Field Trip to Smith Family Farm

This was our second time visiting the Smith Family Farm, and the boys had a GREAT time!  Just like before, they got to dig up potatoes and feed the tilapia.  This time, they also got to pull up some onions as well, and they got a closer look at the cows out in the fields.  The Smith Family Farm is an organic farm in Hastings, Florida.  They participate in the CSA program (Community Supported Agriculture), and they have been on the same land for 5 generations.  This family is a wonderful group of people, and it is amazing the amount of stuff that they grow and sell!  To top it all off, Jeb and Wendy Smith's children are all home schooled, so they have a special place in their heart for us!

Checking out the chicken coop hiding under the jasmine.

Jeb Smith shows the kids what to look for when pulling up the potatoes.

Hayden watches one of the others to see how to twist the potato off the vine.

On the hayride!

 Feeding the tilapia.  Sawyer, true to form, just chucked his entire cupful instead of sprinkling it out and making it last.  He's a little booger, that one.

And the pond goes from a tranquil sheet of glass to a torrent of crazy fish once the food hits the surface!

I think we're being followed....

.....which really excites the group, and they proceed to feed hay through the bars to the cows.  Those lucky cows.

The cows are sad to see us leave them behind.  They tried keeping up with us for a while.

Our collection of produce from the farm.  The bag of potatoes on the left is what Hayden and Sawyer collectively pulled up.  The rest of it, we bought from the family.  Boston Bibb and Green Leaf Lettuces, Swiss Chard, Grapefruit, Sweet Potatoes, Cucumbers, Kohlrabi, and Sweet Yellow Onions.

April Showers Bring May Flowers

Except in our neck of the woods apparently.  We saw maybe 5 days total of rain this month?  So, the last week and a half of schooling almost didn't make sense.  Thank goodness for the gardening aspect of it.

Here is the lowdown on what we accomplished these last 2 weeks:

Color the Rain Boots:

Hayden had to read the color word over each rain boot and color the boots that color.  While he worked on that, Sawyer put together a mini book of different colored umbrellas.

Handwriting:
Sawyer worked on prewriting skills by tracing lines that went from the watering can to the flowers on one page while Hayden did a Rainbow Roll and Write similar to one of his previous handwriting assignments.

Hayden traced his flash fluency card words with glitter glue one day,

and he also used the scrabble tiles to spell them out another day.  This activity is a double bonus because he can work on his addition as well.  

Reading:

The boys took turns figuring out the first letter sound of the pictures on this page and coloring it in.

Most of the letter sounds we worked on involved short vowel sounds.  On this activity, Hayden had to stamp the middle sound of each word.  While Hayden did this, Sawyer stamped a bunch of letter F's on raindrops.  

Hayden also completed his very first word search!

I used another day to let them play with playdoh while working on the short vowel sounds.  Sawyer made the letters A, E, and I while Hayden made words that had the short vowel sounds in the middle.

This was another opportunity to utilize my new pocket chart.  Hayden sorted out picture cards according to their middle sound.  I quickly learned that he confuses the short A and short I sounds a lot.  But for the most part, he did a pretty good job.  

Math:

Hayden worked on patterns and filled in the missing part at the end of each one while Sawyer did a size sequencing activity and put flowers in order from smallest to biggest.

Hayden also made fraction flowers.  Each flower center gave an example of a fraction (i.e. 1/2 yellow and 1/2 blue), and he would have to make each flower with that fraction of petals.  There was a worksheet that went along with it where you had to color in and fill in the blank of each fraction flower, but it made the activity too complicated and drawn out.  So, we just stuck to making the flowers.

Raindrop Money Sorting:  the boys flipped over cards to reveal either a penny, nickel, dime, or quarter.  Then, they had to put that coin in the correct umbrella.

Another Big and Small activity for Sawyer.  He had to circle the biggest item in each row and cross out the smallest item.  I think he's got this concept down pat.

Science:

Our science these last two weeks involved finishing up a couple of past projects as well as beginning the new one which is gardening.  We'll start with the past projects first.  The main one was the naked egg experiment.  After the one week stay in vinegar, this is what our naked egg looked like:

Look how HUGE it is!!

And this is what it looked like when we shined a flashlight behind it:

The other past project we were working on was a lizard lap book.  I don't have any pictures of this one.  It wasn't one of our most interesting lap books, but it was good enough to show what he had learned.

So, moving on to our new science unit: gardening!  One of my favorite things to do is gardening.  I love it, especially when everything grows the way it's supposed to!  Usually, I do this kind of thing on my own, but Hayden was interested in it.  So, we decided to incorporate it into our homeschool day.  Here is what we've accomplished so far:

We began our garden on the side of the house.  We did a combination of plants and seeds.  So, in our garden are eggplants, cucumbers, corn, peas, and okra.  These are the vegetables that Hayden specifically wanted to grow.  Honestly, we should have started this a month ago because it's so hot now already in Florida, but being 9 months pregnant and then having Riley join our family mid-March made it pretty impossible to get down and dirty (us being me, that is).  BUT!  We will see how it goes, right?

