Slices of Life

I was looking for a quick and easy art project to do with my boys.  I knew they all typically enjoyed anything involving chalk pastels and I found a few repeated shape drawings on Pinterest so I convinced them to give it a try. We pulled out our supplies and got to work. We needed chalk pastels, black paper, one cotton ball each, and a cardboard cutout of the shape we wanted to use. We then traced around our shape with the chalk pastel With our shape still in place we used the cotton ball to smear the chalk a bit; moving from inside the shape outwards. We kept repeating the same shape over and over again until our paper was filled. It was a quick and simple project and we really like the way our finished drawings look.

Thanks for stopping by and joining us again this week as we host another virtual refrigerator arts and crafts link up. None of my boys really wanted to do art this week but I finally cajoled them into at least trying a quick and easy chalk drawing. Once they saw how quick and easy it was they all settled down to work; picking their own shapes. You can read more about how we made them here. Now without further ado I invite you to grab a "magnet" and link up your arts and crafts or how- to posts below and visit some other bloggers to see what they shared on their refrigerators. <div class="homeschool-coffee-break-button" style="width: 300px; margin: 0 auto;"> <a href="http://kympossibleblog.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIHGAxkvPLWWe6DqmkfArlI_S3x-FCJ5UiV0_stu6cY1iNpvnRrgQjbDV9X1Lw...

We learned a lot about friction doing what we dubbed our Sword in the Stone science activity.   We experimented with taking a cooking skewer (or pencil) out of a bottle filled with rice.   We gathered our supplies together: an empty, disposable water bottle dried rice (enough to fill the bottle) a wooden skewer  a pencil a funnel We began by just putting a bit of rice in the bottle and then pushed the wooden skewer all the way down into the bottom of the bottle.   We easily pulled the skewer out since there was not enough friction to keep the skewer down.  We then added even more rice and tried again. Once our bottle was filled to the top we tried one more time with the skewer but our wooden skewer was so thin that it easily came out yet again. I decided to take a pencil and try the experiment over again... the pencil worked like a charm and the force of all the rice pushing in on the pencil allowed us to ...

I am having the hardest time sticking with our 100 Days of Science Challenge!  I don't know what it is lately but we just don't seem to have a whole lot of time left for science experiments and even when we manage to do a few of them I don't have time to write up blog posts about them. That said in the last two weeks we've completed 4, yes 4, science experiments!  I am determined to knock out this challenge by Christmas... wish us luck. This week I'm sharing what we have dubbed our "Sword in the Stone" experiment ... even if our stone is a bottle of rice. It was a really fun way to learn even more about friction. What have you been up to?  I'd love to hear from you either in the comments or by linking up your own blog post!  Please join us! Welcome to the Love to Learn Blog Hop A collection of educational activities to instill a life long love of learning in our children. Enjoy learning through play, nature, crafts, and many ot...

We had plans to take the first two weeks off from school and then we had a few unexpected snow days, a sleepover on a school night, and we always take Alec's birthday off in January too so I really expected the boys reading list to be quite small this month. However, Alec went to Barnes and Noble twice to pick out his birthday gifts and came home with quite a stack of books each time (only some of which are pictured in the below photo).  Not all that surprising he managed to read quite a few of them and has found several new book series to read! Here are the books we've been working on this month: Stormbreaker -- Ian got half way through Hatchet and told me he really didn't like the book at all so I told him to return it to the library and try another book.  We picked Stormbreaker and hoped that it would be more action packed for him to enjoy.... When Alex discovers that his uncle is really a spy for Britain's Secret Agency he is recruited to find his uncle...