Posted in homeschool

This post is my entry to win a camera in the "Share Your Favorite Lesson Plan" Contest sponsored by Sprittibee and Academic Superstore.

So, because every lesson in our home is usually something that we just take and run with, picking ONE as my favorite was not only a daunting task, but a completely impossible one.  Therefore, I just hopped on to one of the most recent lessons we had.  As you know we use FIAR as our primary curricula.  Five in a row, is in my very humble opinion, the greatest curriculum out there!  We are currently using Beyond Five in a Row Volume 1 with the older children.  And that means that we are reading and rowing "Homer Price".

One of the lessons in Homer Price is building a simple machine.    Since Homer had created a pulley system to pull Aroma into his room at night the original plan of course involved a building a pulley system, but when the kids saw the catapult in the book we checked out from the library it won out!  (A pulley will be coming later this week). 

You can see D and M working hard on sawing the wood.  They measured everything and sawed and drilled before it was ready to be put together.  Once it was all together they both looked at the way the arm wobbled, so they pulled it apart and added washers.  Then they noticed that the launched object wasn't flying as far as they hoped (In homeschool terms that would be:: The range of the object was not what they hoped).  So they pulled it apart again and moved the arm forward (or would that be backward?) and relaunched until they got the trajectory right.

At one point the kids became human targets, standing in front of the paint soaked sponges that were being launched by the catapult.   Of course by that time they had the trajectory and range just right...so they hit their target every single time.

Next up: Removing stains from laundry.