Learning Notes (Nov. 24-30)

Another week of school.  Here's a great playlist to work to...

First off, it's now the lead up to Advent in our house.  Although the first Sunday of Advent is Dec. 1st, I brought in the totes of Christmas decor from the garage anyway because we have a very busy first week of December and I thought it would be prudent to get the tree up now, instead of on St. Nicholas' Day (Dec. 6th).  So we put up the tree and spent some time decorating it.

Videos and such we watched -

Veritasium and Three Perplexing Physics Problems.
Will Newton's Cradle go forever in a vacuum?

We made play dough - pink, orange, blue and green, and we scented it with almond, lemon, vanilla and coconut extracts.  Here's a recipe we like.  The children used it to sculpt and also to play elaborate games of The Great British Baking Challenge.  The play dough was on heavy rotation many times over the week.

Conversations about...how the cat's footprints go in almost a straight line, how the dog walks with a left/right stride, instead of opposing front/back paws, why people smoke cigarettes (asked after we saw a smoker as we left the store),  can you make an even number by cutting an odd number in half...

We made thaumatropes!  There are lots and lots of videos of these on Youtube if you want some ideas of what to draw on your own thaumatropes.  Here's one that also talks about phenakistoscopes, zoetropes and praxinoscopes as well, and here's one that adds flipbooks and a few other things to the list.  And while we crafted we started listening to this:

Of course, we read aloud...

We did a lot of stuff with snowflakes this week!

This entire website is a great snowflake resource - run by a professor from CalTech.
Symmetry in snowflakes - and some fancy designs for cutting them.
More templates!
Vihart's videos on Khan Academy on snowflakes, starflakes, sphereflakes and swirlflakes!
The Anatomy of a snowflake.
Capturing snowflakes in photography.

This book

Link

Making 3D snowflakes out of the pages of an old book.  We used regular paper but you know, the book pages would also have been cute.

We also made these adorable little yarn birds for no reason at all except that we wanted to.

Activities of different sorts...

Places we went...

We visited a different church we had never attended a service at before.
The 7yo had a piano lesson.
The 7yo and I went to a ladies' stitching group for a few hours and she got to sit and sew with the 'big ladies'.  One of the women, a very talented seamstress, had the 7yo use our sewing machine and run up fabric bags to sell at a craft fair.
We all trekked around town with our shovels in a blizzard to clear steps and driveways, and we stopped for 1/2 price hot chocolates on the way home.
We went out as a family for breakfast.


We had some significant car trouble this week, and with the rush of the season the mechanic couldn't see us for over a week.  Unfortunately, this meant the 9yo's piano lesson had to be cancelled, and all three children missed their swimming lesson.