Vacation School

Posted on November 6, 2014 by Amy

A few months ago, when I was planning for our homeschool year, I sat down and planned out our schedule for the year. No, I am not one of those amazing homeschool moms who planned out every lesson for the year in July. Most days I prep what we’re going to do the night before we’re doing it, if I’m lucky (if not, I just fly by the seat of my pants, and that works just fine for kindergarten).

What I mean about planning our year is that I sat down and looked at all the weeks we would be doing school, the days/weeks we would be off, the days Miss would be at her other school, and then figured out how many hours per day I’d need to teach in order to meet our state’s requirement of 875 hours of instruction per year. I don’t actually have to do that many hours this year because formal homeschooling doesn’t have to start until next year. But this is my practice year, so I did it anyway.

This is one of the built-in “vacation” weeks for our year. We’re at the Farm for my husband’s annual week of deer hunting. I knew I wouldn’t be bringing our school work with us, so I didn’t count on logging any school hours this week.

But duh, it’s the Farm. Being here is like having a week-long field trip. I’m definitely logging some hours.

The girls got to see a groundhog in personal after the hired man captured one in the live trap (the groundhog was digging and making a mess in one of the buildings, so he was taken somewhere else). We had a nice impromptu review about groundhogs, while having the benefit of being able to point out, up close, their perpetually growing teeth and long claws for digging.

We’ve had plenty of outdoor exploration, discussing deer behaviors, inspecting scrapes, discovering where they might sleep and what they might eat.

We’ve had discussions about the formation of rocks, and there has been plenty of “gym class.” Balancing, jumping, running down and up hills, etc.

While playing on the hay bales, we found a big caterpillar. It was spiky and rolled into a ball each time we picked it up.

So, obviously, we had a discussion about animals’ natural defenses. And then we tried to guess what the caterpillar might eat, and we made a habitat for it.

I’ve laughed at myself a little bit this week, because we are not doing anything at all differently from what we would do here at the Farm if we weren’t homeschooling our kids. But since we are, I tend to think about everything differently:

“Oh, an animal skull. Science! They’re climbing. Gym class!”

Yes. I’m logging every bit of it. I love homeschooling.

Grandparents (again), Field Trips (again), and Walls (finally)

Posted on October 10, 2014 by Amy

Quick Takes Friday!

We had a lot of fun with my parents when they were here. We got to celebrate my Mom’s birthday in my very favorite way. With gifts from the Dollar Tree, of course! I let the girls each pick two things as gifts for my Mom. The two older girls really tried to choose things they thought their Grandma would like. I just love watching how proud they are to see their gifts opened and appreciated.

Miss chose a fall-themed oven mitt and a water bottle (similar to the one my Mom uses for her coffee). Lass selected a six-pack of plastic hangers and a statue of a mother holding a baby, which she immediately thought to be Mary and Baby Jesus and decided my non-Catholic mother must have it.

Sis chose a snow globe with puppies in it and what she thought was a small “bouncy ball” that turned out to be a soccer-themed washcloth.

I never get tired of the dollar store presents.

The only time our little dolls and castle ever look like this:

With every. single. one. posed at “The Ball,” is when my Mom is here.

Grandparents are the best.

Two weeks ago, we read the book A Pair of Red Clogs (set in Japan). The Godmother brought me some real Japanese clogs and kimonos and an obi and other things from Japan, that her father had brought back after WWII. She told me to let my girls touch and feel and try on and play with these wonderful items!

Somehow I only got really crummy photos, but the girls had such fun trying on the shoes and clothes and twirling and clomping around. I have such a thoughtful and generous Godmother.

I had wanted to take the girls to a hibachi restaurant for a meal/field trip, but didn’t get around to it during the week that we read the Red Clogs book. So we went with my parents on Wednesday night. The older girls loved it.

Sis didn’t want anything to do with it.

Speaking of field trips, this week we’re reading “A Glorious Flight” about how Louis Bleriot built an airplane and was the first person to fly a plane over the English Channel. We have an amazing aviation museum nearby, which was the perfect field trip this week.

In case you’re wondering, that’s at least seven field trips for us already this year!

Finally, I am very excited to show you this last photo:

Walls! We have walls finally going up. We have such a long, long way to go, I know. But this, seeing something coming up from the ground for real, has just made my weekend.

For more Quick Takes, check out the link up at Conversion Diary.

