Halloween homeschool day #2

The boys helped make both a double batch of pancakes and waffles.  I'm so sick of hearing that we have nothing for breakfast in our house so I suggested we make a bunch ahead of time and freeze them.



The boys readily agreed and helped measure, pour, mix, etc.  They sat down to watch an episode of "Weird Kratts Week" (it's really just Wild Kratts but with new and weird animals this week) while I baked breakfast. 
     
 For school today, Evan worked on another Halloween dot- to - dot while Alec and Ian played a game called 4 in a row.   I found this printable game on Pinterest and followed it to a site called teachers pay teachers.

It's free to sign up (and many of the printable lessons and games are free too) so I figured why not join?!  I downloaded this free printable game.

It looks like a large bingo game and there's an addition or subtraction problem in each box.  The two boys each picked out their own colored counters and took turns solving a problem and putting their counter on it.  The first one to get 4 in a row wins.  The first game was a draw and then each of the boys won one.


After math we did another fun science experiment called Bag of Blood (this was also at the kitchen pantry scientist blog I mentioned yesterday).

We took a Ziploc bag and filled it with colored water.

 Holding the bag over a tray (to catch any drips), we poked wooden skewers through the bag completely from one side to the other.  According to the site, as long as you avoid any areas that have air you can poke several skewers through without the bag leaking.


Apparently, there isn't enough pressure on the water inside the bag to force it out the small holes you're making (and keeping plugged).  Plus we noticed that the plastic is bendable and sticks to the skewers which almost seals the holes back up.  We were able to fit 23 wooden skewers in our baggie without it leaking all that much.

They thought this was the coolest experiment ever!

Once we had several skewers in our bag we did experiment to see what would happen if we put a skewer through the air at the top of the bag, what would happen if we opened the bag, and what happens if we skewer a few close together.

The only one that really started leaking was when we had two skewers real close together so I guess it wasn't all about air pressure!

After math we started our new chapter book called Kitten in the Candy Corn.


We also read a few poems.  Then we brainstormed a whole, huge list of Halloween words and ideas in preparation for our writing activity.

We wrote some Halloween acrostic poems.  I had Evan write his name and the word Halloween down the side of his paper and then we worked together while Alec and Ian went to town writing their own.  Ian seemed to have no problem doing this today and I was glad to see writing become a bit easier for him.  Alec, however, got half the letters done and then went to his room crying (again).  He came down after a while and I tried to help him a bit.

I know they hate writing and I hate to force them but I feel like they hate writing because they don't practice it often enough.  I'm trying to find less painful ways of getting them to write but I still don't think we've hit upon it just yet.
     
For lunch we made English muffin mummies.  It was cute and super easy.  You can find the recipe here.  I forgot to buy olives at the store for the eyes, and honestly, my kids wouldn't eat them anyway.  Ian used cut up meatballs instead, Alec used a piece of pepperoni and Evan tried putting roasted pumpkin seeds on his.



We worked on a few art projects today.  One is called mixed media pumpkins that I found at one of my favorite art sites; that artist woman!  For today we just glued the various papers onto what will be our pumpkins.  We'll paint them tomorrow.

Once that was done, I had the boys draw a simple, large pumpkin on a blank sheet of black scrapbook paper paper.  I encouraged them to fill the paper with their pumpkin as best they could and had them draw a few lines.

We then traced over the pencil drawing with black glue (regular liquid school glue I had added some black acrylic paint to so it will dry black).



Once dry we'll color them in with chalk pastels like the ones shown here.

Others in the series:

Homeschooling Halloween Day 1

Linking Up With:

JENerally Informed



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