Our new study - learning about light.

Our Sonlight Science curriculum is covering light, and we decided to turn it into a bigger unit study. I remember studying light in Std 6, and it was the first time that Science was actually interesting for me.
We made a box, decorated with a lot of stickers and cards inside, but then sealed it up completely so no light came in. The little ones got to look in when it was dark and see nothing, and then we opened up a little sunroof and the whole scene inside lit up. A simple experiment yes, but it led on to some interesting discussion as to what light from the sun is actually doing, and how we can see colours.

This cool pair of glasses splits white light into all it's colours, quite a surreal thing to wear as you walk around staring at various light sources.


Eden and Niamh discovering what Translucent, transparent and opaque means.
This is one experiment I particularly liked at school, so I was chuffed to find a prism. The sunlight is coming through it as white light.
But as we turned the prism we split the white light up into the spectrum of colours.

Finishing off our Netherlands Study

It was good to go over Vincent van Gogh again, it has been a long time since our study of him.


The girls made posters!


Eden wrote a story about Aardina, a Dutch girl.

And some facts about windmills in The Netherlands.

Some books about Netherlands we enjoyed

These are two books that has been added to our collection, the pictures and stories are captivating, I especially remember the one about the boy from my childhood.

Learning about The Netherlands

After reading a book on Corrie Ten Boom, we decided to start learning about Holland, and we have all enjoyed it thoroughly. The country is so close to us, hopefully we can get to visit one day soon.

We have tried many ways to present and keep our unit studies. When the girls were younger, everything went up on the wall, and they loved admiring their work, I think it was suitable for them at that age, as Ciara loves to see her work up on the walls now. Unfortunately though with that method, everything eventually gets thrown away, and we have nothing to go and look at once the children have finished a unit study(except for photos of course). We have tried lapbooking, but I feel it is too fiddly for me, and one has to always be so well prepared to create all the mini books. But it finally dawned on me just to keep it simple and save everything in files. The added bonus of this is if they come back to a subject later on to study it further, they can just keep adding to the file. We will have different files for History, Writing, Geography etc and these will not need to be thrown away from year to year, they can just keep adding and adding. It was a simple decision, but one that already works well and feels comfortable to us all.

We have been incorporating more map work into their studies, I have just felt now is the time to expand on this area of their education(more about this later).
A stained glass watercolour tulip. - Niamh.
Eden's.
A poem about tulips.

A spring watercolour by Eden

Jude reading!

Jude loves reading to me everyday, and he now reads all the Tintin and Asterix books and library books by himself which has given him a lot of confidence, his reading is coming along in strides!!

Some books we are enjoying

We really enjoy reading books as a family, and I only wish we had more free time to read even more, but these are a few we are enjoying together at the moment.

A friend had given me the idea to memorize a whole book. It is something I have thought about in the past too, but have never given it a go. I remembered a sermon by youth pastor, Rick Holland about how he and one of his young peoples groups memorized the book of James. He recommended memorizing the book of James because of the wonderful opportunity to have such a practical book stored in memory but also because it is one of the shorter ones, and so easier. We started memorizing it together, and the children picked it up faster than me, but I realized pretty quickly that some of it was just memorization with no understanding, and that kind of memorization was not likely to stick for very long, and so we embarked on studying the book of James together. I picked up this great children's commentary from Day One publications and I only wish they had this for every book of the Bible, the children are really enjoying it.
The next book purchase was inspired by a wonderful testimony we heard at our church a few months back. The book, The Case for Christ was brought up and highly recommended, so when I looked I was really surprised to see that the author had written a children's version too. It is basically apologetics for children, and the girls have already seen how beneficial it is. They do come up against friends who don't believe and have had a few arguments thrown their way, this book will help to equip them to deal with these situations better, and provide them with clearer answers, based on the Bible to help explain Christianity more clearly.
And we have just finished Corrie Ten Boom, Christian Heroes book. This has actually led us on to our next study - Holland. It could've led us on to WW2, but I think that would be more appropriate when they are older. We are really enthusiastic to learn about Holland, and if we are fortunate enough, we hope to take a short holiday there this year.