Homeschooling is Going Quite Well, Thanks for Asking

Posted on September 18, 2014 by Amy

Many people have asked me about how our first few weeks of homeschooling have been going. The answer is they have been going mostly very well. We’ve already taken several field trips, and Five in a Row has been the perfect curriculum for us to start with. We’ve covered “The Storm in the Night,” “The Story About Ping,” “Lentil,” and “Madeline” so far.

When we were reading “The Story About Ping” (which is about a duck in China) we took a field trip to a Chinese restaurant to try a new type of food and also to experiment with eating with chopsticks (yes, going out to lunch can be called a field trip when you homeschool).

The next day we learned about how ducks keep their wings dry, doing an experiment with oil and water.

And then we took another field trip.

This time we shared our lunch with a mama duck and her babies. Field trips are my favorite.

When we read “Lentil” we learned about different tastes (in the story there is a character who makes everyone pucker by sucking loudly on a lemon).

Sweet brown sugar, bitter cocoa powder, salty uh, salt, and sour lemons.

Of course, then we made lemonade,

which also counted toward gym time, they were working so hard.

This week with Madeline we didn’t do much photo-worthy stuff. Other than ice-painting French flags.

We’re taking another field trip tomorrow to a local farm. It has nothing to do with our book this week, but it’s a place with pony-riding and cow-milking and chicken-chasing, and I want to go before the regular school kids start taking their field trips. And as much as I sometimes want it to, not every thing we do is always going to fit with our book or our theme of the week. I’m cool with that. And field trips are my favorite.

The girls are also (mostly) enjoying our reading curriculum, All About Reading. It’s a good fit for us, because we’re pretty much all about reading around here these days.

The jury is still out on our math curriculum, Math U See. It’s fine, but I don’t love it, and neither does Miss. I’ve been eyeing some Life of Fred books, but I’m not quite willing to bail on our current plan. Yet.

I have bailed out on some other things that I bought out of early excitement and over-eagerness to get all the things and start teaching my kids with Catholic Stuff! I bought a bunch of workbooks from Seton Home Study School, and they just aren’t a good fit for us. Other than the handwriting book, I’m not using any of them right now.

Art, science, and social studies are mostly rolled into our FIAR work. I’m winging it on religion, knowing that Miss is getting some back up teaching in her regular school time. Right now we’re memorizing the Ten Commandments (I don’t know them by heart myself), and we celebrate various feast days, read about saints, and talk about the Mass. There is also a Bible component of FIAR that we do, which includes verses and stories that are relevant to our book for the week. I think were doing pretty good there.

I try to have Miss do a little bit of computer time here and there using PBS Kids Play or ABC Mouse. She gets music class at her regular school and she takes piano lessons. Gym is not systematic at all at this point. It’s running around the couch and playing outside and going to soccer once a week. And foreign language has not made it into the line up at all yet. I have a Spanish program for them, but I haven’t used it.

We still have some tweaking to do, but I’m very happy with how our homeschool is coming together so far.

Next week we’re reading “A Pair of Red Clogs.” It’s set in Japan. I see a field trip to the hibachi restaurant in our very near future.

7QT, Theme Thursday, All in One

Posted on August 23, 2014 by Amy

Linking with Jen and Cari today.

Cari’s Theme Thursday this week was “Google Image Search.” Easy – type your own name into Google Images and share the first image of you that comes up. Except that I am kind of crazy paranoid about keeping myself and my family somewhat anonymous on the internet. I don’t use my last name here on the blog, I don’t use my kids’ real names, etc. Add that to the fact that my last name is super generic (think Jones), and I end up with a Google image search in which not one of the photos that shows up is of me. Not. One. I would have done a screen shot of the images that did show up, but I have no idea how to do that, so here are a few samples.

^^ Not me (that’s Amy Grant in case you couldn’t tell)

^^ Also not me (that’s Amy Lee from Evanescence)

^^ Yeah, not me either (Amy Smart?)

Anyway, you get the idea. There were tons of photos that came up of people who actually do have the same name as me, but I didn’t want to put some random person’s pic on here without her permission, so these are a few of the celebs that came up.

Apparently, as far as the internet is concerned, I don’t really exist. I’m cool with that.

To see other people’s actual pictures of themselves from Google image searches, check out Cari’s Theme Thursday link here.

