Rainy Day Hike

The other day it was another grey and gloomy day but we decided to get out of the house anyways and try to venture outdoors a bit. The leaves are changing slowly, mostly to yellow and orange but we tried our best to spy some of the prettier changes around our house, as you can see from the photos.

On our way back home we did end up getting caught in the rain which our dog didn't appreciate (he's a baby!) but we made the best of it, and once home, enjoyed some hot chocolate to warm up. Love days like this!

The Making of a Canadian Meal

For geography we are starting our journey throughout North America and one of Zoey's recent "assignments" was to choose a recipe from North America from her cookbook (Eat Your Way Around the World) and prepare it for the family. She chose a meal from Canada and made maple chicken with wild rice and a blueberry crisp for dessert. It was DELICIOUS!!!

This was the first meal that she has made all on her own. I helped her with the timing of things so that everything would be ready around the same time for the meal, but other than that it was completely her! So proud of her!

The really cool part of all of this...besides getting to sample this yummy food, is that she has a little passport that she stamps (in this case we will stamp Canada) for every meal that she makes from a different place around the world and then she writes up a little journal entry for her food journal on the foods that she prepared.

It's tying in perfectly with our geography studies!

Weekend Updates

The end of the week last week was a bit of a whirlwind. Last week felt busy as we were kind of playing catch-up with what we had missed earlier in the week due to my having to be out of town for work training. Friday Zoey ended up attending a middle school dance with a friend. It was the first one that she has gone to since being homeschooled and I'm happy to report that it went well. Sometimes I think I'm more nervous for these things than she is!

The weekend was a bit of a sleepy one here. It was rainy and cool pretty much all weekend. I made a vegetable beef stew along with some cornbread muffins (actually Zoey made those) that pretty much lasted all throughout the weekend. 

Zoey worked on some more of her Lego building over the weekend. She is really into the Lego Elves sets. It's interesting, she never was really that into Legos before. Whenever we introduced them to her she was pretty ho-hum in response but lately she's really taking off when it comes to building which is fun to see. I'm wondering if her improved strength and dexterity in her hands has anything to do with it. She's always been a smidge behind in that area. Interesting to think about. Here is a dragon that took a loooooooong time for her to assemble, there may even have been some tears of frustration at some point but I'm happy to say that she finished it with zero help from me or her father. 

It is pretty cool. 

Sunday consisted of more Lego building, some free reading and some football (on TV) which meant our dog had to sport his fancy football sweater...he wore it long enough for the photo and that's pretty much it. :)

We ventured outside after the rain broke Sunday afternoon for a bit and Zoey found this little guy hiding under some fallen tree bark.

And I just thought this mushroom looked cool so snapped a picture of it. It's amazing how many mushrooms we've discovered this year with all the rain that we've been having here and therefore how much we've been learning about the different fungi in our area.

This week I'm excited that we're going to be finishing up and starting some new things regarding Zoey's studies. We're scheduled to finish up reading A Wrinkle in Time for Literature and also the book The Road to There (I'm actually going to miss reading this daily...it was SUPER interesting for both Zoey and I!!). In Geography we'll be starting to move a bit away from learning strictly about maps and mapmakers and moving into studies specific to North America. In science we're going to be moving away from DNA & genes and will be starting in on learning about the skeletal system.

Sunday evening I prepped our week and am happy to say that I feel really good about the rest of this week! Here's to hoping it's a fruitful one!

Echinacea Root Tincture (a project from the Herbal Kit by Learning Herbs)

Today was the day that we finally completed our echinacea tincture from the herbal kit by Learning Herbs. Zoey has been waiting forever and was so excited.

Such a simple first project, I'm glad that we started with it. Today all she had to do was strain the echinacea root (that had been sitting for over a month now) through a cheese cloth and then pour the liquid/tincture into the little dropper bottles.

This project was completed just in time for the cold and flu season that's upon us now here in northern Wisconsin!

Thank you Learning Herbs for putting this kit together that's proving to be perfect for beginners!

Karyotype Project & a Mini Break!

It's been a busy past several days! Sharing some pictures here of Zoey's completed karyotype project which she had to do a bit of research on. She had to determine if the karyotype was for a human, if it was for a male or female, if it was normal or abnormal and if abnormal, what she thought was going on.

I had some training and continuing education to take care of for the library earlier this week which meant our homeschool schedule was slightly disrupted, but we were able to throw in some other forms of learning while away from home which was fun. A visit to a couple of book store resulted in a book purchase or two for Zoey. Over our two day getaway she completed reading the book titled The Swap by Megan Shull and enjoyed it. It was nice for her to get some just for her reading time in I think. :) She also visited the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum which currently has the Birds in Art exhibit on display. Lots of swimming at the hotel pool was done as well as lots of walking around the downtown square. Here are some of our fun pictures from our little mini-break...

Downtown.

In front of The Grand Theatre fountains.

At Sweet Lola's Cupcakery...YUM!

It was nice to get out of town for a bit and have a little break with some fun included...almost made up for the full day of sitting that I had to do for my library training!

Karyotypes

[This post is content for Zoey to utilize while working independently tomorrow.]

 

1. Match the paper chromosomes into pairs.
2. Create a karyotype chart using your paper chromosomes, paper and glue.
3. Based on looking at your chromosome pairs, is your karyotype for a human?
4. How do you know?
5. Is your karyotype for a female or a male?
6. How can you tell?
7. Are there any chromosomal abnormalities?
8. If so, what did you find?

Read this Chromosome Abnormality fact sheet.
Read this blog post on chromosomal disorders.
Read this article on Chromosome 3, Trisomy 3q2.

Ask yourself again if there are any chromosomal abnormalities in your karyotype.
For fun, check out these images of chromosomes:

chromosome library
3D images of chromosomes

Science: Extracting DNA

For science we're still talking about DNA so for some fun we attempted to extract DNA from Zoey and from a strawberry.

This is Zoey's DNA organizing itself to the top...

And there it is all balled up on the stir stick...

We thought it would be fun to get a close-up look of it and put it on a slide. It was cool, but I think if we had a more powerful microscope on our hands it would have been even cooler. Ours is a pretty simple battery operated one but it still magnified it some.

This is our attempt at extracting DNA from a strawberry which ended up not being quite as successful for some reason.

You can see tiny globs of it stuck to the side of the jar below...

An easy and fun science project that definitely made learning about DNA meaningful!