Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Mud, Crayons, Cutting, Glue, and A Whole Lot of Construction Paper....

 We started late today, if you read yesterday's post you'll know why. I am feeling better anyway, but we started late with a minor diversion into geography. For whatever reason my kids had never really noticed the United States flag, and have been crazy about pointing it out for the last week and a half, EVERYWHERE. So I printed off a United States flag for her to color and taught her the pledge of allegiance, of course she'll have forgotten it, but we will probably start doing that everyday too. I also sang "The Star Spangled Banner" for her after her interest was piqued when I said that a flag was an identifier of a nation as was a song and items, like the Statue of Liberty. I haven't truly sung in a long time. It was quite rusty, and I think it is mutual that I not do that again, specifically THAT song.

One of the standards is that she needs to know her place in the world, not "place" as in her place is to be seen not heard, or any such nonsense, or get thee behind me. No, it means how she fits in. Too bad too, because I was hoping to teach her that her "place" was to sew in a sweatshop so that Mommy could compete with China, only on Etsy. I kid, I kid. So this is the earth, with our country identified, and our state and city. Those things on the left are pretend magnifying glasses, they "zoom" in to show our street and an identifying freeway, as well as the "In n' Out" She insisted that be in there. The next one "zooms" even closer to show our house, and her in the yard.


A minor detour. This is supposed to be a picture of my husband, but I think it looks like Count Purplica.


Here's the back, apparently it was a birthday card for him, his birthday was on Monday. Happy belated birthday, Daddy from Count Purplica!


This was our science experiment. Yes that is mud in baking sheets. It is supposed to represent how Rainforest habitats are like the one with the sponge. The water is still present, but also stored into the sponge, where it will continue to release moisture and water, keeping the earth very moist and providing water for communities. I think we put too much water in. I'm not sure they got anything out of this one.


The mud may not have worked, but we definitely learned about the layers of the rainforest. This is her coloring a book about it. I used parchment paper so that the pieces under could still be seen, and we layered them. I drew the "layers" but she colored them in and added the things that were specific to each layer, like butterflies, birds, snakes, monkeys, the sun, as well as herself on the ground to show how tall the trees were.


The finished product. On the right are little blurbs about the rainforest. They originally wanted me to have her staple just those together to make a book, but I thought this might illustrate the point better.


Showing the layers of parchment paper. The flash made it funny to where you couldn't see through it very easily. So I thought I would show you.


Good heavens! My hand looks a bit like a mangled finger spider or something. Clearly I am not a hand model! 

This was her literature assignment. She was to make a book based off of yesterday's Venn Diagram. She decided she would rather write about Christmas. The Venn Diagram did have Christmas in it, and I couldn't care. She wrote an illustrated a book. That was all that mattered.




This was our pre-writing. Kelsey doesn't care much for writing, so this was needed, otherwise the story would say, "It is Christmas. Then end."


This is her "keeping room" diorama from history. She informed me she would not like to live in Colonial times, since they did not have bath tubs and potties, among other things.


I think Keira's been feeling a little under-represented in the home school blog. I tried to tell her it was because she isn't home-schooling yet. She would hear none of that. Here is a picture of her holding a random object to placate my silly 4 year old.


Yesterday's Sick Day

I had been sick the weekend after Thanksgiving. Strangely I felt okay Monday, but Tuesday was really yuck. Even so, I still had school to do. Awesome. : / So far this is the real downside of home schooling. Normally I would have a bit of a break when I am sick, since she would be at school. Nope. Not at HOME-school. : /


I was surprised that they wanted me to teach her even numbers by counting by twos. I had already been doing this as part of my daily system. I have these "dailies" that we do where she has a number of things to practice. In it she has a number of the day and has to determine whether it is even or odd. I explained that "even" meant a number had to be able to be split into two groups where both groups had the same amount. I figured it was a shoe in for division down the road. So every day we would take our number of the day and put them into the place value system. For instance, if the number was "47" she would know to put the 4 into the tens place, and 7 into the ones, then we would then draw 4 sets of 10 and 7 ones. She could then divide the ten frames and try to divide up the ones evenly, or have one left over, and therefore odd. It seemed to make sense, but for arguments sake I also taught her this way too, so now she does it both ways. I just figured the true definition of "even" isn't that you count by twos (it is a characteristic of it) but I thought it was really that the number could be divided evenly. I'm just going to keep on doing it both ways.


