Max - Week 13

L. Arts: I read two of the review practice sheets in the back of the book. I did a worksheet on identifying nouns and verbs. I read a new story from the I See Sam series, Matt at Bat. I read some mini books, including Clocks.

Math: I played Number Dice Junior with my mom few times and also with my sister. I practiced using as many of the five days as I could to make a target number. I won. I also did some workbook pages practicing addition and some Dreambox lessons on the computer.

Science: We learned about atoms. We built models with Skittles and also as a group with balloons. We learned that the atoms of different elements have different numbers of protons, neutrons and electrons.

History: We learned about King Tutankhamen. He wasn’t a very important or notable pharaoh but his tomb wasn’t discovered until the early 1900s so he is really famous. His tomb was undisturbed which was notable because so many were raided.

Music: We focused a lot on baby steps on the staff. A major chord is made up of all baby steps. A baby step goes from a line to a space or a space to a line. We identified mi-re-do and sol-sol-do in our Circle to the Left song.

Tech (Engineering): We built a fort wall patterned after Jamestown with the building stuff at Thanksgiving Point. We also built cup towers with a bunch of cups we had gotten for a neighborhood party game. We built a really tall one.

Admiring the Dinovember dinos one morning

Some spelling words. We noticed just now that I spelled "have" wrong. Oops!

You try to use all 5 dice to make a target number

One of the several games of Math Dice Junior I played this week

Building atoms

Atomic model built with skittles

Building our skittle atomic models

Atomic model with balloons--we are keeping the nucleus corralled

Making the wall 

Building Fort Jamestown

Practicing baby steps on the staff

Reading practice in my language arts program

Assembling my new minifig

I earned this Korg minifig with my lesson points

I noticed how the sunlight shone through these dice and looked really pretty

Our awesome tall cup tower

more practice words

We took a slow-mo video of us knocking the tower down

Mali - Week 13

Language Arts: I did a lesson and read the new story Hit the Gas. I practiced my phonogram cards and my word cards. I did some Reading Eggs. I did a Build A Sentence activity with my mom. You swap out different words in a sentence to change it to match the picture, then draw a new picture card and change the sentence again.

Math:  I played Number Dice Junior. I did some Dreambox. I built a 100 chart. I did some workbook pages. One was fun because it had mommy and baby butterflies and I found all the babies even if they weren’t in the same row.

Science: We learned about atoms. We built models with Skittles and also as a group with balloons. We learned that the atoms of different elements have different numbers of protons, neutrons and electrons.

 
History: We learned about King Tutankhamen. He wasn’t a very important or notable pharaoh but his tomb wasn’t discovered until the early 1900s so he is really famous. His tomb was undisturbed which was notable because so many were raided and robbed a long time ago. 

 
Music: We focused a lot on baby steps on the staff. A major chord is made up of all baby steps. A baby step goes from a line to a space or a space to a line. We identified mi-re-do and sol-sol-do in our Circle to the Left song.

Tech (Engineering): We built a fort wall patterned after Jamestown with the building stuff at Thanksgiving Point. We also built cup towers at home with a bunch of cups we had gotten for a neighborhood party game. We built a really tall one.

Playing Math Dice Junior

Building atoms with Skittles

Building atoms with balloons

Being silly

Building the Jamestown Fort

Our fort inside the wall

Practicing baby steps on the staff

Making dinosaur families

Build A Sentence activity

Build A Sentence

Math worksheet

I had fun matching all the babies with their moms

A craft I made this week

We are the Cup Crew

Mali Week 11

L. Arts: I played Ziggy’s Treasure Hunt. We talked about how every word needs at least one vowel and identified different patterns in words, like consonant-vowel-consonant and vowel-consonant-consonant. I practiced spelling words from pictures in my Spell A Word flip book.

Math: I did some workbook pages. We are learning about counting on as a way to help add numbers. We practiced this with our math dot cards and also with our foam dice.

Science: In co-op we learned about spiders and some of the different ways they catch prey. Some spin webs, some make web mets, some hide behind trapdoors, some just hunt and pounce. We made webs out of popsicle sticks and yarn. At home we did our MEL SCIENCE kit about crystals and made three different kinds of crystals. One of the experiments was supposed to make iridescent crystals when viewed through polarizing film, but it didn’t really work even though the crystals did form the second time we tried. Our other crystals are still sitting in the cupboard while the liquid evaporates.

History: We learned about Ancient Africa. Where the Sahara desert is now used to be a place with water and plants and lots of people lived there. Fossils have been found so they know that it wasn’t always a desert. We also learned about Amanda and listened to two stories about him. One had a moral about how if we treat others badly, they will probably treat us badly in return.

Music: This week was a parents week, they come every other time. We accompanied the group singing Boom Boom Ain’t it Great to be Crazy on the autoharp. It’s tricky to play while people sing along. We also have a new song called Baby Step Leap. We take small little steps and then jump when the song says leap.

Tech (Engineering): We built a giant pile of leaves and jumped in it and buried ourselves. It was really fun. We also made monsters in co-op class. At the playground, we talked about different simple machines that show up in the playground equipment. Swings are a type of lever. There’s a drill kind of thing that is a modified inclined plane. We also watched my dad remove the flat tire and put the spare tire on the car. The lug nuts were super tight so he put the wrench on it and then had to jump on it to get more leverage. He also explained to us how the jack is a modified lever that works with a screw.

Music class

Leaf monster

Word building

My two monsters 

Snuggling in our giant leaf pile

Unicorn drawing

Another pony/unicorn drawing

Making crystals for science

Crystal solution. We had to wait for the liquid to evaporate

Sitting on Max, driving his legs

Mali - Week 9

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.

HeeHaws

Making leaf rubbings

Extracted leaf pigments

Stacking robot heads

Reading flashcards, with candy checkpoints

Reading Jam

The activity in my book for Jam

At Wilkerson Farms

Honey stick - YUM!

I was kind of nervous about the swings at
first but they were really fun

Wilkerson Farm

I love playing with this Halloween decoration

Big slide at HeeHaws

Decorating sugar cookies with mom

Origami