Space, our next frontier!

So, I think it's pretty normal but we are once again trying a new foot for our homeschooling. We tried Earth Schooling and it just didn't fit us well. (It had elements that I liked but not enough.) then we tried to just expand on what our homeschooling group was doing and that just didn't hold his attention long enough. So new we are trying monthly themes that HE chooses. So far, so good and this is our first month. ;)
This month he choose space! And more specifically, planets. We have had a planet mobile that we were slowly working on but we hadn't done anything intense on the planets. I think I am enjoying it as much as he is. Around new years, I did some research and found some templates for mini books for a lap book. I like these because it pulls everything together for both of us. I got everything printed out and cut out what I wanted to then put it all in our "working tub" ( which is just a red tub with everything that we are studying now.)
On the days that we work on our lapbooks, we bring out the tub and go to town. I found an amazing site with videos of all the planets (and more)called Space School. He picks the planet we want to learn about then we watch the video together. As we watch, we go through out different actives. Sometimes we watch it once through then watch it again and stop when we want to and sometimes we just stop as we go the first time thought. I like to do our theme studies twice a week and on the other days we do math or reading. I try to keep them all on the theme but...and on top of that, not every theme day is a lap book day. Sometimes we will do science experiments and some days like today, we do cooking.
Today we made planet cupcakes. They are not sized correctly but they are colored and positioned in the right order. We made them with the Fun-da-middles cake mix and j wanted to add red dye to the batter. Then I just got white frosting and frosted them. After that I let him get creative. I printed out a sheet with all of the planets on it and mixed some food coloring and water in a small bowl for each color. We had to be careful because the frosting was still soft but we got the hang of it. The complicated ones like earth and Jupiter we painted with a brush. Some of the others we decided it would work better to just dip the tops into the color. He got creative with mixing the colors too. We even put rings around Saturn.
After we were done painting I was going to make him label all of them but them decided neither of us wanted to be there all day so I wrote the names of the planets on a pieces of paper (in random order) and without telling him the name, he had to label each planet. He did very good. Then we took a picture and ate our planets!
So much fun!
In love and light,
Steph, Anna, jaiden and Lilli