New changes ... coming

My blogging has been sporadic to say the least. Part of it I believe is I have moved away from this blog's focus.

Oh don't get me wrong. I'm still homeschooling and have lots to say about homeschooling, but with my own children being high school age I have little to share about what we are doing now.

I feel as if it's boring. It's Monday. We went to the local animal rescue and worked. It's Tuesday she did this book work while I moderated a Facebook group and did some house work.

Sure there is times I can share how we found great courses at the library and giving that a try.

I can share and will continue to share, but at times I want to share more about my thoughts on waiting until children are older for formal schooling. If I had an easy button what I would do different.

Maybe some thoughts about politics, CCS, or anything else that might just suit me. Things that seems to me go beyond "Catholic Christian Homeschooling".  Just more of what I think. My thoughts on ....

I think in order to do this it's time to retire this blog and start anew. One that will better suit what I want to blog about.

There will be still homeschooling things, but it will open it up to more topics.  This blog will still be here. I will keep it up because it serves for me an archive of our homeschooling journey.

Especially for the yearly years and I enjoy looking back at the pictures and remembering.... Sometimes I stumble upon something I totally forgot about.

This is a transition time. If you follow me on Facebook you might notice the name change and other things.  When I'm ready I will share the URL of the new blog and all of the new social media links. As much as possible I am going to just change names ... so if you follow or like many of my social media outlets you may not have to do much. Just hang tight while I refocus things and transition to more of what I want to blog about.

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Animals --- Rescue

The weather here has been great. It's been more like middle September instead of early November. Today we went out to the local wildlife rescue, the same rescue Web-Princess has been working at the last several Mondays. Today the rescue had an open house for the public. We walked around, had some treats, and looked at the some of the animals. Pictures from our day:

Many of these animals are the same animals that Web-Princess has been feeding and caring for... Some of them she knows by name, others not so much. Many of these animals when she's there to take care of them she actually gets into the enclosure with them. Tomorrow will be Monday, so you know where we will be.....

Happy Sunday!

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Leaf Disk Lab

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Better late than never, I guess. Followers of Catholic Christian Homeschooling Facebook Page saw a preview of this post with the statement: I would update the blog later today or tomorrow. Well, today and tomorrow came and went -- they are long gone, the post wasn't done within the promised time frame, but it's here now.

This year our science focus has been biology. The topic this past week was photosynthesis. I try to have her do hands on labs as much as possible to go with the course work -- I still need to get a decent microscope, but we have found other labs to do that don't require a microscope. One of them has been the leaf disk lab. When you google search and look on youtube there are several tutorials on this lab.  The two videos we based our lab on was the following videos:













The second video talks about adding detergent to the mixture. We did not do this! We did use spinach leafs and soaked them overnight like the first video suggested. We pulled the oxygen out of spinach leafs according to the second video (it looked easier to do) and dumped them into a contain of more solution -- we also felt this was easier to do -- seeing we didn't have a real good way to keep the syringe in an upright position.

If we were to do the lab all over again we would have done a second patch of leafs without the light. So time could be compared between having the light and NOT having the light.

Our Lab:

• 2 Measuring Cups (2 cups and 1 cup)
• Baking Soda
• Water
• Spinach Leafs (left to soak overnight)
• Container To Soak Leafs In
• Oral Dosing Syringe
• Hole Puncher 
• Light
• A Means To Keep Time (we just used the timer on my daughters iPod touch -- but any device that has a time would work)

I went to the store and bought a package of spinach leafs. I soaked a handful of them overnight in some cold water. -- we used the rest of them for a dinner. :D

After the leafs soaked overnight we used a hole punch to punch out leaf disks. We punched out about 20 of them. We then put them in an oral dosing syringe with the solution of baking soda and water.

For the solution, we mixed 2 cups of water with a dash of baking soda. I actually own measuring spoons that say drop, dash, pinch, etc.

After the leafs and solution were mixed we followed the instructions on the second video and started to extract the air, oxygen, from the leafs; as we did this we could see them fall to the bottom of the syringe.

We then dumped them into a 1 cup measuring cup that had more of the baking soda and water solution and turned on the light! We actually did the whole process several times and after about 5-10 minutes we had at least 5 disks floating on top of the solution.  -- like I said if I could have done it again I would have done it without the light too so we could compare time with the light and without the light.

This is a pretty straightforward lab and I believe it to be good hands on experiment on how photosynthesis works. Of course, it requires talking about photosynthesis and what is going on with the leafs and why the change from floating and not floating. :D

This also lead to the discussion on how different labs are set up to test or show different things. Doing all of this reminded her how long ago when she was younger we did labs that showed mass by floating and sinking -- What a fun discussion that was too!

Oh, and the very first picture was just Web-Princess being silly and goofy. She was hamming it up some for the camera -- especially seeing she knew it was going to be posted here.  She may still ham it up for the camera, but her being a teen matters -- she changed clothes before I was allowed to even snap pictures. She didn't want her in her other clothing, her lounge at home clothing,  mind you just a tshirt, to be on the blog.  She didn't want to people to see her in this tshirt. It's just a tshirt. :D

Temples, Tombs, Hieroglyphs

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This year for history I decided to use Train Up A Child's: World History Course.  This world history course is a literature base course. Luckily for me most of the books needed can be borrowed from my library.  Currently we are studying Ancient Egypt and working our way through the book: Temples Tombs, & Hieroglyphs.



This is a bit of a slow read for us, slower then I would like, but we are making progress and working our way through it.  In the course of reading we learned a little bit about James Henry Breasted. Breasted is one of the first American Egyptian Archaeologist that made a lasting impression on Egyptology, his work is still used today.

Web-princess took a special interest because she learned he was born here. I learned Thursday night that his remains were actually buried here too. So Friday morning we took an impromptu trip to the cemetery to hunt down Breasted's grave marker.   -- what makes his grave marker even more unique is that it's made from a block of granite from Egypt.  I think this is the closet she'll or even I will get from touching something from Egypt.

Smiling and standing next to Breasted's headstone.

It's always nice when a bit of what you are talking about can come "alive". Sure it was just a tombstone. However, it connected us personally to this archaeologist that we are talking about and his discoveries and work.

Under this granite block from Assuan, Egypt lie the ashes of James Henry Breasted

How has your homeschooling going? Any impromptu trips? impromptu activities?

Science: Biology

This year we have been working on biology. So far it has been going well.

Our topic has been cells. Earlier this week Web-Princess decide on her own to research cells and make models.

Research is a little formal. She actually just looked up pictures and made models out of silly putty. It was interesting to see her just dive in the subject of cells and just make models just because she wanted to make models.

It actually made me feel good about homeschooling to see her use her free time to look up cell pictures and make models. Something she didn't have to do, but did because she wanted to. It also showed me that she, even though she was using images, was retaining what she was learning during the day. I know because she spent time on her own to make cell models she will remember this better and retain it.

She was looking things up and learning because she wanted to, not because she was studying it or trying to memorize it for some test. This is why I homeschool. Have your children shown you in unexpected ways they have been enjoying what they have been learning?