MOVING ONTO EARTH....

We moved onto the study of the earth in the science and history project book after concluding our weather study. 

Today we spoke about the broken earth and Pangaea.  The children have already heard about this from our visit to the museum but it was great to experience it ourselves with a little project.

We created a puzzle of how the continents fitted together when they were known as Pangaea and then illustrated the movement of the plates whilst discussing the patterns of earth quakes and their loose alignment to the tectonic plates.

 

Pangaea

Our moving continents

THE FINAL INSTALMENT ON RECORDING WEATHER

For the last few experiments from the Science and History project book we have been working on various ways to record the changes in weather and we enjoyed making the various tools, including the rain gauge, hygrometer and the weather vane.  Today we experimented with the final method we are observing for recording weather with a cross section of a log. 

Not only do the rings tell you how old a tree is but, by measuring the distance between the rings, you are able to tell when the tree was experiencing hot and cold weather.  Faster growth-hotter weather, slower growth - colder weather.

OUR SILKWORM PROJECT

We have some new pets to observe, silkworms!  They are now into their second week of life and are growing rapidly!  We are really enjoying observing how fast they grow and should soon see them start to form their cocoons, in around 3-4 weeks time.  This should be great fun and every morning the kids run to the box to see how much more they have grown and whether there is any sign of a cocoon being formed.

 

This reminds me so much of my childhood and I am so glad that my children are able to experience silkworms.  I am really sad that they are not able to experience chameleons with me as this was also one of the little treats of my childhood. I had a pet chameleon who I use to enjoy watching for hours every day, catching his flies and changing colour on various different surfaces.  

 

 

 

BFSU LESSON C 2 - SOUND, VIBRATIONS AND ENERGY

Our BFSU lesson this week was on sound, vibrations and energy.

The objectives were:

1. Understand and use the following words in their proper context, vibrations, tone, pitch, frequency and amplitude.
2. Demonstrate and tell how sound and vibrations are related.
3. Analyse musical instruments and voice in terms of producing vibrations.
4. Describe  how we make sound with our voices.
5. Demonstrate and tell how pitch depends on frequency of vibrations.
6. Model how sound is transmitted.
7. Describe how the ear picks up vibrations and translates them into hearing.

For part 1 we experimented with larger and smaller elastic bands to produce a tone and how that tone is affected by the size as well as the tension of the band.  Smaller band and more tension on the band the higher the pitch.     We also experimented with a little guitar to illustrate this lesson as well as spoke about the larynx and how the vocal cords act in the same way as the rubber bands to produce different pitches.   We have covered this in Human anatomy with Apologia already so the children knew quite a lot about the larynx as well as the eardrum.

 

To illustrate the transmission of sound we rolled a marble towards three other stationary marbles alone a grooved surface to show the transfer of movement energy from the rolling marble to the next marble and then the next and now they all remain stationary after knocking into one another except for the last one, which rolls on. 

 

This was used to illustrate that the air particles behave in the same way. "Bumping" into each other all the way up to the eardrum, then transferring the vibrations to the eardrum, and  therefore the sound.

 

This exercise in movement energy required the background of the previous lesson on the various energies, thereby building on the knowledge.

 

 

THE AMAZING BRAIN

I am sure by know you have probably worked out that Science is my all time favourite subject so it will come as no surprise to you that today once again we "did" science.  Thankfully the kids have the same love of science as I have so we all enjoy learning as much as we can about it.

Today and Wednesday are Apologia human anatomy and physiology days and today the boys and I were reading lesson 10 which is the Nervous system extended, since we covered the nervous and endocrine systems in Lesson 9.  I choose this course for the boys as I felt it was too detailed and elaborate for a 5 year old to take in and have been following RSO for Princess Perfect instead. I obviously haven't translated this to her so when it is time to work on Apologia she tends to come along and listen in on the lesson anyway. Well I am surprised at the amount of information she is taking in and will definitely be purchasing an apologia notebook for her next year! 

After reading about the various lobes within the brain and how it is "divided" up she ran off to make a clay model of the various areas and I made labels for her to stick on.

 

Somehow I doubt she will forget this lesson!

OUR BLOOD MODEL FOR RSO SCIENCE

This week Princess Perfect has been studying the circulatory system and we made our own scrumptious blood model to illustrate the various functions of the four parts of blood. 

