School Post: The One With The Blood

It's so hard for me to believe, but tomorrow we will be finishing up our fifth week of school already. We've had a really good couple of weeks and I think we're actually getting into a good groove. Some things we've had to do a little tweaking with, but for the most part I'm really happy with the way things are going.

One subject I couldn't be happier with is science. We're studying life science this year and the past few weeks we've been looking at the different systems in the body. For lab this week, Patty made a model of what our blood looks like, and completed a lab sheet about it.

Here's an up close look at our blood model.

Petie can be a little hard to get focused and keep focused on the task at hand, so I was thrilled the other day when he showed a lot of diligence the other day with this reading worksheet.

And of course, there's computer science for the little ones :) The Professor just had to snap a picture when Penny picked up his Macworld yesterday, plunked herself down in a corner, and started leafing through it. Future head of Apple? We'll see - I hear they're looking for someone.

Patty's School Week

I think we're fully into the swing of things around here. We've completed almost three whole weeks of school now. Patty's enjoying being back in school, but is having a bit of a reality check with all of the writing involved with the new school year. (Did I mention she HATES writing?)

In history this week, she learned about early Christianity in Britain. We read about the monks and how some of them spent their whole day writing out books by hand. One of her projects was to color this Illumination pattern like the designs they would draw in the books they copied.

This wasn't part of school, but I found this fun activity on Pinterest. I just poured piles of baking soda on a sheet pan and gave them colored vinegar and squirters to play with. They all had a lot of fun with this, and it lasted much longer than a baking soda volcano would have.

We've also been doing lots of reading, writing, and arithmetic, but I don't have any exciting pictures to show of those. Patty did take her first math test this week and aced it :)

Finally, here's a little video demonstrating our science lab this week.

Super Students

We had a pretty good week of school this week and as we continue to establish a good routine and I figure out how to juggle a 2nd grader, Kindergartener, and Preschooler, I believe things will only get better.

Petie's been working on money values in math, so I was really excited to find this money bingo game where he could reinforce what he's been learning in a fun way.

We loved our science curriculum last year, so naturally I chose to stick with Pandia Press and use their life science curriculum this year. Patty was learning about cells and had to examine an egg to see the different parts of a cell for her experiment this week.

I do not let my kids do school in their pajamas, but I never said anything about superhero costumes.

It's no wonder she's such a super reader.

And speaking of super readers, Penny thinks she has this whole reading thing figured out.

I have another post coming soon about Peanut's preschool week, so check back for that one soon.

A New School Year

Biosphere

As Patty has been studying the Solar System in science, she's been completing an activity or experiment to better understand a particular aspect of each of the planets. Here she is showing off her biosphere she made to represent Earth. We've learned a lot about each of the planets together and she really has an enthusiasm for science. We look forward to wrapping up our study of Earth and Space in the next few months and moving on to Life science next year.

Schooling & Sewing Superhero Style

We started out our school week last week doing some Presidents Day activities, but for the rest of the week, I did a Superhero theme with Petie. He had a lot of fun with this one. We used the Batman Preschool Pack from 1+1+1=1 for the bulk of our activities. I also printed up some simple words for Petie to read and make Superhero sentences. Here he is sounding out See Doctor Octopus cut the power lines. For the harder words like Doctor Octopus and power lines I would use pictures for him to fill in the blanks with.

Other examples of sentences we did were:

Get the net to nab ______.

_______ is a bad man.

Go the the ______ at six.

For filling in the blanks I found images online and used them for words like Spiderman, Superman, The Penguin, Batcave, Batmobile, Bridge, etc... I had tons of simple words, so there were numerous sentence combinations. Petie does not get excited when I bring out his reading book to read, but he loved this hands on way of practicing reading.

I also made him a reversible cape using this tutorial. He has had so much fun rescuing every person and stuffed animal in the house from impending danger.

And then there's this little monkey who thinks she has superhero abilities as well. As long as she's doing this off the arm of the couch and not the top of the bunk bed, I think I'm ok with it.

We had a discussion about superheroes and the different powers each one had and so on. I then asked Petie who was the most powerful, super protector he could think of. Patty suggested God as the answer (the answer I was looking for of course), but Petie promptly ruled Him out suggesting that God couldn't be a superhero because He doesn't have a cape. I try, I really do.

School Post: The One Where Things Erupted

I have to say, I'm not really a big fan of messy projects. Or rather, I'm not a big fan of messy projects in the hands of my kids, since they have the ability to make an already messy project about 10x messier. So, for this history lesson I really had to relax a little and just have fun.

We've been using The Story Of The World: Ancient Times for our history this year, and I really am enjoying it. I enjoy it a lot more when I actually take the time to do the projects that go along with each chapter. This chapter we discussed life in early Crete and talked about the volcano that erupted on the island of Thera. The kids had a lot of fun building and then erupting our volcano. I may just have to let my hair down and get messy a little more often.

Science Fair

Last night Patty was able to participate in the local homeschool science fair. She and the Professor worked on a project about the best way to grow sugar crystals. Her division was the K-2nd grade group and she won a trophy for Best Use of the Scientific Method. We're so proud of her and can't wait to see what she comes up with for next year.

Gimme Five

Here's a simple activity we did this week that I adapted from a game on the site Toddler, Toddler. In the original game you would just call out a color and your toddler would go give a hand of that color a high-five. I knew this would be too easy for my kiddos, so I added a little more of a challenge to it. I put some letters I've been working on with Peanut on some of the hands, as well as the numbers 1-5, and some shapes. For Peanut, my instructions were very straightforward such as "Go give a high-five to the number 3". For Petie I would say something like "Go give a high-five to the letter that starts the word dog". And with Patty I tried to make it even more challenging and give instructions like "Give a high-five to the number that equals 2+3". Patty enjoyed playing, but wasn't very challenged when the highest number was 5. I'll probably add in some higher numbers and more difficult shapes next time we do this to give her a bit more of a challenge.

We All Scream For Ice Cream

For some reason, which I cannot figure out, Petie hates to color. Not when it's his idea of course, just when I ask him to color something during his school time. So this morning, when confronted with a picture to color, he declared that he no longer wants to do school. But, lucky for me, before he made this declaration I snapped a picture of him doing this activity. To go along with the letter I this week, he had to take the ice cream scoops with lowercase letters on them and match them to the cone with the correct upper case letter on it. He's getting a lot better at recognizing his lower case letters and only has trouble with a few of the hard ones like b, p, q, and d.

Eating the Earth

For science this week, Patty made a pizza to represent the layers of the Earth. We don't usually eat our science labs, but this time I made an exception.