Weekly Wrap-Up: The One with the Cheek Cells

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Weekly Wrap-Up

Happy Friday! What a nice week it’s been here. It was our last week of school before our first break week of 2014 and we’ve enjoyed a little taste of spring with temps near 70 degrees a couple of days. I even had the heat off and a couple of windows open yesterday – in February, y’all. Nice.

Of all our subjects, I think we had the most fun with science this week. We looked at plant and animal cells under the microscope. We all love the microscope labs. We used onion skin for the plant cell and cheek cells for the animal cell. I contributed the cheek cells since both of my kids thought that sounded gross. I’m really not sure what’s gross about scraping the inside of your cheek, but whatever.

I know this is a crazy weird picture, but if you look closely you can kind of see the cheek cell in the microscope. Feel free to ignore all the junk on the table:

IMG_9949

We’re also finishing up our first round of books for history since next week is break week. It’s really cool how well our history curriculum is falling into the schedule I’d prefer. We were using Trail Guide to Learning, which is broken down into six week units. We finished the series, so we switched to History Odyssey, which we’ve used and enjoyed before.

I decided to try to make History Odyssey fit our six weeks on/one week off schedule, so I picked up the first four books that are supposed to be read and figured up how many lessons I thought we could get through in six weeks. I didn’t even realize that it would work out that we would finish the early part of the Middle Ages just before the history text goes into the feudal system. It worked out perfectly!

We’ll study the feudal system for the next six weeks and then History Odyssey goes into a study of Asia during the Middle Ages. I really couldn’t have planned it any better if I’d tried.

It was Josh’s turn for breakfast this week. It was supposed to be his turn last week, but the snow kept us at home. I’m still surprised at how much the kids enjoy this one-on-one time. I wish we’d done this sooner.

We kept my niece on Tuesday. I think that’s going to be our regular day. She’s such a good baby, but keeping her still makes me appreciate young moms and wonder how I did it when I was one. It sure is nice having older kids who don’t mind helping out with her while I’m trying to fix meals and having older kids also makes it much easier to still do what we need to do when Baby B is over.

The younger kids are gone this weekend for a worship/missions event at church and Brianna has to work most of the weekend. That means that Brian and I get a rare date weekend. I’m looking forward to it!

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Kris Bales is a newly-retired homeschool mom and the quirky, Christ-following, painfully honest founder (and former owner) of Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers. She has a pretty serious addiction to sweet tea and Words with Friends. Kris and her husband of over 30 years are parents to three amazing homeschool grads. They share their home with three dogs, two cats, a ball python, a bearded dragon, and seven birds.

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13 Comments

  1. I just love your individual breakfast idea. I’ve been trying to figure out how I could incorporate that with my guys, or at least something similar. Time alone with each of them is really premium and yet I think it is so important, probably more so as they get older.
    Your science posts recently are giving me a kick up the derriere! I have got to do more science with my gang!
    Have a lovely weekend with Brian (I am just a tinsy bit jealous)

  2. We just got a microscope, and yesterday I told my 12-year-old that we could swab the inside of our cheeks to look at the cells. She rolled her eyes and said, “Well, THAT’S not gross.” Preteens. Sigh…

  3. I really enjoy reading what y’all have been up to. I am looking into getting a microscope and had thought about Apologia biology for my son for next year so you can bet I’ll be looking into that kit you mentioned in the comments. Sounds about right for our needs.

  4. Oh, I love the idea of a six-week on/one week off plan. Does that mean you school through summer as well? I can see that working for us. Summertime is fun, but it can get really long. We always have a million farm things to do in the summer, but in the heat of the day, when it’s too hot to play outside anymore, doing some lessons could be fun.

    I’ve ordered the Einstein in a Box plan and cannot wait for our first box to arrive. I see many cool science experiments in our future!

    Thank you for hosting this link-up. It is nice to see what other families are doing.

    1. We school July-May, taking off all of June and December. If I recall correctly, we’re on our third year of this schedule and I only wish we’d done it sooner.

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