We started homeschooling this past week. This is earlier than I wanted to, but Miss will be starting her part-time kindergarten next week, and for the first week she’s going to go for three full days so she can get into the classroom groove and get to know the other kids. I wanted her to get a foundation of school at home before doing that, so I began before I was entirely prepared.

It’s been a little crazy. I’m not in a groove yet. I haven’t gotten things worked out so that I can work with Miss and keep the others occupied and still be able to do a little bit of one-on-one work with Lass. I don’t know what the heck I’m doing.

^^ She doesn’t use a binkie, she just found that and decided it was nice to chew on ^^

I will say that, though it has been a little crazy, I’m pleased overall with how the week went. Miss is begging for more of her reading lessons. The girls learned some fun stuff, like what onomatopoeia and personalization are (thanks, FIAR). They had fun coming up with examples of these. We did some cool art. We went on our first field trip.

The field trip was to a place called Bookworm Gardens. All of the different areas at these gardens are based on different children’s books. They even have little cubbies all around the gardens with the books in them, laminated, so you can read them while you explore.

^^ Goldilocks and the Three Bears

^^ Little House on the Prairie

^^ Horton Hatches the Egg

You get the idea.

I thought it wouldn’t be crowded, since school groups aren’t taking field trips yet. I failed to realize that, since most schools haven’t even started yet, the summer daycare programs are ending, and they’re taking field trips. The place was packed.

We had plenty of fun anyway.

In addition to having to prepare for doing my own schooling with the girls at home, I’ve had to get Miss’s stuff ready for her part-time Kindergarten too.

Which means a lot of labeling. Her teacher wants everything labeled. Each crayon. Each marker. Each colored pencil. That’s a lot of labeling. Super Friend did this last year, and she recommended her handy dandy label maker machine.

Which really is quite handy dandy. Except the labels aren’t quite as sticky as they’d need to be to stay on curved objects, like crayons and markers. I stayed up late Sunday night and got all of the items labeled. When I went to show Miss her stuff the next day, I found that on the 108 crayons, 20 skinny markers, and 10 colored pencils, the labels didn’t stay.

I panicked for a moment, and then resorted to the obvious solution. Scotch tape.

I went back and taped over every one of those suckers.

When I took Miss to meet her teacher and drop off her supplies in her classroom she said to her teacher, “My Mom was really smart, because she put my name on all of my things.”

Worth it.

Speaking of taking her to meet her teacher, the open house for her school was on Thursday. She got her school pictures taken.

She looks so grown up, and so tiny, at the same time. Look at her little feet dangling. I could cry.

We had a birthday party today.

A little girl who really loves animals is turning four tomorrow.

Naturally, we had her party at the zoo.

We had just enough time to play on the playground for a bit and see all the animals before it started to pour. Between them running out from under the covered areas to get wet on purpose, jumping in puddles, and needing to make a mad dash through the rain to the car, we had some wet kids when it was all over.

I suspect the rain and puddles were one of the highlights of the party for them.

After much deliberation, prayer, and checking (and rechecking) with my husband to be sure he’s okay with it, I have decided to become a sponsor for the RCIA program at my parish this year. The first class is September 8th. I can’t wait.

For more quick takes (probably much quicker than these!), check out Conversion Diary.

Theme Thursday – Panic, New Homeschool Mom Style

Posted on August 7, 2014 by Amy

Kindergarten. Very soon, our first real year of homeschooling will begin. I’m terrified. And disorganized. And terrified.

Cari’s theme for Theme Thursday this week is “Panic” and her post yesterday showed that even veteran homeschooling moms can be in a state of disarray and panic at this time of the year, leading to hands thrown up and spontaneous avoidance-baking. I don’t like to bake, so I haven’t gotten to that point yet. But I did nearly decide that I would rather my daughters be illiterate than to spend absurd amounts of time peeling and sticking magnetic squares to letter tiles and tearing apart perforated cards (pages and pages of cards!!!) for our reading and spelling curricula. All About Reading didn’t include that part in the description of their product!

^^ Look at all those tiles! That’s only half of them. Peel and stick. Peel and stick.

I am nearly ready, as far as my product preparation goes. 1000-ish Cards have been torn apart. I just have about 700 more to do for the spelling curriculum, and I’ll be done with that. I’ve mostly finished figuring out what we are going to do each day. Sort of. I’ve tallied the total number of hours we have to do school (the only state requirement of homeschooling here) and the number of days we’re doing school and used my math skills to determine the number of hours we need to work each day. I’m already exhausted. Math is hard.

