Tag Archives: science

Homeschooling

2nd week of Christmas!

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To begin our second week of winter/Christmas activities we read about why snow is white from my boys science book and did this melting snowman experiment.
This ended up taking two days since their snowmen needed to freeze after they made them. This is another project my boys wanted to do. Only two of mine managed to make the “snow” the right consistency to make a snowball. Everyone else just made a cup snowman. In the end this project was a hit!

Just needed a few more eye droppers before we do something like it again.

We only had one and that made it time consuming and patience testing.

ha

 

Next we melted ice!

And yes, I had to say it like that to try to get my girls into it…

Adding the watercolors to be able to see the path the salt was taking ended up being really interesting and they actually liked it. We tried different types of salt and the girls figured out that the bigger chunks of salt were not the fastest at making the ice melt. The site suggested making thin ice sheets but I did not have room in my freezer for 5 of those so I just used plastic cups and it worked fine.

I like that the site talks about why the salt helps it melt faster, it made it nice and easy to make this a lesson. Just be warned, if your child chooses red it will look like a crime scene… Next we watched “The Legend of the Candy Cane” on youtube and did a melting candy cane experiment.

I can’t find the blog post I used but I know there are several out there that are basically the same thing.

We just did cold water, hot water, and vinegar and they guessed which one would melt first.

After all the excitement of the hands on projects this one did not hold my girls interest much.

They prefer to make a mess and get their hands dirty.

What is your kids favorite hands on project?

Please don’t say slime…

Homeschooling

1st week of Christmas

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I decided to set aside the girls science curriculum this month and see what I could come up with that had to do with Christmas and winter.

Here is our first week.

First up I read a little excerpt from the boys science book on weather.

I liked these books because they are written to cover multiple ages.

After learning about what snow is we made InstaSnow.

I had this in my science supplies already so it was a nice easy place to start.

Even the boys wanted to join in.

When we were done, we made a sensory bin out of it.

Next up we learned about snowflakes and their symmetry.

I found this idea to make a geoboard snowflake, here.

Next up we made paper snowflakes!

I used this tutorial.

 

The next day we read an online library book on snow that talked more about snowflakes, it was very easy to understand. I like to get the readers for science for the girls because they are usually written in simple terms.

Then we made snowflake salt art!

The template and tutorial are here.

This ended up being such a fun project!

My plan is to learn about ice and melting this week and then move on to learning about Christmas traditions here and in other countries.

Here is my Pinterest board.

Homeschooling

God’s Design Plants

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We have been doing God’s Design Plants for Beginners for a couple months now and I have to say it is a near perfect fit for my three youngest.

They are in 3rd(twins) and Kindergarten, the curriculum says it is for K-2nd.

 

My girls love the fact they get a brand new workbook every 5 lessons.

To them new is always better and whatever is newest is their favorite so the fact they feel like they get a new book constantly keeps them excited.

The lessons are short and to the point which really helps with limited attention spans.

They always have an easy activity that goes with the lesson and it is easy to make it more hands on since it takes so little time.

 

On this day we were learning about stems and what grows from them.

I added on to the lesson by going outside and having them find stems and point out the things growing from them.

We have also gone out to find the different types of trees the lesson talked about.

We found these berries and I had them split them open to see what was inside.

They were pretty excited to find seeds!

The only downside to this curriculum for us is that I have not figured out how to tie it together with out history study yet.

I like studying history by timeline and we are not in a time period that makes plants an obvious choice.

I would like for the boys and girls to be studying the same thing so we can actually do more together as well but the boys curriculum has them doing weather right now and the beginners series does not have weather.

But other than that this has been perfect to grab and go.

What do you use for science?