The plasma was maple syrup.

The red blood cells were lollies and were perfectly shaped with the little dent in the middle!

The white blood cell was the lima beans

The platelets were lentils

 

Ok, only the lollies where scrumptious and were the sugar free variety so allowed to be sampled.

Of course the plasma is naturally straw coloured, it is only the blood cells that make it red.

Unfortunately the red blood cell ended up being bigger than the white blood cell in this experiment as lima beans was all I had to depict the white blood cell !! 

Princess Perfect then completed the accompanying worksheets describing the various duties of the four parts of the blood. 

THE WAY THE WIND BLOWS

Today our page out of "The science and history project book" was on the way the wind blows and we also created the third in our tools built to record weather.  The previous tools being the rain gauge and the hygrometer.

The first experiment showed how the weight of a particle affects how far it travels and the effect this has in creating various sand dunes. 

The used a hairdryer as our wind and noted that the smaller particles of the sand went further down the ice cube tray then the larger particles.

 

 

Then we made a simple weather vane and spoke about anemometers and how they are used to measure wind speed. 

 

Our cat thought it was really tasty!!

 

 



The lessons in this book are fantastic and so quick to pull together into a lesson that the kids really look forward to every week. 

BFSU - LESSON C1 - CONCEPTS OF ENERGY I

Today we studied BFSU Lesson C1 - Concepts of Energy I - Making things go.

The objectives where:-

1. Recognise and describe how things do not go, work, move, or change by themselves.  Something additional is required.
2. In any given situation, identify the "something additional" as: heat, electricity, lighr, or movement.  Which are knows as "forms of energy"
3. Describe that many things (gas, wood, batteries, and a food) are not energy by themselves, but contain stored energy that may be released.
4. Recognise and tell how various devices (light bulbs and motors) change one form of energy to another.
5. Recognise that energy is not created from nothing. It must always come from another source.
6. Recognise and state how energy is never changed into solid, liquid, or gas and visa versa.

We split these objectives into three parts, forms of energy and what they do, storage and release of energy and energy changing from one form to another.

I made four energy cards and a number of action cards and asked the children to match the energy cards to the various action cards as in the below pic.

 



Obviously those with a physics background will realise that we are taking some liberties in the definitions but it is simply to convey the concept, without getting bogged down in detail.   Once the concept is understood teaching the definitions is simple.

Our discussions lead us on a walk around the house to view where our electricity enters and the fuse box which lead us to a discussion on safety.  We also had a long discussion on fridges and how energy is involved in the freezing process.  Food was another topic that came up, and the cycle of light energy in photosynthesis creating food for plants that then get eaten by us to release energy. 

Our accompanying book Charging about - the story of electricity by Jacqui Bailey was perfect to introduce how electricity is created and we ended off viewing a youtube clip on a hydro-electric power station and marvelling at how loud the rushing water was!

PRINCESS PERFECT DECLARES HERSELF DISGUSTED WITH ENID BLYTON!

Princess Perfect and I finished up pretty late with her core work yesterday as she wanted to finish the new book she had taken out from the library before continuing with work.  So off she went and tucked herself up on the sofa with a blanket to read. 

Well, a short while later she came through and said she wanted to have a word with Enid Blyton as she was disgusted in her new book about the wishing chair :-)  She said it was disappointing as had none of the same characters as in the read a loud we had done previously called the adventures of the wishing chair, which she had enjoyed so much and had been so excited to see this new book about it!

Well we definitely have a future book critique in our midst!

Warning to any other Enid Blyton fans out there, the characters are different. :-) 

 

Our original read a loud

 

 

The new adventures not receiving rave reviews by PP.

ART

Just had to post this painting by Hunky Monkey as I am so proud of him!   He did this at his painting co-op class.   This is one class I am happy he attends a co-op for! English, Maths, Science, History, Geography no problem and look forward to the lessons but Art, no way!  Not sure where he gets his artistic ability from as it is certainly not me!

REAL SCIENCE ODYSSEY - LIFE

Along with BFSU, I am using Apologia for the boys and Real Science Odyssey (RSO) for Princess Perfect.  Although she loves to sit and listen in on the Apologia stuff we do! 

