Readings Around the House

The Star Wars obsession continues. I kissed Tiny Dancer while she was sleeping last night and found no fewer than four Star Wars books in her bed with her. The current favorite around here is this:

She's really taking off on her own reading, so there is an endless flow of books going through her hands at the moment.

Little Bear is in love with these Charlie Brown books.  

For school, he's reading The Kitchen Knight and Roland Wright: Future Knight among others.

 

 

And Curly is reading The Song of Roland (Eleanor Clark, out of print), Adam of the Road, and The Illustrated Book of Myths. 

 

 I can't seem to settle on anything for myself at the moment. Anyone have any suggestions? I love to read and am not liking feeling lost!

Tree Study

Our science this year is a loose study of biology. In the elementary school years, I feel it's important for kids to explore the world and learn about it through their hands first and with books second. We have found that a textbook approach just doesn't work for us at this stage.

Two years ago, we did a study of the ocean, mostly using Janice Van Cleave's Oceans for Every Kid book. We also threw in studies of ocean animals including projects, lapbooks, and many books from the library. We had such a great time that year, and I felt like we all learned so much.

Last year, we attempted to use one of the science textbooks from a popular Christian publisher. It didn't work for us at all. I felt like the text was too dry; my kids weren't at all excited by science, and it was painful for all of us. We abandoned that text and sort of floundered our way through the rest of the year.

This year, I knew we needed to go back to what we love. Studying science through exploration. Our topic is biology, so we are studying animals, plants, and the human body. So far this year, we have studied the platypus, earthworms, and owls. We're learning about the animal kingdom and classification within our studies. We've had a lot of fun with dissections, diagramming, and lapbooks plus a number of books we've checked out of the library. Next on our list is alligators and crocs.

We are taking a break from the animal kingdom at the moment, though, to take advantage of the fall. We are starting a study of trees and leaves. 

We have two great resources we are using to start: Fun With Science: Trees and Leaves by Rosie Harlow and Gareth Morgan and Common Trees of Pennsylvania by DCNR, a free resource we picked up at our local fair.

The first book has some great experiments in it to learn how trees work. Today we made posters about one of the trees in our backyard. We measured it to find out how old the tree is (one inch = approximately one year), made bark rubbings, identified the tree by its leaves and bark, measured the height of the tree, and learned to measure the area of the crown. We listened to the sounds of the tree and talked about the ways in which it is good for our environment. We compared this tree to another, older, slightly different variety in our yard. We even found a mourning dove and its nest in the tree. The dove sat and watched us while we worked and watched it in return. 

It's too big!

He just discovered the tree is older than his granddad.

Can you see the mourning dove and nest?

The kids loved this science class, and we had a beautiful day for it. We have a great deal more to do with the trees in our yard, and I am hoping to do some work with other trees in our town. I am planning to graph the trees in our town, continuing to identify what we find with the help of our common trees book, and learn more about why trees lose their leaves, etc. I am very excited for this project and am looking forward to it with the kids!

What kind of science do you do in your class? Do you have any fun tree ideas for us?

Whitaker Center

Hurricanes, movie production, airplanes, and more all in one afternoon! Only at a science museum.

Our little family has a big thing for science museums, and we have visited a number of them over the past few years. We are fortunate enough to have a decent-sized one close to home, and we took a field trip there last week.

There are actually about four of them within 30 minutes of our house, of varying sizes, themes, and budgets. One has a planetarium, another focuses on engineering, and another is three floors. We chose to go to the Whitaker Center for Science and the Arts because we have an annual pass for entry.

The first floor has some small exhibits with bubbles, sound, and the like, but its main feature is the large area for small children. They can act, build, shop, dress up, and play with water. We have spent many hours in this one area of the museum, but this time we opted to skip it.

The second floor has the Carnival of Health. It's exactly what it sounds like: carnival themed activities to teach kids about their bodies. You can feed Gorgo the correct amount of colored basketballs to represent the food groups, race on bikes to see who can burn calories faster, see what you might look like at age 70, and play whack-a-germ, just to name a few. The kids love this section of the museum, although the smaller two are a little afraid of some of the exhibits. It can get pretty noisy in there, and the germ game sneezes very loudly on the loser. It can be a little disconcerting the first time!

Seriously, how gross is that clown?

Also on this floor is a section called Move It! Kids can build and race cars, build and fly paper airplanes, use a variety of methods, including vacuuming, to move small particles throughout a large machine, build a bridge and test it, and find their home or famous landmarks and locations using Google earth. We found our old house, complete with our van in the driveway! It was a little creepy, to be honest.

