My friends! I’ve got to tell you in the homeschooling department, were moving along fabulously. Though it was a bit of an emotional roller coaster (more on that later) we seem to be sticking to the schedule and learning every day.

This week was “STEM Week” at our house. I thought I’d share some projects that worked for us and the kids enjoyed so yours can too!

Sink Or Float

The idea is really easy. Take a large bowl and fill it with water. Or just do this in your bathtub if applicable. Then use one piece of paper per child and write “Sink or Float” at the top. I then had them pick four objects each that they wanted to know about. Before placing each object into the bowl they wrote the objects name under their guess. (Bonus spelling lesson) We were pleasantly surprised to find out what our stuff would do and this entertained them for quite a while.

Flotation Device Challenge

This one brought a lot of excitement to learning. The boys were challenged with “helping Mr. Shark because he hurt his fin and doesn’t want to sink to the bottom”. Using the same big bowl and two like figures, the kids had to create flotation devices using found objects. What I found interesting is how vastly different my kid’s brains work as shown in their devices.

Water Bead Dice Game

This one is pretty simple, I got this water beads kit and paired it with some dice for a game. The rules are: roll the dice to see how many water beads you collect, using the tongs. The first one to fill up their cup wins. I liked this for a few reasons: it was time consuming fun, we used counting and addition (by rolling the dice two times and adding the dots), it worked on their fine motor skills because those beads are hard to grab with tongs!

Walking Rainbow

We actually teased “STEM Week” last week and I pictured it in my week one post. A few people asked about it so I thought I’d share more details. Here’s what we used as a guide to the Walking Rainbow Experiment. My thoughts on this experiment:

• It seems like not a lot of “bang for your buck” but I disagree. It took me all of 1 minute to set up and we spent a lot of time watching it, talking about it, etc. They wouldn’t let me clean it up for two days.
• My water levels were shorter and it took a lot longer than I expected. It actually lost our attention and I had to help it “walk” so I would raise them up.
• The flip side is, the extra time allowed up to discuss primary colors, secondary colors and make guesses on what the mixed colors would be. Even my kindergartner had fun guessing.

Painting With Fruit

One day in our “STEM Week” was food based and I chose this project because it helps sent up our seed sowing unit next week. The basic idea is cut a couple of pieces of fruit in half, grab some paint, and let them experiment with what the fruit shapes are like inside and out. My inspiration was this article, “Painting With Fruits And Vegetables”.

Soft Pretzels

One of the last things we did for “STEM Week” was to explore kitchen science as part of our food unit. Our family loves soft pretzels so we gave it a try. In working through it we talked about chemistry and while the dough rose specifically reactions. We also worked on fine motor rolling out the dough. My little guy made all of the pretzel shapes on his own. We used this recipe to guide us and probably the biggest hurdle will be Brewer’s Yeast if you don’t have it on hand. I’ve look at about a dozen recipes, they all require some amount and I haven’t successfully found a way around that.

We’re working on all kinds of fun stuff over here for “Frog Week” right now so stay tuned. Also, check out my Pinterest Board called “Quarantine School” for more ideas.