The Moon and the Oreos that go with it

During this last full moon we had a big fat moon unit study.  I tried to take decent pictures but since most of our work that was picture worthy was done outside at night you can imagine how that went.  I did get a couple pictures of the full moon… but even with a tripod and a timer you get this:

Or this:

Pretty… but not looking like this:

Via

However, we spent the next three days happily studying the moon in all her glory!

These were all the books we had from the library.  The one on the top labeled simply “MOON” was one of the best for fun facts and cool pictures!  Did you know there was such a thing as a ‘moonbow’?  I didn’t either!  But the shot in this book of the moons light reflecting off some mist near the horizon certainly looks like a rainbow and is clearly from the moons light!  How neat is that!?!

After this we talked about the different shapes of the moons light and what each portion was called.  They learned this well and fast… cuz I used Oreos!!

Thank you Pinterest!

After that we watched a video and had ‘eclipse toast’.

This video was amazing!  Simply done, so Logan could really understand it, this video explains all kinds of facts about the moon and it’s rotation as well as facts about what we see when we look at the moon.

After that, we switched gears to perspective of the human eye.  We talked about how when the moon is low it seems SO much bigger but if you look through a TP tube (which we did when looking at the full moon) you could see that it isn’t any bigger than it is in the center of the dark sky… there is just something to measure against.

Then we moved on to drawing with depth perception.

We are working through Commander Mark’s Draw Squad and the kids LOVE it!  If you have never seen this, it’s super duper old.  The dude has a mullet and everything… but he is just a great character and he is good at explaining things like foreshortening and depth perception with easy, kid friendly language.  Plus, he draws cartoons.  What could be better than that?

Our moon study was super fun… but we are moving on to photosynthesis! 

Autumn copywork, pressing leaves, and preserving spiderwebs

We have been very focused on the changes going on in nature right now. The nights are getting colder and the days are getting shorter quickly. It is very clearly almost fall.

Logan got his first taste of copywork today.  We copied a Waldorf poem onto watercolor paper and he wanted to be included… so I had him write the last lines on his watercolor sheet.  I think he did a fantastic job!

Here was Cyan’s copy work.  Her painting and her handwriting were just lovely.  They both are on the nature table now.  I knew it wouldn’t stay empty for long!

Today for Kindergarten science we pressed leaves! As we went on our nature walk he found fallen leaves and brought them in to press.

He loved the ones that still had green on them because they were ‘pretty’.

Then, along with the siblings, we preserved spiderwebs!  First, we went on a spiderweb hunt around the yard.  The best ones were found on the rhododendron bushes in the back of the yard.  They were still complete, even though there was no spider in them. 

Most garden spiders build a new web every night, so I didn’t feel bad about taking the three that we had found as it won’t take the spider long to build a new one.  I was careful, however, not to spray paint a web with a spider in it. 

The two we found with spiders sitting in the center of their webs we left alone, but we spent some time observing the spiders that lived there, and noting their brown and yellow markings (making them a type of ‘garden spider’).

I preserved the web by holding up some cardboard behind the empty spiderweb and spray painting (very gently and from over a foot away) the web.  I took about 20 minutes to let that dry.  Then I sprayed a sheet of cardstock with Elmer’s spray glue and waited until it was good and ‘tacky’.  Then I slid the cardstock behind the painted web, and gently pulled it forward until the web was stuck to the sheet of paper and this is what I ended up with:

We did two, and although you can see the color on the black sheet better in photos, I like the detail you can see clearly on the white sheet… which doesn’t show up in pictures as well, but is quite amazing in person!  We added these to sleeves in the kids nature notebooks after some fun up close observation and now they will have a spiders web to study at will!

It was a neat project to do after yesterday’s school project of reading about spiders and trying to make our own webs!

 

What a fun and awesome school day!

Back in the saddle again. :)

We are stating light with a unit study on Little House in the Big Woods and a quick study of our maple tree out back that is having some trouble.  We only did 6 workboxes today so we could have our sunny day (one of our VERY few this summer) set aside for cabin building (we are making a playhouse!!).  I figured we would learn as much from putting the siding on our playhouse than we would from sitting inside doing worksheets. 