I laminated a small 100chart. She loves this. She can use a dry erase marker on it. We play guessing games, where we cover one or more numbers with black dry erase, and she has to guess which numbers are missing. My four year old wanted to try. I thought she wouldn't be able to do it, but I was surprised when she could identify any number missing from the top (1-10) row. She was rather pleased with herself.


This is my old word wall, we had to take them down, so I put them into the sight word rotation that we do every day. Then we started a new one. She wanted to do school words.


And there you have it.


I love Venn Diagrams. We compared "The Snowy Day" to "The Very Snowy Christmas". I pulled the second book on a whim, and amazingly it lined up really well. There's nothing like doing a Venn Diagram where the only thing in common is that they are both books. Kelsey liked "the Very Snowy Christmas" by the way. It is a cute book I got from Scholastic Book Clubs for maybe 3 bucks. I recommend it.


This was part of our science project. She has been learning about habitats. This time we learned about Polar Regions, both Arctic and Antarctic. I wanted to just about die when they listed the Narwhal. Of course this one was her favorite, because it most resembled her favorite beast - a unicorn. I seriously thought it was a mythical creature. Guess not. It looks like I may need to brush up on mythical and real creatures. 


We took some fall leaves that Keira painted at preschool and arranged them into a mobile so she could do one too. The middle has a turkey feather that she did at school. On the turkey feather it says what she is thankful for. She said candy. Oh, that kid!


The weirdest smile I have seen out of her yet.

Of course we did other stuff like word wheels, and cluster sounds. We read, and all the usual. I think she had a good day. She said so anyway. I on the other hand simply wanted to lie with my head next to the toilet. 


Monday, November 28, 2011

Exploring Volume, Graphs, and Fun with Word Wheels

Today, Kelsey had a fun project with estimating and measuring volume. She had to make a guess at which containers would hold more, and true to kid fashion she decided the tallest would hold the most and so on that the shortest would hold the least, and I was happy because I knew my work would be easy. I mean what would be the point if she knew that you had to take into account the width of an item as well. We recorded and graphed our findings.


She guessed D as the most to A as the least.


She made estimates on how many cups she thought each container would hold.


She tested her theory.


This is her "Hmmm" moment.


We used blocks to show which ones held more. (I couldn't do halves, so I just drew a half lines on some of the blocks, I probably should have used something better to mark it, or picked containers that didn't have halves in the measurement)


She recorded her actual measurements, and answered a few questions about her experiment.
She also spilled on her paper while pouring, for authenticity, or clumsiness you decide.


We graphed our results.



We did some mini books about the sounds that "O" makes.  We also did "OO" word wheels. This was all about understanding that "oo" can say moon, and look.



Generating a list of "oo" words for our word wheel.


Some extra practice with sight words that we confuse. 





Determining the difference between questions and statements when you do not have punctuation.

We also talked about Ponds for Science today, and did a little T chart for the differences for a child in school during Colonial times versus now. She was amazed to say the least.

Friday, November 25, 2011

Making Up the Day we Missed.

So I had said we didn't do home-school that Friday before Thanksgiving, and the beauty of home-school is that I can kind of move things around as they need to. For instance if we're having a rough morning we can just pick it up later. If one day isn't working we can do it on a weekend day. We can travel with the curriculum, but I am not comfortable with this just yet. I'm still getting my bearings, but we're doing great!

So we decided to make today, this Friday our make up day. It went surprisingly well, I thought we'd have some, "but I have been off all week, what do you mean school", moments. We didn't. It was also a nice light schedule, and I have spent quite a bit this afternoon prepping for next week. Here's a list of websites that have proved useful. Some are what the school provided me, so some of them are pay sites, but I don't have to pay being part of this school.

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/Home.html
http://www.lessonplandiva.com/p/freebies.html
http://www.superteacherworksheets.com/index.html
http://www.ixl.com/
http://www.funfonix.com/worksheets/

I also like to use pinterest.com for ideas. I follow several teachers who post their classroom ideas, and fun projects. You can also follow me on my "home-school" board if you are on pinterest.

http://pinterest.com/jacqui_cupples/home-school/

Anywho, here are some pics from today.









Pretend City!

We made a little Pre-Thanksgiving Day detour to Orange County to visit Grandma, and she treated us to Pretend City. If you live in OC or near it, and you have kids, and you haven't been, well, you've officially been told. Run and tell that, homeboy! Pretend City! It is quite simply - "the $#!+". Stay tuned for photos, fool!
http://pretendcity.org/
Seriously though, it was very fun, and everyone had a great time!