Miss is going to the local Catholic school for 1.5 days per week. She’ll go to Mass, get religious education, music class, gym class, and a few other things. I’m going to send her for the first three full days of school, so she can get to know her teacher and classmates and the routine. Then we’ll start our part-time deal. They start school on August 26th. I am starting our at-home schedule the week before that, with the idea being that I’ll sort of cement “we-mostly-do-school-at-home” in her mind before she goes off to the big world of Catholic school kindergarten for three whole days.

So that means (gulp) we’re starting on August 18th. And we’re going out of town on Friday (tomorrow!) for a week. WHAT?

Panic, you see.

Yes, I have been sitting at the tiny kids’ table to do all the prep work on the materials.

I still need to figure out my first lessons and get some stuff on the schedule of what we’re actually going to do.

I have to figure out a way to organize all this stuff.

I have to clean out our craft and supply cabinets.

I have to figure out what I’m going to do with Sis, to keep her from running off with the fruits of my magnet-sticking labor every time I turn my back, and perhaps help her to learn a little something as well.

I have to actually read our first Five In a Row book and decide what activities I’m going to do to go along with it.

And because I’m crazy and my child is also attending a non-home-school part time, I have to get all of the required supplies for that school, and label each item individually (yes, each crayon, each marker, etc.), and make an appointment for her to have a physical (oops!), and get all of her uniform clothing de-wrinkled. . .

Yikes. Writing this post is only making me more panicked. I gotta go do some stuff. Wish me luck!

Preschool – X Marks the Spot and X-Ray

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Amy

We finally covered letter X in our home preschool and co-op a few weeks ago. I hadn’t been looking forward to it, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to find nearly as much inspiration from Pinterest and other sources as I usually do when planning a lesson. And when I started looking for ideas, I found that, in fact there isn’t much out there about X. I pulled together some ideas I found and came up with a few of my own to teach our preschool co-op. Here’s what we did:

I started by reading Alphabet Mystery by Audrey Wood. This book introduces the concept that the letter X is not a frequently used letter, but can be used as a symbol for other things, like kisses (XOXO), as is the case at the end of the book.

In the book, the other letters go searching for the little X when he runs away. So the next thing we did was to do a letter X search on our white board. I wrote a 4×4 grid of letters, half Xs and half other letters. I got the idea here. The kids took turns, and with each turn had to find an X and circle it, and find a non-X and “X” it out.

The kids really loved the book and the grid activity, and these were a great way to introduce the next part of the lesson. I explained to them that in addition to being a way to symbolize kisses, X is also used as a way to mark the location of something, as in “X marks the spot” on a treasure map.

I passed out “Xx marks the spot” coloring pages from this printable pack and told them it was their treasure map. I then gave each of the four kids a section of the room to search (to avoid fighting or having just a couple of kids getting all the booty) and told them to find the treasure hidden under the Xs. Earlier I had placed small squares of construction paper with Xs on them around the room and under each one was either a gold “doubloon” or a gem. After the kids found all of the loot, they glued them to piece poster board in the shape of an X. Here’s Lass’s:

After completing this we returned to our rug. Usually I take some time to have the kids come up with as many words as they can think of that start with our letter of the week. But this time, considering the paucity of X-words, I tried something different.

I talked to the kids about how very few words begin with X but lots of words end with the letter. I then held up a bag with several different objects of pictures of objects in it and had the kids take turns picking something out.

With each item they had to name it and then tell us whether the item starts with X or ends with it.

Then we moved into talking about X-rays and read the book Jessica’s X-Ray by Pat Zonta.

We made these super easy and fun X-ray crafts:

E-Z. Trace hand and part of arm on black construction paper with a white crayon. Give each child seven and a half Q-tips and a small cup of white glue. Have them dunk the Q-tips in the glue and place on paper to make basic finger, wrist, and forearm bones. They loved it.

All the snack ideas I saw involved eating something that could be placed in the shape of an X, like strips of cheese, pretzel sticks, etc. I opted to stick with my emphasis on learning the sound of X by talking about words that end in X, so we ate Chex Mix. Big hit.

And that’s that. Though I wasn’t really looking forward to doing X, it ended up being the most fun co-op lesson I’ve taught. And the lesson was very easy.

In addition to the co-op day, we did other letter X activities just in our homeschool, like making these St. Francis Xavier dolls:

They were inspired by the ones at Catholic Icing. We just used different materials that we happened to have available.

