I love anytime I can teach the kids science through personal application, for example, we learned botany through growing a garden this summer. There are many great resources available out there to do this. Some with ideas for how to teach your kids math while grocery shopping or while cooking or even when quilting. When I asked my kids what they specifically wanted to learn this year in addition to the studies I had already planned for us. Amazingly they all agreed on one topic - cooking! So I immediately began thinking about how I could incorporate all of the science there is involved in cooking - tons of chemistry and physics and math. Then I remembered a great show on the Food Network called Good Eats hosted by Alton Brown- each show is devoted to a different ingredient or type of dish that he teaches all of the great science behind and in addition to this he teaches the history of the food, proper sanitation, and even a little word etymology! The more I thought about it the more excited I got, deciding that this was the route I wanted to take if I could find his show on DVD. I checked online and sure enough I could get 9 episodes for about $16 - WOW!  But then my husband was telling me how cool our new DVR was that the dish company had offered us to try. *Ding!* A lightbulb went on! I could set this very cool little machine to record all of the episodes right from the TV! Free curriculum! So I immediately read up on how to get it to record more than one episode and it was as easy as pressing the record button twice!

*Ding!* Yes after that another lightbulb came on - there must have been steam pouring out of my ears with all this thinking I was doing! (  : If I could record this program then there were tons more that I would love to use for our school that I could record! So I got out the trusty remote control and voile! I had set the DVR to record all of the episodes of:

Drive Thru History

Newton's Workshop

Moody Science Classics

American Heritage Series

Travel the Road

Kent Hovind's Creation Series

and

Ancient Secrets of the Bible

I can't tell you how excited I am! Most of these were on a wants list for me and now I am getting them for free!

For more great ideas go on over to Works for me Wednesday @ Rocks in my Dryer