We are following Life in RSO at the moment and every lesson is very hands on with a great experiment to go with it, but I do find that you need to supplement loads with other books!  That is fine though as, since I have covered a lot of this stuff with the boys before Princess came home, I have loads of books sitting on the shelf. 

Below is our study of a plant and animal cell where we used jelly and fruit to illustrate the cell and then she got to eat it after! 

PLANT CELL

 ANIMAL CELL

YUMMY!!

 

 

FIRST LANGUAGE LESSONS - SUSAN WISE BAUER

We have been following Michael Clay Thompson for Grammar and have loved it!! It is truly an amazing collection of books that teaches grammar in no way I have ever come across before. 

Well unfortunately we finished Island Level of MCT and I hadn't budgeted on buying the next level up this year yet as it is a pricey curriculum at around $250 with postage from the US!  So thought I would turn to the First Language Lessons by Susan Wise Bauer sitting on the shelf. 

I have officially abandoned the writing programme from SWB, called Writing with Ease, for now.  I may pick up with Writing with Skill later, since I have heard good things about it, but for now we are happy to continue with our Institute for Excellence in Writing materials.  The IEW stuff is going so well right now and I feel so liberated after ditching the WWE stuff for the way more stimulating and interesting IEW.

I am happy to continue with FFL (First language lessons) for now as, although it is extremely repetitive, I am able to streamline it for the children and not make them repeat things over and over again as is requested in FFL. 

One element of FFL that I love is the poetry memorization.  Princess Perfect is currently working on FFL1 and Smarty Pants is working on FFL3, each with their own poems to memorize.  Well, she memorized her short little poem in one day and on the second day I realised that she had been listening to Smarty Pants reciting his poem and she started spouting the poem word for word!!

By day three she had memorized the entire poem!  Here she is below reciting the poem from memory!  Too cute!  So the question is do I move her to FFL3???

The Land of Nod by Robert Louis Stevenson

BFSU SUNDAYS

 

 

This Sunday we studied Lesson D1 - Gravity in BFSU.  The three topics we discussed were The concept of Gravity, Horizontal and Vertical and gravity - the orbits of heavenly bodies and satellites. 

 

To explain horizontal and vertical we made a plumb bob for the vertical and used a spirit level for the horizontal. 

 

 

Princess Perfects' teddy got a free ride around the room to illustrate the orbiting of heavenly bodies and satellites in relation to gravity and centrifugal force, which apparently the boys knew loads about from watching a backyard science episode.

 

 

We finished off with a page from The science and history project book.  Todays experiment was What is humidity?

 

Dad made an awesome hygrometer to measure humidity.  We sprayed the paper towel with a spray bottle filled with water and the "needle" flew into the air!

 

 

 

To experience and discuss transpiration we tied a plastic sleeve around a plant.

 

It didn't work too well as our cat decided to investigate and knocked the sleeve off whilst we were inside working on the hygrometer!

 

 

Ticking the T&E and art box.

Today we have had a pretty relaxed learning day.  We started out with our cores of Maths and English, and as I had to go off and organise details regarding a group excursion I am arranging, I put on classical music in the background and allowed the cherubs to go off and free learn/play.  Well I think we must have ticked a curriculum box with something Smarty Pants created in his time! 

Yesterday we paid a visit to an old school friend of Smarty Pants and they had a wonderful foosball table that the boys spent most of the visit playing.  When we arrived back home Smarty Pants asked dad if he could have a foosball table to which dad replied that it is an item you use a few times and then sits in the corner taking up space, so no.  Well the creation below is Smarty Pants' home-made foosball table!!!  Brilliant!!  He asked me for a box and tape, etc and came back with this!

The same thing happened a few months ago.  Our read-a-loud at the time was The adventures of the wishing chair by Enid Blyton and the children in the story were playing Ludo.  After the story he wanted to play Ludo and I showed him a pic of it online, since we didn't have the game.  He asked me to buy him one and I said perhaps but it wont be right away so the next day off he went and made the game from card himself! 

I so love getting to know every little nuance of my children and what goes on in their little minds!  

HUMAN ANATOMY

Princess Perfect is following Real Science Odyssey - life this year so to support the learning we used the MY BODY e-book from teacher created resources.  It was loads of fun finding where all the body parts go and reading about what each one does. 

