Thursday, April 8, 2010

Easing back into school after break...

Yesterday we eased back into school with a light, fun day. The highlight of which was edible Science, yum! The big kids started out the school day with Writing With Ease, followed by Sequential Spelling. I don't actually own either of these. I have the Writing With Ease text borrowed from the library. I've been using the sample of Sequential Spelling from online. I plan to purchase and use both of these for next school year, but wanted to take the opportunity to trial them out now. The kids actually like both and as for me, I do too. I can see the value in both. The lessons are relatively short and light, but the kids gain quite a lot from them. The kids were assigned to read one chapter and do 10 minutes of multiplication on freerice.com. That website really is a good way to drill multiplication facts. The kids like it because they are helping donate rice to hungry children. There is other subjects as well, such as vocabulary.

If you're wondering what Little One was doing during this focused learning time I'll share. First she was playing with play dough in her high chair. Then she wanted to write like the big kids at the table, so I gave her pen and paper. She drew and talked about the Spelling words and laughed when the big kids laughed. I then read Little Bear by Else Homelund to her, twice.

On to the really fun part, edible Science! We actually did two projects. One failed. The first was ice cream. I've seen this recipe before other places, but I got it out of Science Play-Beginning Discoveries for 2-6 Year-Olds by Jill Frankel Hauser. Basically milk and sugar in a zip lock bag, place in a bigger zip lock bag filled with ice and some salt, then shake, shake, shake-shake, shake shake-shake your booty! The details are in the book. We flavored on bag with chocolate syrup, one with vanilla. Little one loves to help with recipes. She really enjoyed this. It does take 15 minutes, which is a whole lotta shakin' goin' on. I counted it exercise myself. My son snapped a couple of pictures. The last one I took. Little One was showing me her sticky hand. She's selectively fastidious, lol.

The second project was to be edible sugar crystal necklaces. I'm not sure where we went wrong. We've done a sugar crystal experiment before and it worked. I felt pretty sure we followed the directions to a T. Oh well, I'm sure the ice cream was better anyhow.

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