The next thing we did was plant some of those same seeds in clear plastic cups so Hayden could see the process of a see sprouting.   That was fun.  One of the cups got knocked down and broken one day before the seed really had a chance to germinate.  I figured it was a goner and just ignored it, but we were all surprised to see that it still sprouted.

Preparing the cups

These are the cups with the vegetable seeds that we planted in our garden:  cucumber on the left, corn on the top right, pea on the bottom left, and okra on the bottom right.  You can see that the pea is the one that fell off the table and busted, and yet, it still continued to grow.  Go peas!

Art:

I think our love of science is getting in the way of completing more art projects.  We really only did one art project these last two weeks.  The boys painted terra-cotta pots that they later planted flower seeds in.  Hayden has a lot more patience for this kind of thing than Sawyer, but Sawyer did request a fingerprinting activity.  So, I'm going to make more of an effort to incorporate art into our daily lessons.  And we will definitely be doing fingerprinting next week!

We also took a field trip to the Smith Family Farm in Hastings, Florida with our homeschool group.  The pictures from this field trip are in a separate post.

"Egg"cellent Homeschool Week!

The week after Easter was a super fun week for us.  I decided that since we had over 100 plastic eggs from our Easter egg hunt, and quite a few hardboiled and raw eggs, we were going to make this week all about eggs.  The boys loved it, and Sawyer didn't even want to go to preschool this week because he was afraid he'd miss out on something cool.

So here are all the fun activities we did to make language arts and math a little more exciting this week:

ABC Egg Hunt

For this letter identification game, I wrote all the letters of the alphabet in upper and lowercase on the top and bottom halves of each egg.  Then, I took them apart and tossed them out in the yard.  The boys had to go find the matching top and bottom of each egg and bring it back inside.

Once back inside, they had to match up the eggs to its rightful letter on the poster board.

After they got both parts of the egg with its matching letter on the poster board, they got to trace and copy (just trace for Sawyer) the letter on their lined paper.  The great thing is:  Hayden didn't even fuss about having to write his letters.  He didn't even think of it as a writing assignment!  Score!

Easter Egg Spelling

This one was just for Hayden while Sawyer did Reading Eggs on the computer.  I wrote several of his high frequency words and words from the book he was reading this week onto construction paper.  Then, I cut them up and put them into some of the plastic eggs.  He would have to pick out an egg, unscramble the letters, and find the index card with the same word on it.  After he found the word, he'd read the word to me.  This activity was actually pretty hard for Hayden.  I only had him pick out 5 eggs thinking we'd be done with it within 15-20 minutes, but 45 minutes later he was still at it.  I meant to do this once each day, and if I had followed through with this plan, I think he would have gotten better at it.  It's a hard concept for sure because he's so used to seeing the letters in the correct order.  So, I may try to do this once a week - without the Easter eggs maybe?

Easter Egg Word Families
This one was more fun for Hayden.  I had three Easter baskets lined up, each with a card indicating a specific word family (-at, -op, and -am).  He is very familiar with the -at family, somewhat familiar with the -am family, and the -op family is new to him for the most part.

For this activity, I wrote a bunch of words onto the Easter eggs with the ending on the bottom half and the beginning letter(s) on the top half.  I separated all the eggs into the same container.  Hayden's job was to find the matching top and bottom (similar to the ABC hunt but with words instead of just letters), and then put the egg in the correct basket.

Easter Sentences
Another unscrambling activity, but pretty easy.  It was just a fun thing to do to give me a reason to bust out my new sentence strip pocket chart and give Hayden a chance to understand the basic parts of a sentence.

That was pretty much it for the language arts side of school this week other than reading another book and working on our flash fluency cards.  Now, on to the math part......

Sort and Graph
I love graphs!  We had a good time with this one.  The first thing I had Hayden do was sort out most of the Easter eggs by color (remember we had over 100 eggs and I was NOT going to graph that many eggs.  We'd still be working on it today!).  There were a few different shades of the same color, and after discussing it, we decided it'd be easier to just group them together as the same color.  Otherwise, it would have become too complicated.

After sorting them all out, we built a bar graph on the board.  I drew it out, and Hayden filled in the blanks.

Egg Patterns
I never thought we'd have a difficult time with this one because Hayden has always been good at identifying patterns.  However, creating his own pattern is a whole nuther story.  I showed him a pattern, and he could tell me what came next.  Then, I told him to build a repeating pattern using 3 different colors of eggs.  Instead, he'd make a long line of all these random eggs and say "This is my pattern."  After correcting him and going over it several times, he finally got the hang of it.  I'd have him do an AB, AAB, AABB, and ABC patterns.  Then, he'd have to point to each egg as he called out the letter pattern.  This seemed to be really helpful to him, especially if he got an egg out of order because then he was able to correct his own mistake without me having to say anything.