We also played The Somebody game which the boys enjoyed joining in with.  They are following Apologia and Princess Perfect sits in when I read from it and follows at the moment but I wanted something a little more hands on for her to play around with and Real Science Odyssey was the perfect companion as it has practical experiments to support the various studies of the body.

RIGHT START MATH .... DEFINETLY THE RIGHT START

It took me a long time to finally decide on a math curriculum for Princess Perfect. The boys are doing Singapore Math but I wanted something fun and hands on and a bit less worksheet driven. 

There aren't too many choices out there for math, and I pretty much have most!! Curriculum junkie that I am.  I did try Math u see with her at the beginning of the year but it didn't work for her at all.  She started pre-primary in main stream schooling at the beginning of the year with a pretty high level of math ability but I have to say sitting in a class doing not a stitch of math for two terms has taken its toll!  She still has it there but it hasn't been exercised unfortunately. 

I lay in bed with her a minute ago and she was chatting away merrily about a lesson we had done in Right start math today and I am so happy that we have chosen Right Start as it really is such a good fit for her and I cant sing its praises enough. 

This is the box of manipulatives it arrives with which are amazing!! Even the boys want to use them!  The math card games book is phenomenal and ranges from basic to advanced games.  We have started at level A even though the placement test pegged her at level B purely because it is a different way of teaching to what she is used to, and what I am used to as well! A few differences are the use of an abacus for counting.  They discourage counting on fingers completely and expect the child to recognise numbers and blocks of numbers on sight instead of counting.  Also they don't say eleven or 21 etc They say one ten one for eleven and two ten one for 21, etc.  It is to simplify the decimal placement for the child and, whilst I thought it would be hard for her to grasp, since she has been taught differently, it hasn't!  She will hold up the abacus and say this is nine ten two and also 92.  :-)  Level A starts out slowly introducing the basics but by the end of level A you are at an Australian year 2 level at least!  It covers concepts such as time, money, geometry, fractions, etc and this is just level A!  It does do it in such a gentle,  playful way that it is hard not to grasp it and there are probably only 20 worksheets in total for the whole level as the assessments are all practical based. The programme is 132 lessons so should take you around a year to complete if you do a lesson a day.  For the first 40-50 lessons we have been doing 2 a day as they are pretty basic.  I hope to finish level A by the end of the year and move onto level B next year. 

 

Princess Perfect demonstrating a few ways to show 9+9=18

 

LOGIC AND CRITICAL THINKING

I have begun to turn my mind to logic and critical thinking and Princess Perfect was the first to trial a product.  She started on Lollipop Logic book 1 and is now on book 2.   She loves the books and they are the first thing she grabs when it is time for her to do "alone work"   Whilst they are great fun I don't think they do very well at extending and exercising her brain as well as she goes through a book in no time!

I came across the Critical Thinking Company and LOVE the look of their products but their postage from the USA is harsh, especially for something I would like to try out to see if it will work! They do have a couple of e-books but I liked the look of Building Thinking Skills as it looks quite comprehensive, covering shapes, figural  and verbal similarities and differences, Sequencing, Classifications and Analogies.  It looks like a really good higher order thinking activity book that will last longer than a week.  So I ordered Level one - Grade 2-3 and it arrived today! So far it looks quite good. 

Sample of one of the pages

A few more items I use for logic and visual perception

This is the MiniLUK advance system which is fantastic for visual perception, geometry and higher order thinking. 

 This is a tangram puzzles book (with solutions at the back) with over 500 tangrams!

MY IEW HAS ARRIVED ....... AGAIN!

Hooray!  I am saved from finishing WWE!!!  My IEW has arrived today!
Well this exact product arrived at the beginning of this term but I sent it back for a number of reasons.  I had just finished the PAL programme with Smarty Pants, and since Hunky Monkey was coming home, thought I would spring for the Institute for Excellence in Writing/ Student Writing Intensive Level A deluxe combo for both boys.  When it arrived I found it a bit of a reputation of the Part III of the PAL programme I just completed and thought I couldn't possibly do another KWO (Key word outline).  What really pushed the decision to send it back was the quality of the product that arrived.  It had arrived via the local Australian distributor of the product and they had obviously had an issue with their printer as the pages were streaked and unreadable in places as well as had creases made by the drum of the printer on many pages.  It also took about a month and a half to reach me as the local distributor had gone on holiday and closed up shop for two weeks!  Then they got my address wrong twice!!! Sending it without tracking, so the first parcel is out there somewhere still and the second parcel had to be chased via the postal service as it had again been sent to the wrong address!    This all left we quite annoyed before the product even reached my door and when I saw the shocking quality that was it!  I exercised my right to a 100% full refund and sent it back.  

