Craftiness and Counting to ONE MILLION!

Yesterday and today consisted of some artsy elements. I posted them on our family blog, as I'm having a hard time deciphering between what is school and what is life when I go to post. Are all activities done with the children school? Or just the math and reading things? Yet, I really could pull math and reading out of any activity. Sigh. Perhaps I should send them to school just for the free time, because they're going to learn a ton while living in our house anyway. Perhaps that is why I never studied as a child...life at my house was study. Hmmm. It's a thought, but for now, we are homeschooling, and so far, so good.
Anyhow, here are the posts about the artsy things done / discovered:
Surrounding Children With Beauty
Step One in Adding Some Beautiful Fun

Then, we read the book Count to a Million by Jerry Pallotta. The kids really enjoyed it.

B is for Boa Constrictor

So, we studied boa constrictors today. Mainly triggered by reading
The Day Jimmy's Boa Ate the Wash

Then after reading about how boa constrictors really eat (click on picture of actual boa at top for link), Zac simulated it with a stuffed animal and a slinky. Cool. It was his idea.

Then Payge tried to eat the stuffed animal. She's teething. The other two started to refer to her as "Mommy Constrictor" with the slinky being her offspring, I guess. Hee hee.

We returned to our water color pencils, and made these:
Zach's wiggly snakes.

Chayce's wiggly snakes.

L is for Lizard

I know, we're bouncing around with this one. BUT, it went with the kids' interests, and I find that if I teach them something when they ask for it, they remember it much longer. Here's what we did for Lizard (sorry if you read our other blog, this is a repost):


Home made "fossils" are fun, cheap, and easy.

1. Purchase (at the dollar store) those cheap plastic dinosaurs and lizards.
2. Make up a batch of salt dough.
3. Mix a cup full of dirt (from outside, don't buy dirt.) into the dough.
4. Wrap balls of dough mixture around each lizard/dinosaur.
5. Let dry.
6. Give them to the kids with a dull butter knife and tell them to find the animal inside.
   

Education on the fly

So, it seems that we haven't been doing anything structured lately, but don't let that make you think we haven't learned anything!
This weekend, we went to our library's Science Alive! activity day, and it was a blast! The children handled skulls, owl wings, talons, earthworms, cacao pods / beans, dogs, honey bees, robots, magnets, marbles, etc. There were experiments to participate in, nanoparticle counters to watch, and telescopes to win.

Soon, there will be a wonderful new telescope on the market, named the Galileoscope, which I plan on purchasing. The Michiana Astronomical Society is having a night where you can purchase one for $15, and have an astronomer show you how to use it and what you are seeing. I can't wait!!

That was all on Saturday. Then Sunday was our day of rest, with a little church thrown in (which I do not see as rest with three children, but whatever), and on Monday we ventured out to the HealthWorks Museum to learn more about the human body. I didn't bring my camera, but my friend promised to email me photos she took of Chayce dressed up as a tooth. The museum was doing a "How to Brush Your Teeth" skit, and Chayce volunteered to be in it. She made a cute little molar.

U is for Uakari and Unicorn

A Uakari
The common name is believed to come from the indigenous term for "Dutchmen"; their red faces apparently reminded the locals of sun-burned Europeans^{[citation needed]}. Too funny.

A unicorn.

So, we learned about both animals. The monkey mainly for Zach, and the unicorn for Chayce's sake. I mean, really, we're going over the alphabet for her sake, so I have to cater to her a little.

The Artsy Animals assignment didn't go so well. They wanted ME to do the drawing, and I'm not going to showcase my artwork online. Sorry.

On another note, if you head over to my Regression blog, you'll see that we also had some great hands' on experiences!

V is for Vulture

A vulture.

Again, with Artsy Animals. I'd call it AA, but that just doesn't sound right, given that I'm working with kids. In math today, we're still working in the Saxton math K curriculum, slowly going through it. My goal is to give them a little bit of math all year, rather than to jam it down their throats for nine months and give them three months off. Instead of doing the assignment exactly, because I'm scizzor phobic lately (too many little pieces of paper to take away from crawling baby!!), I had them use our teddy bear manipulatives to do the adding and subtracting story (they were supposed to color and cut out a few teddy bear pictures, but...)


Zach drew his own pictures & titled them (although I had to write "vampire" over bat for it to fit, he still writes a little big.)

Chayce asked me to draw hers, but then colored it.

W is for Warthog

Warthog

Today, we used Artsy Animals Learn to Read, and then I decided that since"watercolor" also starts with 'W', we would do some watercolors. I bought a book at the discount store named Painting with Pencils which details fun projects using watercolor pencils. I (luckily) was in the right place at the right time last year at Sams Club after Christmas, and got a set of watercolor pencils on the clearance rack for dirt cheap. Hence, I didn't cry if a pencil or two got misused. Plus...can you really MISUSE art supplies, if you are just trying to be creative with them?

Below are the art projects the kids finished, as well as their attempts at drawing a warthog.


In math, we are still studying the number 2, trying to form it well on paper. It's not an easy number to write.

Zach's warthog. Chayce didn't want to. She was busy finding the purple crayons. ;)






















Zach's sledder & mitten. The sledder is supposed to look like he's going downhill, hence the smear.













Below is Chayce's sledder and mitten. I think they both did a great job, considering that it was their first time with water color pencils. We'll have to do projects like this again.