M & M Adventures: Mali

L. Arts: I did my flash cards review. I read a new book called Jam (I think). It was about a girl who had a yak come to dinner who really liked eating jam.

Math: We played our game Clumsy Thief Junior to practice adding to make 10. I practice counting to 100 a few times.

Science: In Hands-On Science we learned about why leaves change color in the fall. It’s a result of changing temperature and amount of sunlight. Making leaves is a big job for a tree, and with the reduced sunlight in the winter, the payoff is less because there’s not as much light for photosynthesis. With oranges and yellows, those pigments are already there but hidden behind the green of the chlorophyll. Reds are different and are produced when the sugar in the leaves changes to pigment. We extracted pigment from different colors of leaves, colored fall pictures, and made leaf rubbings. We also read a relevant book and watched a Brain Pop video. We also watched some wild Kratts episodes about penguins and dholes, a type of wild dog.

History: We learned about Leif Erickson for Leif Erikson day. We had a special Swedish cake in celebration, even though he wasn’t Swedish. We figured it was close enough. It’s called kladdkaka.
Music: Our homework was identifying which note was higher on the staff out of a pair. We practiced our songs on the bells. We are learning to play the Scotland’s burning song.

Tech (Engineering): We did origami. We got our own sets in a co-op class. We also got some stacking robot heads that are really tricky to balance. The set came with 8 heads but balancing more than 5 seems impossible so far.

Other: we had two fun field trips this week. One was to Wilkerson Farm on Thursday and the other was to HeeHaws on Friday. We made Halloween sugar cookies with our mom.