Plants - Part 1

We started our Plants unit today with a study of Seeds.  We read the section of What Your Kindergartener Needs to Know that discussed plants and seeds.  George really does not like this book.  For some reason, he resists and acts up everytime we pull this book out.  I ended up letting them do some coloring pages from the Giant Science Resource Book while I read the sections.   We read a few other books on seeds (see list below) and began our experiments.

Our first experiment was to look closely at seeds and break open a seed to look inside.  First I took an assortment of seeds that we had just bought to start our vegetable garden for the year and allowed the kids to explore them using their magnifying glasses.  George mainly used the edge of his magnifier to break the seeds but I did manage to get him to examine some of them.

Using an experiment sheet from Science Experiments for Young Learners I had soaked lima bean seeds in water overnight.  We broke them open and examined the parts of the seed and viewed the tiny little plant that was starting to grow.

After examining our seeds and doing a record sheet we set up a series of experiments that will take a week or more to see results.  All the experiments are from Science Experiments for Young Learners although many of them are variations of things I have seen in many other places.

First we rolled up seeds in a moist paper towel - 5 rows of 5 seeds each.  After it was completely rolled up, we placed rubber bands around it to hold it closed and placed it in a jar with a small amount of water (about enough to cover the first row or two of seeds).  In about a week, we will unroll the paper towel and see which seeds germinated.

This didn't need to be placed in a window but this was the only shelf I had cleared off that I could keep the kids from disturbing.

For our next experiment, we set up two plastic bags with paper towels and seeds in them.  One will be kept moist while the other will remain dry.  We will view them each day to see any changes.

For our last seed experiment, we planted seeds in two different bowls of dirt.  One will be kept in the sun, the other in the dark.  We will observe these in a week and compare them.

George seems to know what the results are going to be already but I keep telling him we just have to wait and see.

Easter and Spring

We haven't done a lot of school stuff for the past week since we were celebrating Easter and studying Spring.  To me, the best way to study Spring is to experience it.  So we spent lots of time outside.
We blew bubbles....

played T-ball....

We took a Nature Run...

and hung out on our favorite rock.

And, just to make it look more like school, we brought along our magnifying glasses to check out some dirt.

We celebrated Easter by decorating some foam eggs using dabber paints and roller paints.

We colored Easter Eggs.  I found the idea to use whisks to hold the eggs in Family Fun magazine.

We did an Easter Egg hunt at home.....

and another one at the park with Mom's Club.

I tried really hard to get a nice picture of the kids in their Easter outfits.  All I wanted was them both looking at the camera with no funny faces or poses.

Oh Well, maybe next year.

To see what others are doing, check out Preschool Corner and 5K too at Homeschool Creations.

Little Miss Chatterbox

Vicki has been surprising me lately with how clear she speaks and some of the things she comes up with.

We were driving Stephanie to dance one evening and we saw a sign "This Exit M" (large McDonald's M). Vicki points and says "Mommy, that says 'this is FRENCH FRIES!!!"   I promise we don't really visit McDonald's THAT much.

Stephanie loves musicals and her two favorites right now are Rent and Wicked.  She was listening to the song "Popular" from Wicked in the car and, of course, singing along.  When the song ended, all of a sudden Vicki pipes up from the back seat, "Wow, that was really great Steph".  Steph told her thank you and Vicki responded with "I really like that song".

When Vicki saw her new Easter dress she asked, "Is that for ME?  THANK YOU Mommy!  It's BeaUtiful".

Tot School - Easter

Vicki is 32 months old.

I finally found a way to have uninterrupted quiet time to work with Vicki on Tot School activities - do it before Georgie wakes up.  I don't know why this didn't occur to me before.  He usually sleeps at least 30 minutes to an hour later than Vicki does, at least on the weeks where we don't all have to get up to take Stephanie to school.    So, here we go with our first Tot School activities.  Vicki is showing a lot of interest in George's reading activities so I'm starting The Reading Lesson with her (sort of).  We're doing the letter C (Lesson 1 of The Reading Lesson covers c, o, a, t and s).

She did a letter C search.  I saw this idea on Confessions of a Homeschooler (probably other places too but I'm pretty sure I saw it there first).  I made up my own sheet so the letter we were working on would match the theme we were doing.  I put a couple Easter Egg graphics (from Word Clipart) in the place of some letters.  Vicki had a really good time doing this.  She did better with the circling than I thought she would.  After finding the C's, she went through looking at other letters and tracing them while singing the appropriate lines from Leapstart Letter Factory DVD. 

