A Baker's Dozen: Daily Life in a Large Family: Unit Studies

You know you have a large family when...

...your children feel sorry for families with only six or seven children.
...people ask if you're competing with the Duggars.
...even your friends aren't sure how many children you have.
...your family no longer fits in a 15 passenger van.
..complete strangers feel welcome to comment on your fertility and contraceptive methods.
...two of your daughters go for a walk...and get asked by a neighbor if they're foster kids.
...you have to carry three health insurance cards in your wallet- because that's how many it takes to fit everyone's name.
...you take the wrong child to the dentist...simply because your handwriting on the calendar was messy and both started with a "j".
...grocery shopping for 30 children and 12 adults for a two day camp constitutes a "small" shopping trip for you.
You find yourself relating some small incident to your husband and starting with the words, "Well, I only boiled twenty-six eggs for breakfast..."
...you buy a 40 pound box of bananas intending to make banana bread and freeze a bunch for smoothies...but your children eat them all first.
...you find an afternoon root canal relaxing.
...it takes you twenty-three minutes on the phone to schedule your children's dental appointments.
...you've given up on using your toaster entirely and make all of your toast under the broiler in you oven.
...you are seriously tempted by the stacking cribs you see at Goodwill for $19.99.
...you find yourself thinking, "Wow, the house is so quiet and peaceful with only nine children".
...you have enough children to constitute not one, but TWO large families.
...you have a laundry basket devoted entirely to lonely socks seeking their mate.
...when you got to buy your children those cool "spin toothbrushes" because you think they get their teeth so much cleaner...but the store doesn't carry enough styles/colors for your children to each have a different toothbrush.
...when you can't take all of your children to the doctor's office at the same time because the waiting room has only 10 seats.
...when you still have seven children that are required by law to sit in a carseat or booster seat.
...you call the doctor to get your children tetnus shots, and they tell you they don't have enough in the office and need to order more from the health department.
...you take up more than one entire pew in church.
...you take only half of your children to the library, and STILL get asked if they're all yours.
...you go to fill your children's flouride prescription at the phamacy and you clean them out of every pill they have...and it's still not enough.
...you spend sixty dollars on socks...and not everyone gets new socks.
...you go shopping at Costco and the cashier asks if you're having a soccer barbecue.

April 13, 2009

Light, Color and Rainbows {Unit Study}

Friday we finished a week long unit study on light, color and rainbows. Once again, it was completely exhausting, but so worth all the hard work. There was something for everyone in this unit. We read about twenty (really!) books on light and color. Some for the older children, some for the younger. We bent light with a prism (just like Isaac Newton, in the book we just finished) and viewed the color spectrum through a spectroscope (Milestones in Science).

I would guess that the most exciting activity for my little ones was this.

I whipped up a huge batch of whipping cream and added a little food coloring. Each child was given a blob of the three primary colors on a cookie sheet and allowed to mix the colors. You should have heard the squeals of surprise and delight as they made new colors. "Mama, Mama, yellow and red make orange!". They were so excited over their discoveries.

And for those of you who care to follow the saga of Avi and Tucker, here's a little glimpse of their personalities in whipped cream.

Careful, precise, artistic Tucker carefully mixing each color.

And then there's Avi. Why bother mixing the colors when you can just dive in and smear whipped cream all over the place?

And while all this was going on out on the deck, the older children were using water color pencils to make works of art.

Several times over the week, I've had my little children say something along the lines of, "Look, Mama, it's a primary color!" It's amazing how much even a three or four year old can pick up in study like this. For the older children I focused more on how light affects colors and the scientific aspect of it. One of the best resources we found was Billy Nye the Science Guy's Light and Color DVD. He explained light and color much better than I could have :)

Hilary, who was also studying rainbows over at her place, donated the beautiful rainbow poison...oops, I mean jello.

And because we like to do things with a little flair around here, we ended our week with, what else? A Rainbow Party. Complete of course, with rainbow foods (blue and yellow chips, red salsa, green guacamole, rainbow popcorn, rainbow veggies and rainbow fruit salad). And a handful of friends.