Pre-Holiday School Days

This is when it starts to get hard to stay on top of things with school.  There are too many fun projects that we could do.  It's WAY too easy to get sidetracked, and it's even harder to stay motivated with the "required" stuff.  But, we are trying (sort of).  Here's the last two weeks of the boys trying to stay focused……

*On a side note:  I noticed that I duplicated some pictures and projects on this post and another.  I deleted a few, but in an effort to keep myself from getting confused, I'm going to stop with the deleting now.  Viewers will just have to scroll past the duplicates.  Hopefully, this will be a one time thing.

Language Arts

Working on beginning sounds in the workbook.

Creating word family flip charts.

Do-a-Dot Letter Hunt worksheets.

Sawyer's Sight Word Caterpillar in the making!

Hayden's early reader review from the last month of his language arts curriculum.

Handwriting without Tears workbook activity.

Cutting out shapes and colors to make a color book after reading several books
about colors.

Searching for colors in magazines to go in his color book.

The books we read about colors.

Math:
Sawyer got lucky with math these last couple weeks.  It was either MathSeeds on the computer, or Skylander themed fun with addition, money, and sorting.  He was in heaven….

Cutting out the Skylanders and putting them into their proper element.

He knows these guys pretty well.  

Figuring out coin names and values.

Using the abacus to add numbers in the thousands.

Practice, practice, practice!

Reinforcing counting in the thousands by playing the Corners Game

Figuring out how many pennies equal a nickel and a dime.

Playing a coin exchange and counting game to help remember how much
each coin is worth.

After a week of using the abacus, we are now working on adding numbers
in the thousands without the use of the abacus.  

Science:

These last two weeks were spent finishing up the dinosaur unit (and lap book) we've been working off and on with over the course of the semester.  We talked about the diets of the different types of dinosaurs, how dinosaurs were born, the theories of extinction, and in the end, Hayden picked out one to learn a little more about.

Making carnivore and herbivore teeth out of playdoh.

Pretty sure that the one on the left is supposed to be sharp and pointy like a carnivore,
and the one on the right is supposed to be a flat peg-like herbivore tooth.

Filling out the mini book about dinosaur diets and how dinosaurs were born.

 These next few pictures are of experiments we did to explain the two most popular theories on dinosaur extinction:  the asteroid theory and the volcanic eruption theory.

Quick demo of what would happen to the Earth's crust if a meteor/asteroid slammed into it.
When we dropped the  marble (aka meteor) into the pan of cocoa covered flour (aka crust of
the Earth),  it left a nice sized crater and threw out a ton of flour up from underneath and out
onto the outer areas.

Ammonium Dichromate
An EXCELLENT way to show how volcanos really work!  Screw the baking
soda and vinegar experiment - this one is AWESOME!!

First you light the ammonium dichromate with a (preferably) long lighter.
It can take a few seconds for it to actually catch, and with a match or regular
lighter, this could inevitably burn your fingers.  Once it catches, the orange
crystals begin to turn black, burning from the inside out.

As it burns, it starts shooting the burned pieces up through the center and out of the
hole it is creating within the middle of the pile.

The ash blows out and off to the side, just like a volcano would if it were erupting.

The bigger the pile you start with, the bigger and longer burning experiment you will
get out of it.  This pile was barely a tablespoon full!  It was incredible! 

Hayden and Sawyer also got to make their own mini dinosaur worlds (a pie tin diorama, if you will).

This one is Sawyer's.  :)

They worked on these suckers for EVER!

Writing a pocketful of information about the Spinosaurus to add to the lap book.

Hayden's finished lap book on dinosaurs (this was our biggest one yet!):

Outside cover

Open all the way to show all the mini books.

Tabbed book on dinosaur diets and wheel of theories
on extinction

Pocket of Spinosaurus information

(Sideways) matchbook mini books on the definitions of
paleontologist, dinosaur, and fossil.

The flip flap book on types of dinosaurs (open)

Flip flap book on types of dinosaurs (closed)

The dinosaur accordion timeline (all folded up).

The dinosaur accordion timeline (open)

Social Studies:

And last, but not least, in our school for the last couple weeks, we finished up on learning about Japan.  We didn't get around to doing all the cool stuff that I really had in store for us, but that just means we'll get another opportunity the next time around….

We learned about Children's Day in Japan.  Families with a son fly fish-shaped windsocks outside
their homes on a long pole.  The windsocks represent carp swimming upstream.  Parents hope their
sons will overcome obstacles as they grow up and become men.

The work begins on adding scales to the fish windsocks.

Hayden was able to paint glue on his own. 

Their finished windsocks!

After the Children's Day activity, we learned about the cherry trees that bloom every spring in Japan.  it's apparently like walking through a fairyland with all the pink blossoms everywhere.  So, we made our own little cherry blossom art with blown watercolor paints and pink tissues.

Getting started was harder than we anticipated.

It helped when I was able to find a fatter straw for Sawyer to blow through.

Hayden was finally able to get the knack of it as well, even with the skinny straw!

Finally putting on the "blossoms"!