Easter Egg Number Hunt
Also similar to the ABC Hunt....I wrote the numbers 1-20 on some of the Easter eggs.  Then, inside each of the eggs I put one of the other numbers.  The goal here was to find all the eggs by using the numbers inside each egg.  For example, the first egg he picked up was egg #8.  Inside egg #8 was the number 15.  So, he had to search for egg #15.  Then, inside egg #15 was the number 3.  So, his next egg to find was egg #3.  Etc. etc.  I thought I had done it correctly, but either Hayden misread one of the numbers, or I screwed it up because we wound up not going full circle as planned.  Still, it was fun.  Sawyer refused to participate on this one because he wanted to swing instead.  Plus, I wouldn't let him just pick them up at random like he wanted to.

I guess I didn't get a picture of this one.  But you can always go back and look at the ABC  Hunt picture.  It looked pretty much like the same activity.

And so ends our math activities for the week.  Moving on to the big whammy of the week:  SCIENCE!  Our favorite subject of all!

So, I found a TON of science experiments involving eggs.  It was great!  The boys loved it, and we were checking back on our experiments every day.  Here is what we accomplished:

Investigating Air Pressure with Boiled Eggs
This was the first experiment we did.  It was really weird looking for the boys, and it was kind of a challenge because nearly all the boiled eggs we had were boiled beyond that "easy peeling" stage, and you really need a smooth surfaced egg for this to work right.

The first thing we did was find a large enough container that could hold an entire egg, but have a neck too small for it to fit through.  That was a tough project in itself, but we finally found a salad dressing jar that worked out well enough.

Then, I lit a couple of matches and threw them into the jar while Hayden quickly placed the egg over the opening of the jar, and voila!  The egg gets pushed down into the jar!  (Well, it actually got stuck halfway through just like the photo below, but it was cool anyway).

Egg Geodes
This was really cool.  We had lots of scrambled eggs the morning we did this activity because we needed 6 empty eggshells in order to do the experiment.  Here's what they looked like after I broke off the top.

After the eggshells were ready, we needed rock salt (which we switched out for kosher salt after we couldn't get it to dissolve enough), sea salt (we used iodized salt), and borax to mix with hot water.  We also needed some food coloring to help us keep identified which eggs held which solution.  This was our whole setup.  I ended up switching out the bowls for big mugs because we had to stir pretty vigorously to dissolve the salts and borax in the water, and the bowls just weren't deep enough to keep from making a huge mess.

Once we got everything together, I let each of the boys stir the solutions.  Then, I poured them carefully into each of the eggs.  Each solution filled up 2 eggshells with just a tiny bit left over.

We were supposed to leave the eggshells alone for 5 days in order for the water to evaporate leaving only the crystals from the salts and the borax behind.  Sounds like a long time, but it was fun to watch the change each day.  In fact, even by the end of just this first day, there were already crystals developing. This is what they looked like the next day.

Red - Kosher Salt Egg

Yellow - Iodized Salt Egg

Blue - Borax Egg

We moved all the eggs to a mini muffin tin for a better (and more visible) container.  As you can see, the iodized salt egg
seems to be permeating the shell the most whereas the borax eggs are staying pretty much clean.  

After 4 days, this is what the eggs look like:

The Kosher Salt Egg crystals look like they have
climbed up and over the top of the
shells and moved on to the muffin tin.

And the inside of the Kosher Salt Eggs are nearly
evaporated entirely.

The Iodized Salt Eggs have just permeated their shells.  It almost looks soft and fluffy!

And the Borax Eggs look nearly identical to the second day of crystallization.  Almost nothing has evaporated and it looks like very delicate ice crystals clinging to the inside of the shells.

The Naked Egg Experiment

We owe a big thanks to Steve Spangler for this one.  He is one fun guy when it comes to science.  If you've never heard of him or checked out any of his experiments, do it now.  He's awesome.

For the naked egg experiment, we used a raw egg and covered it with distilled vinegar.  Immediately, bubbles developed on the surface of the egg as the vinegar broke down the properties of the eggshell.

After 24 hours, we were supposed to change out the vinegar with fresh vinegar, and already, you could feel the eggshell disappearing.  It kind of felt like a boiled egg.  Once we put on the fresh vinegar, we're supposed to wait a full week before messing with it again.  So, next Tuesday, we'll pull it out and see what other cool stuff develops.  Today, it looks like this:

If you're thinking that it looks swollen and yellowish, you are right!  It looks totally gross!  Apparently, the vinegar is penetrating the membrane of the egg itself thereby enlarging the egg.  So, the boys are learning the meaning of osmosis this week!

And that ends our "egg"citing week of egg lessons!!  We will obviously be carrying over a couple of things next week.  So, stay tuned....