We also read lots of other books about X-rays and bones, like My Mom Has X-Ray Vision by Angela McAllister, Dem Bones by Bob Barner, What Does the X-Ray Say? by Second Grade Students at Longfellow Elementary School, and Curious George Goes to the Hospital by H.A. Rey.

Letter X wasn’t too bad. And now we only have two more letters of the alphabet to complete. We’re doing Y right now, and in a few weeks we will do K. Then we will be done.

I’m really excited about this because I’m ready to move on from focusing on a Letter-of-the-Week style of homeschooling (though for us it’s usually more than one week per letter). I have purchased some different curricula for Miss to start working on kindergarten stuff, and I’m eager to start something new. I really don’t care that it’s April and an odd time to change what we’re doing in our school.

I just bought Five in a Row Volume 1, and I’m really looking forward to starting it with the girls. I also have some kindergarten materials from Seton Home Study School for Miss and grabbed some new preschool books from Rod and Staff for Lass to start on. We will be adding other components when kindergarten starts for real in the fall, but I think these will be the perfect change of pace for us for the rest of the spring.

Going to Catholic School?

Posted on February 27, 2014 by Amy

I met with the principal at the local Catholic school today. Next fall Miss will be starting kindergarten. But since I homeschool my kids, you might wonder why I would bother to meet with a school principal.

I had started thinking about beginning the process of taking my girls to after school religious education classes in order for them to prepare for their first communions and confirmations. And then I thought about the descriptions I had heard from people who went through religious ed after school like that (none were good). And I began to wonder if there was some way I could have my girls do it differently.

I have a sister-in-law who homeschools her oldest son part time and sends him to public school part time. He’s in first grade. They love the arrangement they have.

Super Friend’s kids go to the Catholic school here in town. I have heard wonderful things about the school from her and everyone else I know whose children attend there.

I put all of these thoughts together, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I might be able to work something out where I could send Miss (and later her sisters) to the Catholic school part time, and still maintain our homeschooling for the rest. I figured I could still have her home with me most of the time, still be able to technically be a homeschooling family so that we aren’t subject to the attendance rules of the schools and could continue to travel as much as we want, and yet be able to derive many of the benefits available with a traditional school system.

My mind was swimming with the possibilities. I envisioned being able to send her to school for religion classes and then not have to send her to them after-school. Maybe letting her take art and music classes in school. I mulled this over in my head for quite a while, and finally I just called up the principal of the school and asked her if we could do it.

Guess what she said? “That sounds wonderful. Let me check into it.”

So she met with the people that needed to be met with. She sent me a schedule for the kindergarten class to look over. And today we met to see if we could come up with something that might work.

It. was. fabulous. The principal was absolutely open to all of my ideas and completely willing to work with me. She was open to trying to enable Miss to attend not only religion classes but the school mass on Thursday mornings, music, gym, computers, and art. I also asked that she be able to participate in some free periods like recess and “free choice,” so that she’d have a chance to play and interact and make friends with the other kids.

I am so thrilled with how the meeting went. As it looks now we will probably send Miss to school maybe for about a day and a half per week. She’ll be able to perform in the school concerts. She should be able to go on field trips. She’ll be able to have plenty of time playing and learning with other kids her age, but still be home with me most of the time. I’ll be in charge of the majority of her schooling. I’ll get some help in teaching her religion. And we will still be able to travel whenever we want and do all the other things that homeschooling enables us to do.

I haven’t talked to Miss about it, but I think she will be very excited about the possibility of spending some time at school outside our home. And I think it will be a great experience for her. I really think it will be the best of both worlds.

Treasure

Posted on November 9, 2013November 9, 2013 by Amy

Yesterday we took the girls on a long treasure hunt. It was cold and windy. We ended up with one shell, one piece of shell, and two pieces of hickory nut husk as our “treasures.”

Not much in the way of take-home booty.

But, it was really one of the best treasure hunts we’ve had. The real treasures just weren’t things we could put in our pockets. My favorite was this deer carcass:

It had decomposed enough that it wasn’t stinky or gross. Granted, I didn’t want to touch it, but my Mother-in-law, bless her heart, took care of that when the girls asked to look more closely at different parts. They were fascinated by the ribs and spine and jaw and pelvis, and came up with various hypotheses about how the deer died.