One of the great things about IEW is you can send it back for a full refund no matter how long you have had the product in your possession! That is confidence.

So first day of Term 3 and I found myself without a curriculum for Language Arts!  I decided to give Writing with Ease - Susan Wise Bauer another go after a very persuasive email from a home school friend. Well week 2 found me ringing my hands and remembering why I had ditched WWE after briefly looking at it in December 2012.  Faced with a year of Narration, Copy work and dictation I thought I would take another look at IEW. I mean there is no creative writing at all till around year 6 with Susan Wise Bauer!

After looking at it closer, without being clouded by the annoyance of the badly delivered shoddy quality product of before, I realised that I should have stuck with my initial feel of the programme which is that it gets the child up and writing immediately and gives them the confidence they need to write effectively.  So I paid the hefty $95 delivery and ordered the product from IEW in the USA.  Well here it is, exactly a week after I ordered it, well packaged and beautifully presented!!  Cant wait to start!

The Science and History project book

Along with BFSU we do one or two experiments from The Science and History project book, on the weekends as a family.   We have just started at the beginning and are working our way through it.  Today we did Clouds and rain on page 26. 

To illustrate the life cycle of water we boiled a pot of water and then, once the water was boiling, we put a plate above the pot.   Then we had a look at the plate to see it was covered with drops of water which is vapour that has cooled and turned back into liquid. 

Then, to end off the experiment, we made a simple rain gauge to measure the  rainfall over the next couple of days.  Our ragdoll cat, Gadget, thinks it is something to eat as seen in the pic below so not sure how much rain we will collect!!

 

We ended with a read aloud from one of Jacqui Baileys Science works books A drop in the ocean.

BFSU

On Sundays, as a family, we always do a lesson from Building foundations of Scientific Understanding by Dr Nebel.   I absolutely love BFSU!  It is aimed at a K-2 audience but I am starting this with all three munchkins as I think it will fill any gaps they may have in their scientific understanding. 

We are following a similar flowchart to what is in the book and so far we have completed lessons A/B1 - A4.  I am busy creating a poster to illustrate what we have learnt so far and will publish that as soon as I am done.

Todays lesson is Lesson B2 - Distinguishing Living/biological, Natural Non-living and Human-made things.  Off we went into the garden to find specimens to classify.

Whilst I thought it would be pretty straight forward, it wasn't!!!  It took me a good few minutes to get my head around the living/biological label as it wasn't as straight forward!!

In our living/biological category we had a flower, tree bark, wood, a leaf, a shell and a few critters - a snail (trying to make a get-a-way!) a worm and an ant.

The natural non-living items are rocks, soil, stones and clay.

 

 

Our human-made items where a bit of pasta, an ice timer, a wooden knight (chess) a bit of lino and a piece of old pottery.

 

The objectives for this lesson where:-

 

• Correctly assign an item to one of the three categories, Living or biological, Natural nonliving and human made.
• Recognise, name, and describe key attributes that enable the above distinctions.
• How we make seperations, ie Orientation, Symmetry, Tenuous quality, etc
• Recognise and use the following words in their proper context : Biological, resources, raw materials and conservation.

 

The previous lessons we did on BFSU are:-

 

Lesson A/B1 - Organising things into categories

Lesson A2 - Solids, Liquids and Gases.

Lesson A3 - Air as a substance

Lesson A4 - Matter I: Its particulate nature

 

A little humour :- When we where studying Lesson A/B1, organising things into categories, I gave smarty pants and princess perfect a task in the local library to illustrate that they understood the lesson.  I asked them to locate a book "Secret seven Well done by Enid Blyton" and bring it back to me.  Smarty Pants ran off to find a computer to look up the reference and Princess Perfect ran off to near the front of the library. I followed at a distance and overheard her asking the librarian, "Um excuse me ma'am could you possibly tell me where the secret seven aisle would be in the library."  Ha,ha, definetly thinking outside the square!