I pulled out our Sensory Bin (for only the second time - see 5 Senses lesson).  I had taken Easter Egg foam stickers, put two of them back to back and wrote letters on them - Capital letters on one side and Lowercase on the other.   I have an aversion to spending a lot of time printing, laminating and cutting out things related to a theme (since they may only be used once) so this was a lot easier with a similar result.  Vicki had a great time with this.  She'd pull out an egg, read the letters, then bury them back in the rice.  After a while, she pulled all the letters out, piled all the rice in the middle into a "big castle tower", then smashed it flat again.

She played with rice and eggs for over half an hour.  I really wish I had started with these earlier since it's not nearly as messy as I thought it would be.  I use a 15 Qt storage bin and filled it about 1/3 of the way up with rice (it took about 1/3 of a 25 pound bag of rice).  I put in down on a towel to help contain any spills but she's actually been very good about not scattering it around.  I do plan to eventually color some rice to make it a little more interesting.

After the rice, we did a number chart printed from Confessions of a Homeschooler.  We used small foam Easter Egg stickers (without removing the backing paper) and put the correct number on each space.  We only did 1 through 6 since Vicki still has a lot of trouble with numbers (letters and their sounds came much easier to her).  She liked it enough to do it twice.

We then used these stickers to outline a letter C.  She only did about 1/2 of the letter before deciding she was done.  By this time, Georgie had woken up and she was more interested in playing with him then doing school.

It was a beautiful, sunny Spring day so we took a Nature Walk after lunch.  We bought along our magnifying glasses to take a closer look at things like our forsythia bush, bugs, rocks, etc.

Vicki's favorite thing to explore by far was the numerous puddles and streams of water flowing through the neighborhood after all the rain we've been having.   I started off telling her to stay out of the water but everytime I turned around to tell Georgie to slow down and wait for us or hurry and catch up (for some reason my kids can never walk together) she'd immediately make a beeline for the nearest water (and there was A LOT).  I finally gave up stopping her.  It was a warm day (they ended up not needing the sweatshirts) and she was wearing canvas sneakers so they were pretty easy to dry out once we were home.

Visit 1+1+1=1 to see what other Tot's are doing in Tot School.

Human Body - 5 Senses

To continue our study of the Human Body, we studied the Five Senses.  This ended up being a lot of fun since we did lots of experiments and activities.  First we read some books and discussed the senses all together.  We read The Magic School Bus Explores the Senses, My Five Senses by Aliki and a Senses booklet from Science AtoZ.

The first Sense we explored in depth was Sight.  We read The Eye Book by Dr. Seuss and checked our Science Encyclopedia for information.  We also looked at and read some pages on seeing from The Learning Page.  Then we did an experiment from Science Experiments for Young Learners but I modified it some.  The experiment called for scattering candies in different color wrappers in a marked off section of grass outside.  We are having some torrential rain today and our grass hasn't quite come in yet so this wouldn't have worked very well.  I saw on a blog (I don't know which one, if anyone has any idea, let me know) about hiding candies (M&M's or Skittles) in tissue paper.  I ended up buying blue Easter grass to use and hiding mini M&M's.   We had discussed tools which help us to see (from The Learning Page) so each of the kids had a magnifying glass.   Then we discussed what we could see.  We decided that the orange and yellow candies were the easiest to see.   The blue and green candies were hardest to see, especially the blue ones since they were the same color as the "grass".   Then we jumped ahead to tasting as the kids ate the candies.

Next we did the sense of Smell.   We read What's That Awful Smell by Heather Tekavec to start off.  Then I took five cups and put different items in them to smell.   This was another experiment from Science Experiments for Young Learners but I just used some plastic cups instead of closed containers and didn't have them match the scents.  I did just one of each scent and we discussed whether it smelled good or bad and why.  Both kids disliked the smells of coffee, italian dressing, cinnamon and garlic.  The only one they liked was chocolate syrup. (I used things I had around the house that had strong smells).   

Mmmm, Chocolate smells good.

Vicki thinks coffee smells BLECH!

We discussed other smells and decided popcorn, chocolate, bubble bath, flowers ("smell good as a daisy") and books smell good.  According to George - "books smell a little good but bad if they are in the library" and "everything smells good at the grocery store where we buy apples, bananas, chocolate chip cookies and M&M's, then we come back home because that's all the stuff we need to buy."

Bad smells included coffee, garlic, skunk, Vicki's diapers and Daddy's feet.

Our next sense was hearing.   We read Sound All Around by Fay Robinson and some hearing pages from The Learning Page.   The kids decided that discussing hearing required music so George played the laundry basket drum while Vicki played her radio.