My Mother-in-law showed them the teeth and discussed how old the deer may have been. We talked about the circle of life and how other animals had eaten the rest of the doe’s body.

It was a fantastic science lesson, without really being a lesson.

Then we had “gym class” climbing on this old fallen tree. They have been captivated by this tree since it fell over in the early summer.

The adventure turned out to be a bit of a disaster, because the girls were scared half to death by trying to balance on the tree trunk in slightly floppy rubber boots.

It was cool anyway.

Next stop was the beach. They enjoyed splashing in the water a bit (the whole reason we wore the rubber boots).

We went for a walk along the shore.

And found some deer tracks.

We explored some beaver handiwork too.

Though we ended up with just a couple of small in-my-pocket treasures, the real treasures of the day were the findings and experiences of nature.

One of my favorite things about homeschooling the girls is that I think it has made me focus on and cherish these kinds of occurrences even more than I did before. I enjoy having a new appreciation for how much learning there is to be done out in the world.

Halloween Fun

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Amy

This is a big photo post to share some fun Halloween pics.

We had lots of fun doing pumpkin and Halloween stuff in school the past two weeks.

We did marble painting to make spider webs

Or spoon painting…

Lots of other stuff too:

Sis loves the felt board.

We even had a Halloween costume party with our preschool co-op this morning. They were so excited to get their costumes on first thing.

They did crafts and played games and had white-chocolate-covered banana ghosts.

We managed a family photo before trick-or-treating tonight.

I didn’t think the little gnome would keep her costume on,

but she did the whole time!

It was pouring while we trick-or-treated.

It was so yucky out, we only went to four houses. The girls really didn’t care though. Miss kept saying, “Mom, I just love trick-or-treating!”

They loved the candy too.

The quote of the night came from Lass. After they got their treat from one of our kind neighbors, she very loudly said, “He’s really an old man!”

I hope everyone has had a fun and safe (and dry!) Halloween.

Getting Rid of Fruit Flies – A Preschool Science Experiment

Posted on October 18, 2013 by Amy

I loathe fruit flies. All summer I was very particular about handling things in my kitchen to prevent their taking up residence there. I always place fruit waste in plastic grocery bags before putting them in the garbage, I run my disposal frequently, I cover the bananas in the bowl on my counter, etc.

We managed to avoid fruit flies for the summer. Then I don’t know what happened. Perhaps I got lax in my precautions (though I don’t think I did). We have had some of the disgusting and annoying little bugs flying around our house for the past week or so.

A couple of days ago, I enlisted the help of my two older girls to experiment with the best way to get rid of them.

In the past, I have tried various strategies to kill the flies, with not much success. This time I went to Pinterest to find some suggestions.

There were tons of them, but I picked out three different methods and some different substances to attract the flies. I reminded the girls what an experiment is. We talked about our different methods and the importance of both attracting the flies and trapping them. We discussed how each of our methods would try to accomplish these two goals.

The three methods we used (from left to right):

1. Wine in a bottle with a paper funnel.

2. Dish soap, apple cider vinegar, and water (with bubbles on top).

3. Apple cider vinegar and plastic wrap across the top with small holes.

I asked the girls to hypothesize which method would catch the most fruit flies.

Lass thought the wine with the funnel. Miss thought the soap/cider/water mixture (we had talked about how the flies would land on the soap and get stuck in the bubbles).

The results:

A discussion followed about the possible reasons that the vinegar/water/bubbles mixture caught so many more flies than the others. With some help, they came up with the hypothesis that the flies were able to smell/access that solution better because of the wide open top of the glass.

I could not quite believe that the wine was not a better lure, since my experience has been that any time I sit down with a glass of wine, if there is a fruit fly somewhere in our house, it will circle around my head and my glass for the entire evening as I try to sip and enjoy. So I suggested that we try a second test to see if the flies like cider vinegar or wine better.

I guess this was just crummy wine, because the cider vinegar/bubbles caught 11 flies, while the wine/bubbles caught only one.

So, if you ever have fruit flies, take it from us with our fancy preschool science experiment, and use our winning method: two squirts of dish soap, water to make bubbles (about half of the glass) and then about the same amount of apple cider vinegar.

It was fun for the girls to check each morning to see how many flies had been caught by each method. Miss was especially into it. Lass, my sweet, sensitive girl, seemed to be in denial about the demise of the bugs on the bottom of the glass. “I think they’re just taking a bath,” she said, as I poured them down the drain.