I am substituting my reading aloud for audio books right now to get in the groove of schooling again, and it’s working out beautifully. I will get back to having my school read-aloud time with them in a few weeks, but for now we are really enjoying Audiobooks.  Today, we listened to the first two chapters of “Little House in the Big Woods” narrated by Cherry Jones.  If you haven’t heard this version, I highly suggest it!  She does such a wonderful job!  She has a husky tenor voice that it easily believable as Ma, Pa, or any of the children.  She does the singing and the fiddle music playing behind the story is just lovely.

We were all enthralled. 

After the chapters for today were complete, we started the Little House in the Big Woods lapbook, starting with the cover pages, the smoke house, and the log cabin on the back. 

Next up was nature study.  I had marked the page in Fun with Nature Trees, Leaves, and Bark to the page that had the maple tree on it and I sent Logan out back to discover which tree was the Maple.  It only took him a few minutes to come back in with a maple leaf!  I went out with him and we looked at the pictures and compared the maple tree in the book to our maple in the yard.  We came back in with a few leaves and spent some time making leaf rubbings for our Nature Notebooks.

We did two on top of each other with different colors so you could see the different sizes of the leaves on the tree right now… then we marked the date and wrote down the words ‘Maple Tree’ on the page.

Next up was a Montessori activity called “Animal Farm”.  Since Logan is reading 3 and 4 letter words pretty well now I just let him do the whole thing by himself. 

The only one he needed help with was “Lamb” (of course) because he was trying to find ‘sheep’.

After this we worked on Logan’s sight words while Cyan worked on her spelling list.  He is having a little trouble with blends and digraphs so I pulled out the ones that are in the first two lists of the Dolch Words chart and we worked on those for a few minutes. 

Then I moved over to Cyan as Logan played with the counting manipulitives in the next workbox.

She is doing spelling words from a note she wrote back in may where she misspelled them.  I had her write them correctly twice and then practice them out loud, then we did the test.  She only missed two, but she wrote those out 5 times while saying them aloud at the same time.  We will use this same list for the whole school week.

Logan’s last box for today was number recognition.  This was something he was really having trouble with when we started our break.  He doesn’t seem to have any issue now.  Even so, I made it so that he was using stickers instead of having to remember the number, remember what it looked like, and then trying to recreate that with his 5 year old fingers at the same time.  lol!  Next time I will add in him writing them, because it seemed that this was super easy and went very quickly.  But he enjoyed the success!

Kindergarten and 6th grade have begun!

5th Grade Praying Mantis Lapbook

Cyan’s Praying Mantis Lapbook has several pages added.  I used this story starter page and these worksheet pages from ABCteach.com, and then a few pages from Homeschool Bin. 

I simply stapled the pages to the center portion of the lapbook so they worked like a flip up book.

She also made this: Praying Mantis Cutout (remember to print on cardstock!)

Under the pages she had tons of mini books with information on them. 

She did nearly all of the mini books from the HomeschoolShare.com Praying Mantis Animal Study Lapbook.

She also added some pictures and captions from our own mantis hatching experience. 

My favorite part of this lapbook was a few days after it was done.  I have a few friends that we gave baby mantis to when we had ours… one of them asked if Cyan could help her kids do a lapbook that was similar.  She was able to tell them ALL about mantis, their lifecycle, what they eat, their body structure.  It was cool to hear how much she retained from doing this project!  That is my favorite part of unit studies… the kids retain SO much!

Praying Mantis Preschool Lapbook

The preschool version was simple yet every time he looks at it he can tell me all sorts of neat things about the mantis.  Here is a walkthrough of his lapbook:

This is the outside of the lapbook. All of these resources were found at HomeschoolShare.com under ‘Praying Mantis Animal Lapbook’.

When opened it has pictures from our hatching mantis babies and Logan’s captions which I wrote out under each picture.

The flap in this section has the largest and the smallest mantis fold out.

This section holds the most fold outs.  The anatomy of a mantis, complete with all sections of an insect which goes along with this song:  (To the tune of BINGO)

I am an insect in my life,

and this is what I look like,

two antennae, compound eyes,

one, two, three, four, five, six legs,

Thorax and an abdomen,

and this is what I look like!

The other flaps are what mantis eat, where mantis live,

and the life cycle of a mantis.  (All dictated by Logan, but written by me.)

THe other side has two flaps that are simply named “Fun Facts” and Logan got to add whatever he wanted in there.  We had just watched Kung Fu Panda and the video from here so this is what I got for the first one:

Lol!

Next up is Cyan’s lapbook for the mantis (5th grade) which is much more detailed, but this one was just a lot of fun!