Week Thirteen -- The Thanksgiving Comet

No, there really wasn't a Thanksgiving Comet (at least not that I'm aware of . . ) But it was a short school week due to Thanksgiving and we learned about comets therefore Amanda logic deemed it an appropriate blog title.
We also learned this nifty trick of doing somersaults! On a bar! Over a nice big ditch! One of Little Bug's best traits is that he attacks everything with all he's got. Why give mom a little startle when we can give her a heart attack instead?

When we weren't attempting bodily injury, we settled down and worked on identifying subjects and predicates in sentences.

We read a lot this week, including this selection from James Herriot's Treasury for Children.

We finished our Thankful Tree on Wednesday!

And we learned all about comets. What they're made of and where they come from.















Then we made our own comet with foil and curly ribbon and may have scarred Kyle Dog for life as we tossed it around.

Week Twelve -- The Captain Crunch Catastrophe

The Hannah House, on average, eats a reasonably healthy diet. (Well, most of us do. Some of us are super picky and think the five basic food groups consist of fish sticks, chicken tenders, tater tots, fruit smoothies, and jelly sandwiches). However, I do try to keep the processed stuff to a minimum. But like every superhero--y'all know all moms are superheros, right?--I have a kryptonite. And that kryptonite is grocery shopping with a child. The bright lights and endless rows weaken me. Disorient me. And somehow things get thrown in the cart at random and, often times, unbeknownst to me . . . 

This isn't always an issue, and sometimes even provides much needed amusement (like the time I spent twenty minutes trying to figure out why I'd bought three boxes of microwave popcorn). But Little Bug on Red Dye #40 is akin to experiencing the downfall of the Titanic: panic-inducing, confusing, and the prospects of survival are grim at best. Thankfully Mrs. R, who possesses the patience of a saint, worked with us through our Captain Crunch Crack episode and we were able to salvage the day. Mom has since thrown crack cereal away . . .

Alas, every day is a new day, so we learned a lesson about careless shopping and then moved on to learn about the four seasons of the year.

We certainly never turn down an opportunity for a good play on words in the Hannah house

Another homeschooling mom shared a link to some great Thanksgiving videos at Scholastic. Little Bug and I watched a video filmed aboard a replica of the Mayflower. In true boy fashion when the twenty minute video ended all my son could talk about was the fact that the ship had a "poop" deck.

We finished our diorama on the Lakota people.

And, finally, we donned helmets for some more space traveling . . .












to planet Earth! Cole decided he liked this planet best. Surface H20, oxygen and all that jazz.

Oh yeah. 
There was also math.

Week Eleven -- To the Moon and Back

Know what's fun?

Eating Oreos.

And that made learning about the phases of the moon far more interesting. For the next few weeks we'll be journaling the moon and it's phases and using the awesome Star Walk iphone App to discover even more of what's hanging up in the sky. Thankfully Spain and its rain are cooperating with us this season.

                         Our Thankfulness Tree is growing!

November is Native American Heritage month and Little Bug had the privilege of hanging out with his Great Grandpa Larvie this summer--a Lakota member of the Souix tribe. We decided to learn a little more about the Lakota people by working on a diorama over the next two weeks. We built a tipi (or tepee) to place inside and labeled things like the sun, tree, and water with the proper Lakota vocabulary.

We used the opportunity for a journal prompt where Little Bug decided that if he lived in a tepee he would sleep. I guess he doesn't feel the same living in our house as sleep seems to be his least favorite activity. Ever ;)

On Friday we fueled up the rocketship and flew on over to Venus. Cole decided to make it a short visit because of all the volcanoes and, you know, the 400 + degree Celsius temps. Smart kid.

  

Coloring a turkey

Saving the world. Again ;)

Night Sky Study

There's so much to fill a study on the night sky. I decided to break up the ten weeks by studying one planet a week for eight weeks (anyone else still feel weird ignoring poor Pluto?) and then one week for asteroids/meteors and one week on constellations.

We started with one of those giant science fair tri-fold boards, painted it with a mixture of blue and black.

And you can't exactly travel into space without a rocketship, right?

Or an alien hat.

So. With all space exploration necessities in place, we were able to travel to our first planet, Mercury.

Each planet will have a fact sheet to accompany it. After reading through the fact sheet, we answer a few questions about the planet and then both sheets go into our Space Exploration Notebook.

Week Ten -- Night Sky and Equations

I think a common fear that many homeschooling parents harbor is that one day the lessons will go above what they feel comfortable teaching. That really shouldn't happen in 1st grade and, thankfully for us, it hasn't.

Yet.

But when you realize you're teaching your kiddo some basic equation work, your stomach gets a little queasy and you start having flashbacks and begin to panic that your child might need a smarter momma if you continue to homeschool.

Me, a worrywart? Never.

Luckily, the Math U See program has videos we watch together with a very nice instructor who has much better explanations than I could ever give.

I learned how much Little Bug really hates handwriting. He insisted turkeys didn't say 'gobble, gobble' but simply 'gobble' just to keep from writing that one extra word ;)  Which was fine. Momma just added another worksheet that required writing for the day. *cackles*

It was time to choose a new Nature Study and this term we're focusing on the Night Sky which you can read more about here. So each week we'll be visiting a new planet. This week we traveled to Mercury.

And of course no one goes space traveling without an alien hat ;)

Week Nine -- Journey To the Center Of the Earth

This week we started off with learning about landforms, which fit in nicely with the book we've been reading, Paddle To The Sea. We did a simple color, cut, and label worksheet that covered the major ones. But I knew we'd spend a bit more time on Cole's favorite, the volcano. 

Little Bug had a blast with the paper mache and Mom had so much fun cleaning it up (note the sarcasm ;) ). 

For the month of November we're working on building our Thankfulness Tree. Each day we write down something we're thankful for and glue the leaf to the tree.

We also did a couple activities learning about the layers of the Earth. We built and labeled a diagram and also recreated the layers with playdough. 

Week Eight -- And It's Oh So Late!

So far, we've fished for nouns.
We Super Mario-ed through verbs.
This week was all about adjectives, which goes along perfectly with Halloween.

We started the introduction by using one of our decorated pumpkins. Little Bug prefers coloring to carving. I'm more than on board with this much neater method.

He wrote down five words to describe his pumpkin, drew a picture of it, and then used an adjective in the sentence. Yeah, it says rotten. Because that darn ugly lil pumpkin really was starting to rot.

The next day we had a worksheet that required identifying both the noun and verb in the phrase.

And for a final review of all three we did a Candy Corn Word Sort which he aced :)

"Spiders are ugly."

Little Bug showed that he's undoubtedly his father's child with his journal prompt on spiders.

And even though it was a busy week, we fit in some time for Angry Birds Art ;)