My little Stinky Face has attended preschool since he first turned 3 years old. Lately though, God has been tugging at my heart, telling me that it is time to bring him home and start homeschooling him with my older child. Not long after I felt the Lord telling me this, my husband got a promotion, which means we will be selling our home and moving out of this school district. It's as if He was preparing me for this part of our journey. Stinky Face normally goes to school Tuesday through Friday, but I am now keeping him home about one extra day each week, to do school here at home. I think it's going to work out well. He's so eager to learn. He wants to be homeschooled! My only problem is getting him to stop! He throws a fit when I say that it's time to stop. He wants to continue on, trying to do things all by himself. But he needs my direction. Just looking at this picture, you can tell how focused and intentional he is. I love every moment of it!

This is the picture he was working so hard on. I think he's doing great for a 3 1/2 year old!  :0)

SCIENCE FUN

If you're anything like me, you wouldn't consider yourself to be crafty. And you wouldn't really enjoy science experiments where you have to run to different stores to gather up all of the material that you would need, then come home and spend hours on projects, tweaking them in your own way as you go along to see what else can happen. With this being said, I am so thankful to have found www.timberdoodle.com. This is the site where I ordered all of my 6th grader's curriculum and where I found the Big Bag of Science. 

It snowed on my stove!

This bag of science has seventy different experiments that we can do and almost everything we need is in the bag! The first experiment we did was Fake Snow. We've had a very mild winter this past year, so this was the closest we could get to the real thing. All we had to do was take this powder and mix it with water and wallah! Simple and fun! 

Stinky Face playing with the snow!

ANATOMY EDIBLE CELL SCIENCE PROJECT

This is our cell (jello, with a little bit of frost from being in the back of the refrigerator).

Adding in the parts that make up a cell (candy).

G.Q. chewing on centrioles (sour candy strips).

The final cell. I'm not sure what I did wrong because it didn't completely hold together. That didn't matter though. G.Q. still enjoyed this project very much and it helped reinforce his understanding of cells.

My son invented a game that we can't get enough of. It's SO simple that even our 3 year old caught on and plays along. The whole idea is to get someone to say the word "what". When they do, you tell them that they have the word. This is harder than you might think. All he has to do to get me to say it, is catch me off guard and say, "Mom". I respond with "What?", without even thinking most of the time. I like to get him back by saying a bunch of gibberish. He has no idea what I said, so of course he'll say, "What?", and then I will answer back with, "You have the word". Give it a try and let me know what your family thinks of this silly game!

 I left the laptop open while I went to the bathroom and this is what I found when I came back! My son can be so sweet. It's moments like these that makes me feel like, maybe I'm not such a bad mom after all!  :0)

In homeschool science, we are learning more about the skeletal system. Here is an experiment that my son did:

Shape a human (or other creature) from a lump of clay. Give it long, thin legs and arms; put a head on it's shoulders. Go ahead and squish the head flat because that's what your head would look like if you did not have a skull. (My son didn't want to smash his creature.) Now see if the figure can stand up on its own. If you made your figure correctly, it will not be able to stand.

Next, break a few toothpicks into different sizes. Insert the toothpick pieces inside your figure like bones. (Creature without toothpicks is on left, being held up by creature with toothpicks on the right.) The toothpicks are like bones in the clay figure's skeleton. They gave it support so it could stand up.

A poem I wrote to Jesus this morning...

I need more of You
And less of me
More peace of mind
And less anxiety

I want to trade in
My tears, heartache and pain
For Your joy that floods over me
Like a down-pouring rain

Lord take away
All my selfish ambition
As I seek Your face
For the one true mission

As I die to my old
Prideful ways
I ask You to mold me God
I am Your clay

Help me to start
Each day with You
To walk away from distractions
As I seek out the truth