The final floor has a  number of displays about our planet, including weather forces. Activities include making tornadoes, earthquakes, and floods, as well as trying to catch a cloud. Our favorite exhibit here is the hurricane chamber. 

Do you see me clutching him for dear life? Like those 65 pounds are going to save me in hurricane winds. He is, however, doing his best Harry Potter/Daniel Radcliffe.

In the rear of this floor is a behind the scenes look at movie production. We got stuck here for a really long time. Visitors can change the lighting, create some digital graffiti, experiment with music, and, our favorite, stop-motion animation. Oh, my, was this fun! I never dreamed I would have as much fun as the kids! We created a ton of movies and emailed them home to view later. 

 

This was my first attempt at the animation. Don't blink, or you might miss it! Next up is Little Bear's. Please don't ask me what it's about. I'm sure it has no point. When you get to trash can, I'm sure you'll agree!

And below is one of Curly's.

The best part of our visit was that it was a Friday afternoon in early October - too early for school field trips. We were five out of maybe 20 people in the entire museum! We practically had our own tour guide! An amazing museum employee named Jim enhanced our visit by showing us the ropes and explaining some of the concepts to us. We owe a lot of our fun to him!

This was our first field trip of the year, and we all loved it. I can't wait to take more!

Where do you like to go for field trips or family days?

Science Friday - Owls

We can be a little nerdy sometimes. Maybe a lot of times. I'll let you decide.

One of my dearest friends has a blog based on nerdiness. Can't get better than that.

We were talking this summer about science for the kiddos, and we decided to Science Fridays together, taking a cue from NPR.

First up was owls.

Owls from art class.

 We started learning about owl last week by researching. Curly is writing a report, and we are all working on lapbooks together. 

We also are working on a lab report. We got this template from The Crafty Classroom to use in learning the scientific method. 

The kids each came up with their own question, did some research, and made their question testable. We knew we would be working with owl pellets with the Nerdys (here is her take on the owl pellets; she does a great job of showing resources), so I steered their questions in that direction. After the pellets, we are compiling our data, analyzing it, and creating a report.

Last Friday night we went to the Nerdys' house to dissect pellets with her scientist husband. Poor Little Bear cried when he discovered a skull inside his pellet. I liked seeing how all the different kids approached the pellets in different ways. 

If you had told me fifteen years ago that I would be spending my Friday nights dissecting owl pellets, I never would have believed you.

Incentives

Taking on all three kids this year worried me a little. I wasn't sure how I was going to fit everybody into the day. And on top of that, Curly's list of subjects has grown even longer. So I decided to put into practice some good, old classroom management incentives to see what would happen.

The first step is pennies. Each Monday morning every child is given ten pennies. They keep these pennies in one of their school drawers throughout the week. If one of them breaks a rule, the culprit has to give a penny back to me. If he breaks a second rule, a second penny is returned. You get the idea. 

On Friday afternoons, when school is over, the school shop opens. Items purchased from The Dollar Tree were put into bags labelled with prices. They can choose to spend or save their pennies. So far, there's not much saving happening. Then the shop is closed until the next Friday.

Also great math practice!

Each day that all three children keep all of their pennies, they earn a puzzle piece. I took a picture of the kids and blew it up to an 8x10. I then mounted the picture onto a piece of construction paper and cut it into 24 pieces. In theory, it will take them a little over a month to fill in the whole puzzle. At that time, a selection of larger incentives will be placed into a hat, and one will be drawn. These might include a trip to the $2 movie theater, ice cream, a game night, etc. 

The puzzle is kept by the posted school rules.

I was a little hesitant to do something so "school-like," but it's working beautifully. No one wants to lose a penny, and only one child has lost any so far. And the truth is, we all need some incentives, don't we? Sometimes those are intrinsic, but sometimes we need some help. We reward ourselves by buying something new when we lose a little weight, or by taking a trip after a particularly long stretch of work. I mean, even just taking a day off and playing "hookie" is appealing, right?

They aren't really concerned with the larger prizes, yet. So far, they are mostly excited about getting the pennies on Monday and the school store. I like that the puzzle is a longer-term incentive. Right about the time the pennies start to lose their luster, the larger prize should kick in. And that should rejuvenate them for a while.

How about you? Do you use any classroom management techniques in your home? In your home school? In your regular classroom? Any suggestions for fun prizes?