Flowers are Amazing!

Thank's to Joshua for the title of this post.

For science this week we learned about flowers.

Our first activity was to dissect tulips, which were graciously donated by neighbors. My tulips died weeks and weeks ago, but that is another story. We found the petals, the stamen, pistols, stigma, and even some ovules. We talked about how if the pollen cane get onto the stigma, it will creep down into the pistol and turn the ovules into seeds and then in turn the seeds may become flowers themselves. This brought up the whole concept of pollination and bees, bugs, etc., why flowers smell and have colors, and about how the fruit grows. Each little apple blossom, if pollinated, is making way for a new apple full of new seeds! Here are the photos.

A Pistol

here you can see where the blossom fell off and the ovules are growing into seeds deep inside what will someday be a delicious pear!!

This is the picture we used as our dissection guide.

She had to make one of just petals.

All of Joshua's creations. Even a sword made out of flowers. He is still a boy, of course.

Our second flower project was to create our own ideal flower gardens (this was not academically challenging but it was artistic and fun to do). We have a bunch of gardening and seed catalogs so we just took some scissors and glue to them and made our creative creations. Abigail said she wanted to paint too, so we got out some paints as well.  I even made one too. Mine is what I am eventually going to plant around our front tree and outside the front bedroom window where the shade makes it almost impossible to grow anything else - even tulips and daffodils it seems.

And then I planted marigolds in my garden! I've never done this before, but everyone else does it so I figure it's important. Many people think it helps keep away certain bugs, but a couple of websites said it doesn't. Unfortunately, nobody is claiming it keeps ALL the bugs away, which would be wonderful. My gardening know how come essentially from just copying everybody else, so if you see me cutting a roast in half...

You can't really see, but there are marigolds planted between the mounds.

Derek too the day off of work on Friday and we went on a little hike above our old neighborhood in Springville. I was surprised at the many wildflowers there were up there, so I made the kids pay attention to them and called it a field trip.

And last but not least, our biggest healthiest tomato plant blossomed! We've got two little flowers on this plant and it makes me so happy because this is one of the plants we started from seed in our kitchen. I feel like a success!

The End of Rome

We finally finished Rome. I know, including this post, there are technically only 2 posts about it, but we've actually finished our third week studying Rome. I think because it's the end of the year and the weather is so nice and the garden needs so much attention, I am having a hard time focusing on school. Still, we were able to do some good things. On Monday we read about Pompeii and Mt. Vesuvius. We had an amazing book that should the area of Pompeii from it's original beginning (huts, etc) and followed one particular hut until the present day. So the hut went from a one room hut to a modest farm house to a big city house, wars, earthquakes, the volcano eruption and burial, to rediscovery, and now tourist attraction. Through the book, of course, you also learn a lot about the Roman culture.

On Wednesday we focused on the military, their armor, jobs (centurions, auxiliaries, etc.) machinery (ballista, catapults), and the whole road making bit. The purpose of this was to get ready for Friday, in a way, because we would be talking about Christianity in Rome and about the Armor of God. The Christians at that time would have been very familiar with armor as the Romans left soldiers in every land and place they conquered, so for Paul to use the comparison of a soldier's armor with our spiritual armor makes a lot of sense. On Friday we also talked about Paul and his trip to Rome. This was fun to talk about because we also mentioned how a lot of the New Testament is a collection of letters that Paul wrote to Christian congregations. We were able to talk about what happened to those churches, and that even though around 350 AD Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the priesthood and authority had long been lost and those churches began adapting and manipulating the doctrine so that the truth became lost. And of course how can you talk about the loss of the truth without talking about the restoration of the truth! So that was a fun conversation.

Here are our lapbooks on Ancient Rome.
This first lapbook is Joshua's. He didn't arrange his mini books by topic, but just by what fit best where. I've got photos of the inside of each mini book as well. The lapbook template creator did a great thing when she added pre-written answers to some of the books. Joshua hates writing in these books so he appreciated that on some he could just cut and paste.

This is Abigail's lapbook. She's still practicing bubble letters.

After the kids had finished their lapbooks, Lukas woke up and asked where his was. I had made a couple of mini books over the last three weeks, but I gave him mine and Joshua and Abigail were excited to help Lukas make a lapbook of his very own, which he probably proclaimed to Derek, "I made this all by myself!"

Next week is our last week of history before summer break. We're finishing up with the Byzantine Empire. It should be pretty brief. We're all ready for summer around here!