Our School Weeks 23 & 24

The boys were SO excited to start our Astronomy unit in science.  I'm not sure there is even anything that they don't already know just from reading the many many astronomy books we already have.

So we started out just reading about what astronomy is and then about the sun, which included learning about eclipses.  We did our own version of a solar eclipse, where the moon blocks out all the light from the sun during the day in a certain area. Just an FYI, there will be two solar eclipses in 2012...one on November 13th that will be a full solar eclipse only visable from Australia and that area, and a partial one on May 20th that will be visable from the western United States all the way over to the Japan area.  Which doesn't really do much for us here in Florida.

We're reading through the book "Apologia Astronomy", reading one lesson a week.  I also bought the Notebook Journals that go along with it and the kids do four or five worksheets a week for each lesson.

We started with the planet Mercury, finding out it has no atmosphere and is much like our moon.  We dropped pebbles and marbles into a flour and salt mixture to see how craters form.  Mercury has no atmosphere, so it's always getting hit.

Then the boys made clay models of Mercury and used pencils to imprint different size craters into the clay ball.  We let them dry and one of these days I'll let them paint their model.

Since we're learning about the planets in order of closest to the sun, we learned about Venus in week 24.  Venus is quite different than Mercury in that is has a very thick atmosphere, is very hot all the time, and is covered with volcanoes.

We did this experiment to see how the lava hardens after a volcano erupts and becomes part of and changes the terrain already there.  Basically, we melted butter and poured it over the little glass bowl in the middle so that it flowed down over the flour (land) and then saw that it hardened in place.

So that's where we are in science for now.  Our next stop...earth.

We finished our study of China with take out Chinese food for dinner.  We were supposed to make our own fried rice, but we have chicken stir fry and egg rolls every Wednesday for dinner, so I thought we'd do something different (and give me a break from cooking!)

Some of our work from our China studies...

Next we moved on to ancient Japan, and enjoyed a Japanese snack while we learned about it.

The boys each wrote and illustrated their own Haiku poem.  Hand Guys (imaginary guys that the boys made up years ago) are still a popular topic for everything

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Christopher's Haiku

 

Matthew's Haiku

Matthew's drawing of a Samurai (Japanese knight)

After Japan, we learned about ancient Russia and tried one of their favorite foods, Borsch.  I did alter it a little bit based on the ingredients I had (omitting the ones I forgot to buy!)  It was okay.  Not a favorite of ours, but it's always fun to experiment with other cultures' recipes.

Christopher working hard on spelling

Legos are always surrounding the boys during school!

The girls are really into coming into the school room to do 'preschool'.  The boys do most of their school during the girls' naptime, but I'll go in with them at other times and give them 'preschool' activities.

And then it's always fun to capture the girls' sweetness.  Leah has memorized this book and likes to "read" it to Anna.

Here's a video from a few months ago of Leah "reading" this book (with a Mickey Mouse stamp on her cheek.)  Enjoy!

You'll have to scroll to the bottom to pause the music if it is playing so you can hear Leah.