A Perfect Gloomy Day

It was a rather gloomy day today. You could feel fall in the air and it just felt like a good day to be inside and cozy. Our morning was full of board games and tea, with lots of laughter and friendly competition. Chase spent some time teaching Lily chess this morning. He loves chess and is always very serious about winning, but I was pleased to see him patiently helping Lily play out the game without taking advantage of her lack of chess knowledge too much. 

Unfortunately, he did not go so easy on me and quickly beat me, 2 games in a row, at Laser Khet. 

We worked on Chemistry a little, going on a chemical hunt and thinking about what chemicals we use daily, which chemicals are good and which are dangerous. 

 We had a second lab planned but got side tracked when Chase was looking at the ingredients of a Sanpellegrino and began to wonder what 32g of sugar looked like. We took out the kitchen scale and spent a good amount of time measuring out grams of sugar of any packaged food item we could find. That naturally lead to some great mental math as we had to calculate how many grams of sugar there would be total if the item had more than one serving. 

After realizing how much sugar is in packaged foods and being thankful for the reminder of one of the several reasons we need to eat fresh foods from the earth, the kids busied themselves with the microscope. 

First looking at anything and everything that would fit on the platform, and then running around outside trying to find special little pieces of nature to make their own slides with. It had been a while since we had the microscope out and they were so captivated with it.

It was the perfect day to curl up with a book and a blanket and the kids spent a good portion of the day reading story books and school books. 

 Chase checked out the neatest book on dragons from the library, so when he wasn't reading story books to Lily, he was enthralled with dragons.

Lily continued to read her book on prehistoric animals. We've been working on prehistory for months now, and she loves it. 

Lily did some notebooking on what she was looking at in the book. This is typically how we learn; we read books about the subject we want to learn about and then copy diagrams or draw pictures about it and then copy any information they deem important enough to write down. I love this way of learning. The work comes out beautiful, so the kids are happy to do it and are proud of the work they've done 

Chase is learning early American history right now so his notebooking today was on the regions of the original 13 colonies. 

The kids finished their work and moved onto chores, cleaning up our school messes and unloading the dishwasher. It was a pretty normal day, but it felt different today for some reason. Maybe it was the gloomy weather or the feeling of fall in the air, but it was one of those perfect homeschooling days that fills me with pride and joy and leaves me so grateful that they are able to experience this type of learning.