We did an experiment from Science Experiments for Young Learners but once again I had to improvise a little.  I couldn't find opaque containers to use so I ended up cutting some paper towel tubes in half, putting the objects inside and sealing the ends with paper and tape.  They didn't look pretty but they did the job.  Inside I put bells, rice, paper clips and cotton balls.  I made two of each sound and then the kids shook them to find which ones matched.   Vicki was much better at this then I expected.  After finding the matches, we played music with these new "instruments". 

Our next sense was Touch. I set up a Sensory Bin with objects of different textures in rice.  I had feathers, rocks, emery boards, pompoms, velcro dots, buttons and gave them spoons and funnels to explore with.    We  searched for items than classified them using a data sheet from Science Experiments for Young Learners by "something soft", "something scratchy", "something hard", "something fuzzy", "something smooth" and "something rough".  We decided that pompoms were soft and fuzzy, cotton balls were soft, velcro was scratchy, emery boards were scratchy and rough, the rocks and buttons were hard and smooth.  The feathers were classified as "soft but feathery" and the spoons as "swoopy, hard and smooth". 

As soon as the feathers were found Georgie gave up on the search and started blowing feather in the air.  Vicki loved the Sensory Bin and continued digging for "treasure" for over 30 minutes, until I took it away when she started throwing rice around the room.  I had never done a sensory bin before because it just seemed so messy (and something in me rebels against wasting all that food) but I'm glad I decided to start one.  I have found ideas for using it all over the internet and the kids both enjoyed it. 

Our last scent was Taste.  This was actually the hardest to come up with an activity since George is an EXTREMELY picky eater and never wants to try anything.  We read some pages from The Learning Page on taste and discussed what would taste sweet, sour, salty and bitter. 

We finished up with a review.  I put a bag of popcorn in the microwave then had the kids tell me when they knew what I was doing and how they knew.  The first thing they noticed was the smell (Daddy had bought the Super-Dooper Butter Flavor popcorn instead of the 94% fat free that Mommy usually gets so it had a way stronger smell than usual).  Then we could hear in popping.  Once it was done, we saw it in the bowl, touched is as we grabbed handfuls and then tasted it - YUMMY!  (My kids love popcorn.)

We did an activity from The Learning Page discussing what senses we would use the experience the following items:  an alarm clock, flowers, telephone, popcorn, television, doorbell, chocolate cake and sandpaper.   The kids both had a pretty good grasp of the senses and had a lot of fun with all our experiments.

To see what others are doing visit Preschool Corner & 5K too at Homeschool Creations.

Human Body - Systems

We are currently studying the Human Body.  This week we went through each of the body systems and next week we are going to cover the 5 Senses.

For each system we used a Science Encyclopedia, watched a Magic School Bus video and used a body systems activity from the Evan Moor Giant Science Resource Book.   I also recently downloaded the first few lessons of REAL Science Odyssey as part of their Try It Before You Buy It preview.  I printed out the description pages and read them to the kids.  I liked their descriptions better than the ones in our Science Encyclopedia since they were much easier for them to understand. 

We started the week by hanging and coloring the body from the GSR.

We read From Head to Toe by Eric Carle and played along with the story to get ready.  We started with the skeletal system.   We read The Skeleton Inside You and used a mirror to look at our ribs (at least the kids did, my ribs are not currently easy to see).  We felt along our arms and hands to feel the bones.  We tried to make a tent by using just pillows and blankets and then added support from chairs and tables, to show how the skeleton supports our softer body parts.  We added the skeleton from Giant Science Resource Book to our guy and colored it in.

The kids weren't awful about coloring together but there were a few fights. George has gotten very meticulous about his coloring lately and usually has a (very colorful) plan.  So I also let him color in a skeleton exactly how he wanted without his sisters help.

The other body systems we covered and activities we did were:

Muscular System - felt muscles in our arms as we moved it
Circulatory System - exercised and then felt our pulse in our neck
Respiratory System - breathed into a paper bag to show how lungs expand and contract
Digestive System - pulled a tape measure out to 15 feet to show how long the small intestine is and then folded it to show how it fits in the body.
Nervous System

For each one, we added and colored the body parts for our Giant Science Resource Book guy and he looked quite interesting by the end.

We finished up with a review of all the body systems using a game from the December 2009 Teachers Book Bag.   George glued the pictures in the correct categories. Vicki just made a collage with all the pictures.

Next week we'll be going over the 5 Senses.

To see what others are doing check out Preschool Corner & 5K too at Homeschool Creations.