Sun, science, and Hot Melted Butter.

We've been revving up our school year and we're finally chugging along on all cylinders! (I don't actually know anything about engines--does one chug on cylinders?) 

I eased into all four of our major curriculums over the first few weeks of school, starting with just math and grammar, and doing fun, light activities for social studies and science until we could really dig in to our new Greenleaf History of the Old Testament and Apologia Astronomy  with its Junior Astronomy Journaling Notebook. They've both been a challenging addition to our lineup, but excellent--and I love how they're growing my boys both in knowledge of the subjects and in discipline and learning skills in general! (I especially love spending a chunk of time every single day reading Scripture out loud with my boys--but more on that in another post!)

One of the great things about the Apologia Astronomy Junior lesson plan is that almost every day includes some kind of hands-on activity or craft--super simple things, like “acting out” rotating planets revolving around the sun with siblings! (See pic above) One of the fun activities this week was to emphasize how dangerous it is to look directly at the sun--we melted butter with a magnifying glass! 

Even though Valor isn't really doing the class with us, she joins us for the experiments and other activities and is able to get a lot out of them along with her brothers!

In the same way that the magnifying glass focuses the energy of the sun to burn through that butter, lenses in our eyes will concentrate that energy and burn our eyes...and we don't have pain receptors in there, so we can't even feel it--but we'll certainly still feel the effects when we go blind from the damage! It was a good visual (no pun intended!) for all of us, and also a fun hands-on experiment outside!

When you dive in new curriculum, you never know how it’s going to turn out—But I think this one is a big hit for us!

In other news, our American Heritage Girls (AHG) troop is officially chartered--we'll start meetings in January! I am honored to serve as the Charter Representative (our chartering organization is CAPE) in our new troop. It's been a wild ride so far, and the planning and training is absorbing every spare moment! If you're unfamiliar with AHG, you should definitely check them out--along with Trail Life USA , which is the brother counterpart (my boys absolutely LOVE their Trail Life troop!). 

Much love, and more to come!