August Learning Inspiration

Here is a list of some things we'll be doing this month, subject to changing interests. These are things I came up with by writing down the interests they express during our conversations, as well as things that I think they will enjoy that they haven't seen before. I'm putting the list here in case anyone else needs some inspiration, and please feel free to comment with the things you're doing this month too, because we all can always use more inspiration!

Places to Go:

Music in the Park
Hot Air Balloon Races
Go to community college to see the Geology class's rock collection and have the teacher identify our rocks (I haven't set this one up yet, but I'm hoping he'll go for it. The anatomy teacher did.)


Crafts:

Homemade fingerpaints
Make Flubber
Bees



Projects:

Make a movie (We have shot the raw footage for movies about bees and Princess Diana and E has ideas for Spiderman and Rapunzel movies, now we just need to learn how to edit them. E also told me today that she wants to make a movie with clay characters like in Chicken Run).

Making wine (hehe, ok not really wine, but last week or so E and I got on the topic of making grape juice and I showed her videos of people crushing the grapes with their feet like they did back in the days before the machinery that does it now. I think it will be fun for them to get a bunch of grapes and crush them in a bowl with their feet! Then we will drink some juice and maybe try making some kind of Traditional Foods fermented drink).





Books/videos/things to look up:

Yom Kippur is coming up next month, so we will get some books and have some discussions about that in advance. We may also discuss the 9th of Av, if I can find a way to present the reality without going into too many horrible details.


Pirates have been a common play theme around here lately, so we'll get some books about real pirates. Today we found out about Ching Shih. She was a Chinese pirate who commanded 1800 ships and 80,000 pirates.



Games to play:

E has been enjoying this 3D Logic Game the last few days. She got to level 8 with only two little hints from me.

Some kind of addition and subtraction game that uses jumping or throwing or some other activity to play (let me know if you know of a good game!) I think there are some ideas on her flash cards, but I need to read them again.




Things to do:

I'm going to start taking them outside every night to see the moon and whether it is waxing or waning or full.

Use a piece of butcher paper to trace their bodies. Then we'll make drawings of life sized organs, bones and other body parts to glue to their paper "body." We'll make "blood" with food coloring and marsh mellows for blood cells. (I got this idea from a fellow homeschooling mom, and I might set it up to do as a group project with some friends).