Our Homeschool Diary: No Accidents, Only Discoveries and Learning

We had a 5-day weekend the previous week, plus the short get-away the weekend before this, so the kids (and I included) are having severe holiday hangover and are not able to get our regular lessons started.

Kuya's History and Geography lesson was about the Middle East, so after some casual storytelling and exchanges of thoughts (we recently celebrated the UAE National Day last weekend), the topic of magnets suddenly came up.

I really cannot recall anymore how "magnets" came to discussion. I think it came as we discussed UAE's pearling industry and the discovery of oil. Anyhow, we started talking about magnets - they know how magnets work like how most metals are magnetic.

We talked about how the earth is a big magnet; magnets have poles - north and south, and that opposite poles attract, same poles repel. Well, I got a confused look from my two younger learners. Too complicated, I suppose. So let's just play.

Sand.io (A Mini-Magnet Game)

We do not have big magnets at home, only those from fridge magnets. We tried making temporary magnets by rubbing a needle to the small magnet but we could not somehow make it work. The magnet may be too weak?

On to the fun part. We headed outside armed with our small magnets and a piece of white paper.

I scooped some sand and put it on the white paper. Underneath the paper, I started to glide the magnet and to the kids' delight, small particles started moving with the magnet!

"Whoah! That is so cool, mommy!"

They made designated home bases for themselves and started to "collect" as many tiny iron bits as they could at their own corners. But then, you can't get too confident. You have to make sure that no one can penetrate your base and "steal" your "loot".

_{sand.io, their new game.}

They named their game, sand.io, inspired by one of their favorite games, agar.io. lol.

They love the game that they still play it days after we first played it.

I asked them to observe and describe the bits that they collected:

"They are color black, mommy!"

Yes, it is very different from the color of the sand. The sand is light brown while the iron bits are black.

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Surface Tension

Not related to any lesson, but another spur of the moment activity is a "surface tension" experiment.

Simply put, surface tension is the ability of water to hold up a weight on its surface because of the water molecules being attracted to each other. Insects like water strider are able to run on water because of this principle. Some things can also stay on the surface of the water even though they would normally not float.

We took a small bowl of water and some safety pins. The goal is to make the safety pin float on the water.

"Shhhh! Don't disturb the water!"

The kids' concentrated hard and after several failed attempts, finally got the hang of it. They could now easily place the safety pin on the water and make it float.

"You don't even have to wait for the water to settle down," Kuya said confidently.

Okay! Next task, clean the table! LOL.

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Soon they'll be butterflies.

A few moments later, I noticed the house was quiet. My kids had disappeared again and wandered about outside.

Apparently, they have been observing this plant that has lots of small caterpillars.

_{A small caterpillar.}

There were lots of them, more than 10, they said. They again wanted to bring one of them inside the house so they could observe it more closely, but I said we better just let them be in their own homes.

The weather has been perfect the past days, and we just want to exploit it as much as we can. We don't have this luxury all year round. This is the time we really have to "bring the classroom outdoors" and have some real good time with nature.

Three weeks to go and it's Christmas. I am thinking of some Christmas-themed activities to make and of course catch up with our lessons before the Holiday fever kicks in again.

Any Christmas activities in mind?