Easy Shooting Star/Comet Craft

We've been studying space rocks! To go along with our chapter, we made this simple comet craft with stuff we already had around the house. You can find the instructions for this easy peasy activity on the blog, First Grader At Last.

We also watched the video for "What is a Shooting Star?" by They Might Be Giants

Finally, we wrapped it up with a game of Comet Toss which came in one of our Kiwi Crates. I don't think I've mentioned Kiwi Crates on here yet but I will soon make a whole post on them so you can learn about how awesome they are.

Geography Time

I love Geography. In fact it is what I have my degree in so getting to teach my favorite subject to Sarah Hazel is always the highlight of my homeschooling week. For Kindergarten, we are using Evan-Moor Beginning Geography. This book is great for introducing the most basic of Geography concepts which is spatial awareness, map skills, and landforms. We spent several weeks covering landforms and have now moved on to learning about each continent. For a side project, we are also learning about all of the states as well as the Great Lakes and major river systems. Once we finish up this book, I have no idea what we will do because I am struggling on narrowing down our options. Whatever it is though, it will be fun!

Landform cut outs from her Geography book.

Layers of landforms

The Bouncing Naked Egg Experiment

I kept seeing pins on Pinterest about bouncing eggs and naked eggs and eventually, curiosity got the best of me and I had to see what this bouncing naked egg business was all about. It was the perfect excuse for me to play and for us to mark it down as a science experiment. The truth is, I like learning in homeschool just as much as the kids ;)

Should you want to make your own bouncing naked egg (that's should be fun for Google searches. ha!), you can find the instructions at Imagination Station

 The process is really easy. All you do is take an egg and drop it in a cup of white vinegar.  We let ours soak for a whole day. Sure the house smelled kind of weird after leaving a cup of vinegar out for 24 hours but I'll take the smell in exchange for a cool science experiment.  No need to stir your egg as it will actually rotate on it's own as the shell starts to disintegrate, at least that's what happened to ours. We did gently poke at it a few times during the de-shelling process to see what the shell felt like. The vinegar broke it down to a soft foamy consistency until evenutally, the shell pretty much disappeared. When we pulled it out, we gently rubbed any foam still left on the egg until it was a nice and swirly looking. You can see a lot of the yolk in ours. I wonder if that's because we soaked it for a whole day? Next time we'll try it for less time and see what the yolk does.

It really does bounce! Now I wouldn't go dropping it from a second story or anything crazy like that. 

We decided to go a bit farther and see what would happen if we let our egg sit another 24 hours but this time in blue water. Osmosis!

 You guessed it! A blue egg!

Our naked egg hung around a good five days before it started to lose it's bounce. It never did get stinky or bust but it did harden until we were left with this sad little sack.

That's what I call an "egg-ceptional" experiment.

A Peek At Our Homeschool Day

Cameron is finally riding the bus home from preschool which means that Sarah Hazel and I have more time to do school! Previously, we were using up at least three hours out of our day between taking Cameron to school and picking him back up. Now I've started having Sarah Hazel stay home with her Dad while I take Cameron to school, which on average takes about 45 minutes out of our morning. While I'm gone, she goes ahead and gets dressed, eats breakfast, and does some independent school work so that when I get back home, she's ready for the day and we can make the most out of our time. Plus she really enjoys doing independent work then proudly showing it off to me as soon as I walk through the door.

Here is our new and improved schedule:

Mondays/ Wedenesdays: Cameron is home with us on Monday's and Wednesdays so we do the best we can to get things done. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. When it does happen, it looks a little like this:

We always go into our school time with fun videos and songs that I've found on YouTube.

• writing (manuscript and some sentence copywork)
• she reads to me from her LifePac Readers
• language arts
• scripture verse, Bible story, and/or character lesson
•  snack and fun music videos
• geography, history, math, science or some other topic she is interested in. I tend to let her choose what she feels like doing at this point.
•  an educational show like Magic School Bus, School House Rocks, etc...
• after lunch we might do an art project, nature hunt, or large science project but usually the rest of the day is just spent doing whatever they want to do.

