Last week was a busy week as always and especially with the many fun projects we were able to accomplish!

For my 4 year old daughter's alphabet box we learned the letter "J" last week.  I had my daughter color a "J" template that I got here and I drew jigsaw pieces on the template.  After I helped her cut out the pieces she glued the letter back together and I cut out a border to look like an outline of puzzle pieces.  So it looked like this:


One thing she made, along with my 7 year old, was a jellyfish.  They were super easy and fun!  We used 1/2 of a paper plate, chenille sticks, glue, tape, googly eyes and markers.


I also read books about Jesus and Jonah while they were doing their jellyfish craft.


We hung up their creations on our alphabet wall which is really on an "A frame" ceiling, hence the slanted look in this picture :)


We also continued our Apologia Astronomy studies with 2 experiments about the planet Mars.   The first experiment was suggested by Anna-Marie at Our Life's Adventures when she was studying astronomy with her children.   So I got the same book out of the library, Mars by Steven Kipp, and tried making our own martian sand to explain why the sand on Mars is red. 





After a few days the wool started to rust in the pan with water while the other dry pan did not have rust.  We explained that the dust on Mars is red due to the iron oxide which is rust.  According to our Apologia text there is some evidence that there was liquid water on Mars at one time, but currently scientists believe there is none now.

Another fun experiment we did was build the biggest mountain peak in the entire solar system on Mars, and this volcano is called Olympus Mons.

We first made the salt dough recipe that was suggested in the Apologia text that was used for our volcano.
Our volcano is in the background with rocks around it with the text in the forefront that explained the experiment.


We then erupted our Olympus Mons by combining red food coloring, baking soda, vinegar, and dish washing liquid.

We are continuing to study ancient Greek history and this past week we made theater masks as I read information about how the Greeks only used male actors because females weren't allowed to perform.  So the men also played women's roles and usually used 2 sided masks to show 2 different emotions while performing.  Before my children began their masks, we looked up images on the computer of all the different kinds of masks to get ideas.  We stumbled upon a fun game on the computer called "Face Memory" that explained how Ancient Greeks had exaggerated features on their masks to entertain several thousand people in a big theater. This memory game tests how well your children can remember features on a mask.  My children enjoyed testing their memory skills!  Click HERE to play.  Here are some pictures from our mask activity:

My 4 year old insisted I take this picture of her with her mask as she looked into our bathroom mirror :) 

For history this year, I am teaching learning Ancient Greek history with my children during our homeschool days.  I try to cover history on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons.  Last week, we completed a salt dough map of Ancient Greece.

To clean up from the dough and paint, I had my kids clean their hands with...olive oil! We talked about how the ancient Greeks used to bathe with olive oil because Greece didn't have many rivers, and indoor plumbing didn't yet exist, so we put a little olive oil on our hands.  We all agreed that cleaning our skin with olive oil felt "greasy" and "yucky"!