Beginning of our school year

    So our school year has started with a bang :) OK, well truthfully we did some school through the summer so our first week of school wasn't too exciting, but we are now officially homeschooling a 3rd grader, a 1st grader and Brie likes to tag along so we're calling her Pre-K3 this year :)

So things are going nicely this year too so we are finally able to combine my 2 oldest. We are truthfully following a lot of The Well Trained Mind recommendations this year with Sonlight sprinkled in. I've found that I am terrible at following a schedule so as long as I have a Spine for history and science then I just follow that and then add in the extra books as we go.
   For history we are working on Story of the World 2 (SOTW) We just finished up reading chapter 12 this week and learned how Tariq lead an Islamic army to invade Spain and also about the rock of Gibraltar. I've heard of it before but now we know what it is all about :) Here are Noah and Kayla working on their mapwork that accompanies SOTW2 from the activity guide.

For science we are using the TWM recommendation for third grade science (I think, or 2nd :) ) Anyway, we have SL Sci C and after about 12 weeks we haven't really cracked into too many science experiments so we have added in Adventures with Atoms and Molecules book 1. Right now we are aiming at doing at least 2 experiments a week and the kids are loving it. They are also keeping a science notebook along with it. We did experiment 1 and 3 this week, skipped 2 because I didn't have a balloon :)
   Anyway, here they are discovering how molecules move in hot vs. cold liquids. On the right the tea took a longer time to darken up since it was colder than the left one. Also the picture with the plate is them putting food coloring on an ice cube. That was to show how molecules are so close in solids so the foreign molecules (food coloring) aren't able to get in.

I don't have any exciting pics to show of math and LA, but we are doing well in those areas too. Both kids are loving their AAS(All about spelling), FLL(First Language Lessons), and WWE(Writing with ease) work. Kayla is doing well with math but ds hates it so I am thinking about letting him just do Life of Fred but then work on his math facts. There is a lot of meat in LOF, but I think he still needs to work on getting his facts down so I got him a little math gadget to do that :)
    Anyway, hope you all have a good week and can't wait to post about what we learn next one :)