Good Morning! Welcome to The Homemaking Party!
Last weekend, Daddy started something new in our homeschool---Chemistry! Jamie works much more than full time, week after week, serves as a board member and in worship ministry at our church, and still makes time to be present in the lives of his nine children. I'm so thankful!!
He doesn't usually do planned out lessons with the kids, but when we recently discussed the serious lack of advanced science in our homeschool, he really stepped up to the plate. I'm good with nature study discussions and activities pertaining to whatever we're doing outside on a given day, but I was a Chemistry drop-out in high school and have never felt like I could (or should!) teach these higher level science subjects.
About a year ago, a friend told me about a new curriculum she was trying out called The Good and the Beautiful. It sounded like a pretty wholesome thing so I decided to check it out. Ha! The day I went to the site, they were offering a one-day free printable of their entire brand new Chemistry course! Woo Hoo! I printed it out and put it in a pretty binder...and handed it over to Jamie. Ha!!
Our first lesson was a general overview of Chemistry and featured an experiment where we caused marker colors to separate out on wet coffee filters.
We first guessed what would happen when we got four different colors wet...then we drew those colored circles on coffee filters and put just the tips into water to see what would happen.
The colors spread out and separated into different shades...and even some surprise colors!
Everyone got in on the lesson---from me and Lynzie, the grown ladies of the house, to Kynthia and Brenna, who are six and seven and not yet doing formal lessons. I figured I'd get in on this teaching and then I'd feel better about reteaching it to the youngers when they're in high school.
Once the kids' filters were dry and they'd recorded all their observations, they stored their pretty colored filters in a notebook. We're looking forward to Saturday morning when Jamie will have lesson number two ready to go through. It's days like these that reinforce that homeschooling (and any family learning opportunities, really) is more about the time spent and the memories made than any intelligence gained. I'm thankful!
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