Blending A Family of Dorks

One of the advantages of homeschooling is the ability to really engage in whatever is most interesting to the child being homeschooled. Davis has always been interested in anything to do with science and nature so when I saw a post on a Facebook homeschool group I'm a part of about a class on rocks and minerals, I immediately said we'd be there. This class was planned and scheduled by a fellow homeschool mom who has boys very close to the same ages as my boys so I knew this would be a great one for Davis and Tyrion.  Of course Davis got a lot more out of it than Tyrion but it was still fun for Tyrion to have the chance to touch and pick up a variety of different rocks and just be around other kids learning things at the same time. Between Davis and I we took a lot of pictures so I'm going to let them do most of the talking for us. First up are pictures of the tools used to mine rocks and crystals.  The kids each got to choose a few rocks from this bin ...

This particular experiment was put together very quickly and was not a favorite for Davis. The end result was quite goopy and a little slimy,  he doesn't like handling things with that texture so definitely keep that in mind if you plan to recreate it at home. We found this experiment at Science Fun . They have a lot of fun looking experiments that we plan to try in the future so be sure to check them out if you like the ones we've done before. We'd love to hear what you think and get some new ideas for experiments to try so please leave a comment below.

One of Davis' favorite subjects has always been science and in particular he loves hands on experiments so now that we're homeschooling, we plan to do a lot of these. Since he enjoyed creating the Neighborhood Nature Tour video , we decided to set up the camera while he did this cool experiment too. I actually saw a video of this experiment on Facebook before we did it and it was so simple that I didn't bookmark the video or website for the instructions however, I'm now seeing many variations on different science websites so we may have to revisit this one and see how the variations turn out. As always, please feel free to leave feedback with advice or new experiments you'd like to see Davis try. Thanks for visiting and viewing his videos!

Davis recently recorded a series of videos that the edited along with pictures into a YouTube video guiding people through the nature he has found in our own neighborhood. While I held the camera and showed him how to use the editing software, he did all the actual writing and directing as well as the editing to create this video. We were really lucky to see a bald eagle and some smaller birds as well as some beautiful river views and we discovered a small creek nearby where we hope to see some other animals in the future. He had a lot of fun filming and editing this so hopefully we will be doing more of them in the future. We would love to hear what you think of this video and if you have any advice or topics for future videos.