who says school can't be fun?

The educational packs from K'nex are incredible!!! I mentioned yesterday that we were doing a project from the Simple Machines: Gears pack. Well... they built the mechanism that rolls a car window up and down. The kits are amazing and then pair them with the teacher guide and you've got an incredible educational experience. The kids beg to do these and after just building two models (we spread out the projects for those school days were we seem to be lacking focus but need to keep doing school... if you know what I mean).... they have several concepts down. They can tell you which is the driver gear and which is the driven gear, they can tell you that in this project our rotational input gave us a linear output and that the first gear train is connected to the second gear train by an axle.

We thought Alex would love these just because he loves to build, but I'm loving them too. They're super easy to use in the homeschool environment. I'm definitely going to add a new one to our homeschool order each year... hopefully working up to this one eventually! :-) I think in addition to the science kits... we might add this math one as well.

So, here are a couple of pics of Alex with his K'nex car window....
(he's looking through the window... LOL!)

Today we worked on a Snow lapbook kit from Hands of a Child (their site is down for maintenance at the moment). This was our first foray into lapbooking and we had a lot of fun with it! The kids really enjoyed it too! Ours won't end up being an actual lapbook... we're gluing everything to letter sized cardstock instead. Then we'll three hole punch the pages and connect them with metal rings.

I find it's really hard for all three of us to stick to our "regular" school schedule during the month of December. So, we're filling our days with projects (the K'nex) and fun unit studies! I found another Hands of a Child lapbook on the symbols of Christmas... that might be fun for next week!

Alicia and Ia thank you so much for the information on the sleds! The price is right so we may give them a try (well.. maybe not me personally LOL!).

Okay... I've rambled on enough!