Switzerland Unit: Mountains...

I'm so bad about having us do science...  But since geology has always been one of my things, we get a fair bit of it in at least...  In fact, the other day we were discussing grade level.  One of Miss A's friends is a boy who shares her exact birthday.  He is in fifth grade.  She is in fourth.  (We, B and I, decided that since it is a late August birthday, and since she has had some disruptive moves and less than ideal teachers, we would hold her back a year.  Besides, what's the rush?)  This boy really lords it over her, and tells her she must be stupid or something.  So we talked about it.  I said that since we are in homeschool, grade level doesn't matter as much.  I said yes, she's in fourth grade, and that is where she is in math and stuff.  But in other areas, like earth science, she is probably in about ninth grade level, because we learn so much about volcanoes, plate tectonics, rocks, etc.  That made her feel better.  I said that her friend is in fifth grade, but in some areas, like ornithology, he might be in college level (he's very passionate about birds).  But in other areas he may be lower than her.  Mostly I want her to learn to not care about what other people say or think about her, but that's a hard lesson for everyone to learn...

Here are the mountain books we read:


This one is a good intro, not too much on each page.  Just enough for Miss A and Miss M to read as their last thing at the end of the school day before they got released to the great outdoors.  Any more text and they would have self-destructed.


Also good, early reader level.  A small child would be able to sit through.


These two also, good background info.


This one we did not like.  Well, I didn't.  It has some basic factual errors.  ("Plants grow at the bottom of mountains."  Really?  What about all the alpine plants?)

It did lead to a good discussion of two good words, alpine, and timberline.  So that was nice.  We went back through all the photos in all the books and looked at treelines and alpine flowers.

Also, we talked about mountains in the Gospel.  I asked them where Moses went to talk to Jehovah?  Also Abraham and his vision, Nephi and his vision,  Brother of Jared took his stones to the top of a mount to ask Jesus to touch them.  Isaiah calls the temple the mountain of the Lord, etc.

Miss A Book Report

I read Who Is Malala Yousafzai by Dinah Brown.  The book is about a girl who was trying to stand for her right to go to school.  When she was 15, there was a war going on, and these people thought women couldn't do the same things as men.  So they said girls couldn't' go to school.  Her father owned a girls' and boys' school.  The people who were fighting Malala's country said that her father should shut down his school and re-open it only for boys.  But he said "No, I will keep my school open."  The bad guys were really angry at him.  So one day when Malala was going to school in a little bus about 15 feet long, the bus stopped, and two men hopped on the bus and said "Who's Malala in here?"  Everyone just took a glance at her and the bad guys knew who Malala was that instant because they had looked at her.  They shot Malala in the head.  After that she didn't remember anything.  Like being taken to the hospital, then she had to go to a greater hospital in England, which was 4000 miles away from her home.  But she survived the shot by real big surgeries done on her head.  Her hearing wasn't well and they had to do surgeries on her hearing as well.  Meanwhile her family was packing up to go visit her in England.  Once she was feeling better a little, she had to take a little walk in the morning, a longer walk after lunch, and an even bigger walk after that.  She was lucky she was in England because they had a really big university that Malala could go to.  She wanted to stay in England because the war was still going on.  But she could still do skype to her friends that she really missed.  She was still fighting to let girls go to school and she won the Nobel Peace Prize.  Also, she is the youngest person yet to have won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Egypt Unit: Mummifying an Apple...

This was a lot of fun.  Hard to wait for a week to see the results, but the girls had fun pouring the cups out to discover what was inside.  Here are the results, and then I'll put in the girls' reports on their findings at the end.

 Here they are with the apples in the cups.

 These three, one above and two below, show the one in salt.  The salt had solidified, and they had to chip the apple out.

These three show the apple that was put in cornmeal.

The girls wanted to replicate a mummy with wrappings, so they wrapped an apple slice in paper towels and put it in sand.

 These next three show the one put in sugar.

 The apple put in sugar was wet and moldy gross.

 This one was a surprise to me.  I had read that you could replicate natron, the mummifying agent the Egyptians used, by adding baking soda to salt.  As you can see in the above and below photos, the results were pretty nasty.  I thought it would work better.

 These two, above and below, show the apple slice left in salt and lime juice.

 The rest show the slice left in sand.

 It looked so good that I washed it off.

Sliced it up, and made them eat it.  Not me though.

They liked it, and said it tasted just like a normal apple.  They had fun eating a "mummified" apple.

Here are their results.  Both sides of Miss M's, then both sides of Miss A's.

Egypt Unit: Feast and Misc...

Egypt had so much to cover...  Here are some other things we did:

 We visited the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in DC to see lots of artifacts.  The mummified ox was a favorite.

 I thought this coffin was beautiful.  The girls also liked seeing lots of shabtis, since we had read so much about them.  Also, I can't find  the pictures, but the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk VA has an amazing Egyptian collection as well.  A gorgeous sarcophogus, cat and falcon statues, lots of other things.

We had our Egyptian feast.  Labor intensive, but some of the things were tasty.  We had mint limeade, falafel, cheese bread things, koshary, and kebabs.  B liked the seasoning on the meat even more than his favorite Stephen Raichlen rub recipe, which is high praise indeed.