 Tuesdays/Thursdays:

• Sarah Hazel does independent writing, math, and Language Arts assignments
• Fun YouTube Videos
• finish up any leftovers from her independent work
• she read to me from her LifePac Readers
• language arts
• scripture verse, Bible story, and/or character study
• snack and fun music videos
• geography videos followed by geography lesson
• math
• history or some other topic of interest
• big science or art project

I think it's easy to misconstrue what our homeschool days actually do look like. I fear that people believe Sarah Hazel is sitting at the table for hours with her nose in a workbook when that could not be farther from the truth. Most of the time we do our school work in the floor at a lap desk so that Sarah Hazel can move and dance around at her leisure. I'm not sure how things work in a brick and mortar Kindergarten class but I'm guessing it's a lot more seatwork than we are doing. The majority of her schoolwork is completed in one to two hours, with the exception of large projects which we may work on well into the afternoon. Sometimes we skip sit down days in exchange for field trips or "life learning" days. Education is so much more than seatwork!

One more thing I would like to add is that we do not do drills or memorization activities with the exception of a weekly Bible verse. While I do think some memorization techniques are good in later grades, I think it's more important to understand concepts first. Without a foundation, memorization is nothing more than stuffing a child full of useless facts. I think this especially holds true when it comes to Mathematics.

Schooltime Fun on a Snowy Day

Normally we are at Co-Op on Fridays but it actually snowed last night so our regular agenda went out the door and I was left with the decision of not doing any school today or pulling stuff together in a hurry and still keeping it fun. I opted for the school route since my kids had zero desire to play in the cold, wet snow. I suppose they got their fill of it last night when they played in it while it was still coming down hard. To go along with the snow, we read Owl Moon (lovely story, by the way) then Sarah Hazel created a watercolor resist version of the cover of the book.

If you haven't done a watercolor resist with your kids yet, it's super duper easy. All you do is draw a picture with oil pastels but leave the background blank. After you have your picture drawn, paint with watercolors in a left to right horizontal motion across the entire picture. Your oil pastel drawing will resist the watercolor, which is kind of cool to watch.

After doing art, we did our daily reading and writing then talked about different types of plains around the world. After that we had History time and Sarah Hazel created a Lemning of me. She had me sit crisscross applesauce while resting my chin on my wrist all while holding a purple Disney princess teapot. Such a pose!

Our science time consisted of experimenting with citric acid, baking soda, red cabbage juice powder, and polyacrylamide (thank you Mind Blowing Science). Three hours later, our mixtures resulted in red, blue, and purple jiggly crystals. It was a great way to see how colors change and mix based on what they are mixed with and also is a great lesson on evaporation.

Once the water evaporates, all that will be left is colored gems!

We still had one more activity for the day which was to make a bird feeder because Sarah Hazel was afraid the birds would go hungry in the almost melted away snow. ;)

Most of you probably made these growing up, especially if you were in something like Girl Scouts. Take a toilet paper tube and punch 2 holes in it for the string that you will use to hang your bird feeder. Tie the string tightly then spread the entire outside of the tube with peanut butter. Next roll the tube back and forth across the bird seed. I like to lay out our birdseed on a cookie sheet covered in wax paper for easy clean up.

Have a blessed weekend!

100th Day!

Today is the 100th day of school. I cannot believe it! In celebration of the big day, Sarah Hazel did a little art project. Poor Nana!

Today we also learned about compound words which was a lot of fun.

Sarah Hazel has one story left to master in her first reader and then she will get to go to Chuck E Cheese to celebrate! It's so much fun to watch her reading starting to take off.

The rest of this week we are going to work on finishing the rest of her Unit 3 book for Language Arts and start her Pig lesson in Draw Write Now. I was very pleased with how well she did with lesson one and am anxious to see her copywork progress throughout the book. This is from her first lesson in the book.

Cameron has been doing a little school work with us. I've not taught him any math but instead just letting him play with our materials on his own. He loves these writing mats and playing with Unifix Cubes and Base Ten Blocks.

 For Sarah Hazel's Nest Video class at Co-Op, she is given a verse each week to memorize. During Christmas break, she was given the entire Lord's prayer. She memorized the whole thing! Cameron would often say it along with her so it's safe to say, he's memorized it as well...by default.

 I've not really got huge plans for the rest of this week's schooling other than finishing a Mercy Watson book and hopefully finding some more Magic School Bus videos. I like watching those as much as the kids do!

She's Mathy Part Two

After realizing how much Sarah Hazel enjoyed (and understood) multiplication last week, I decided to go ahead and go past Singapore 1B just to see what would happen. I first gave her a 1's sheet then a 2's sheet. She did them quickly without any help then proceeded to tell me "those are too easy."

I guess tomorrow we'll venture into the threes and just keep going.

We also opened her chapter on the beginnings of division which was way too simple for her. She took her workbook into private and did every division exercise and then brought it back to me telling me it was fun and she wished she had more. I don't know, maybe we should piggyback division and multiplication for awhile.