my already born kids shouldn't have to put their education completely on hold because mommy's not feeling very well.  So we've been doing a lot of reading allowed and I discovered the national geographic videos website so my kids can watch educational videos without the downside of youtube: the random videos that come up as options on the side and at the end.  I watch with them to clarify anything they are confused about and ask them questions about what they're watching.  They really like the show "Naked Science."  Though I think the name send unintentional innuendo.
When we learned that we were in fact going to have another baby, my kindergartener  really wanted to know how that happened.  We've already explained a lot about the birds and the bees to her, but she really wanted to know more because the basics just didn't make sense to her to make a baby.  Ironically, that same day a package arrived for us from my in-laws.  They had been going through books their kids had outgrown and sent them to us.  One of them was entitled "How babies are made."  It's geared toward young children.  It answered her questions and she wanted to read it over and over that day and the next day.  She told me that she thinks that's kind of weird and she's not going to tell anyone about that.  We have emphasized it not to say that in church and she claims she doesn't want to, plus I warned the primary president, since she has a tendency to randomly say what's on her mind.

More How to Make and Apple Pie and See the World!

Continuing in our unit study of How to Make and Apple Pie and See the World, we have been very busy.  First, we incorporated math.  I found a simple apple outline in one of N's workbooks and traced that several times on two pieces of paper.  Then N and I colored them and cut them out. 

In the book, the girl picks 8 apples, one for the cow, one for the chicken, one for her, and 5 for the pie.  So we started there.  D and I would be the chicken, and N would count out the appropriate number of apples.  Then we did things like how many apples would we need if we made two pies?  Or, if the tree has 22 apples, and we pick 8, then how many are left on the tree?  You get the idea. The next day we did this again, only I got out the mini white board and wrote the numbers and functions we were doing to kind of introduce her to those concepts.

Then we moved on the science!  In the book, the girl gets a cow so she can milk it and then churns the butter into milk.  Well we didn't have a cow handy, but we did get cream at the store, just your garden variety heavy whipping cream.  I explained that it was from a cow and was a part of milk.  Then we put it into a cleaned out jelly jar and shook it!  Then we shook it, shook it and shook it.  The kids we quite worn out from all this shaking, and they were jumping up and downs and dancing all around, so I guess that counts as P.E. too!  Well, after 20 minutes of just shaking, we had made whipped cream, and that's exactly what it looked like.  I wondered if I'd made a mistake and gotten the wrong stuff.  Wouldn't be the first time something didn't come out the way I'd planned.  But we kept shaking, since the kids were tired of shaking, we discovered that we could all sit on the floor and roll the jar to each other.  Then when one of us got it, we'd pick it up, shake it a few times, then roll it to someone else.  D had a hard time rolling (it wasn't a perfectly round jar) so his attempts were ore like sliding than anything else, but hey, it still worked.  After 30 minutes total shaking time our cream was starting to look quite lumpy.  We knew this was a good sign.  So we kept rolling and shaking and soon our butter started to seperate from the butter milk.  We kept rolling and shaking for about 5 more minutes to be sure everything was separated.  Total shaking time was about 37 minutes.

 Here is the separated butter in the jar.

 Here it is with the lid off.

 This is  where we strained the buttermilk out into a bowl (we used the buttermilk the next day to make buttermilk pancakes which were SOOOOO good!).

 There's the butter all strained and rinsed.

 N wanted to take a picture of it too.

Another thing in the book is that the girl takes some sea water and then evaporates the water to get salt for the pie.  So we mixed up some salt water, D and N licked it to find out how it tasted, and we're currently in the process of letting the water evaporate from it.

 We put the bowl out on the balcony to dry faster, but tookit in at night so it wouldn't blow down and ruin the experiment.

To help this stick in their heads we've looking at diagrams, talking about, and watching youtube videos about the water cycle.  No pictures of the progress so far, but the salt is definitely crystallizing and the water is evaporating!


The night we made the butter, we made another apple pie for family home evening and used our homemade butter!

Oh, and since A is too little for these things we've been watching baby Einstein clips on youtube and listening to classical music, and reading baby books.  He loves it!

Homeschooling is so fun!