Babies and Lego Catapults

We went to a friends house for another science lesson gathering with our homeschool STEM group. This time we built catapults out of Legos! It was so much fun to do this! While there, we got to snuggle with a baby pug puppy and the cutest baby human.

Chess, Geodesic Domes, Science and Such

After a long and dark winter, our days are beginning to get longer and a bit warmer. As the earth warms and wakens, we are spending more time outside, also awakening. The chickens are laying eggs. We have a duck couple and a geese couple that visit our side of the pond daily while the frogs and crickets fill the evenings with their songs. We are still getting many, many rainy days. It's been a very wet winter, which continues into spring. We spend some days waiting out the rain by playing chess, exploring the microscopic world with our microscope, playing with our growing pup Isis, reading Harry Potter and The Land of Stories series, obsessing over Pokemon, crafting, cooking and we sometimes pretend to 'do school'. Our friend Jonna is teaching Esperanza and I macrame and Esperanza and Ezra recently constructed geodesic domes with her. An online science program we follow is teaching us about selection of traits in plants and animals. Armando has been busy all winter with new houses and is finishing up 2 in Washougal and 4 in Camas. They should all be sold this Spring (1 is a presale and 1 other the sale is pending). We have lots of plans and goals set for this year and look forward to all the fun and adventures that await us!

Pi, Science and more Pie

It was not only a good day for pie, but it was also our first day meeting with our homeschooling STEM (science-technology-engineering-math) group. I explained, in limited detail, what pi was to my kids and that it was fun to make March 14 a day to talk about it. I had fun writing down the number and symbol on the chalk board, and Esperanza enjoyed saying the numbers.

A few of our homeschool friends came over and we did a small floating ping pong ball activity and discussed what is called the Coanda Effect. We watched a couple of videos then got to work experimenting on making our own contraption to float a ping pong ball by blowing through a straw. It took awhile to get the ping pong balls to float, some of us figured it out, others never did. We also brought out a hair dryer and used that for the same effect. It was fun!

And then, we had pie.

Cousins

Just another day hanging out with cousins Sadee, Andy, Rafa and Kiko.

Prepping the Spring Garden

The kids and I took advantage of some sunny days and got a start on our Spring garden by planting veggie seeds in the raised beds. Ezra helped me move a bunch of dirt around and the kids both  helped replant the strawberry plants in nice and neat rows too. We planted the strawberries in rows of 10 with 10 plants each row. Then we determined how many strawberries we would get based on how many each plant would produce. 

Homeschool math - check! 

We are all looking forward to eating yummy strawberries and fresh veggies later this year.