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 ;)

Week Seven -- The Week That Nearly Wasn't

It's hard settling back into routine after a nice weekend vacation.

So we sort of didn't.

We skipped school on Monday as it was Christopher Columbus Day and all the kids were out. And even though we live so close to a monument of Columbus' three ships, I couldn't bring myself to drag us out the door again. So instead, we did laundry. We cleaned house. We caught up on all errands that had been neglected--oh, wait.

That was all me :P

With the upcoming weekend looking pretty packed as well, we hit cruise control and enjoyed a mild week, hence the lack of pictures.

We did our daily date writing to work on learning how to spell the month and days and practice our handwriting. We started--and have sort of decided to stop--reading Peter Pan. He's showing zero interest. I think we'll try Pinocchio instead and see if that's more up his alley.

We learned about the four types of sentences: declarative, imperative, interrogative, and exclamatory. First, we wrote a sentence for each of the four types

Then I used a free download I found online to read off sentences and have Little Bug tell me which type they were.

Once he had them pretty well memorized, we worked on recognizing the proper punctuation for each type of sentence. I supplied the sentences and he had to fill in with a ? ! or . 

We began the math lesson on +9. This whole way of teaching math is so foreign and intriguing to me and I'm grateful for the DVD lessons because I'm not quite sure I would understand the concept the way they teach it if I didn't have it to refer to. 

Other than that, Little Bug memorized a verse, read a book--one he quickly informed me was something he'd read in kindergarten already--jumped on some bubble wrap packaging because it sounded fun, passed out asleep in the hall with a book late one night, taught Kyle Dog how to go trick-or-treating to increase his candy inflow this year, and dressed up in costumes throughout the week. 

Week Six -- Never Eat Slimy Worms

'Monster Stew is made with dogs.' 

 Halloween is on its way and it's a top three favorite holiday in the Hannah household. Naturally that means we get to do lots of Halloween-y themed things. Like our journal prompts.

This week we learned about maps. We started off with seeing where we were locally and then expanding all the way out to our solar system.

We made a compass and learned the importance of Never Eating Slimy Worms. This led to a discussion where I explained it wasn't really kosher to eat worms in general unless you were in a culture where worm-eating was considered a delicacy and even then it'd probably be best to politely decline. I don't think that message got through . . .

In math we started solving for 'what number' which is eerily similar to some pre-algebra stuff and it gave me bad flashbacks. So far it looks like Little Bug is far better at math than I ever was.

We drew our own map of the house complete with a legend and compass.

And then he used the map to give me directions to different areas in the house. While wearing a dalmatian costume. Because everything is better in costume.

We finished Charlotte's Web!! Which is good because it was a week overdue at the library and the librarian wasn't thrilled. But then, she never seems thrilled about anything other than sighing and making her lovely patrons feel like an inconvenience :) So in honor of finishing the book, we rented the movie and had a family movie night.

There's nothing quite like watching your little one's innocence crumble to the floor like sand when they show *spoiler alert* Charlotte's death scene montage set to music. Good thing we haven't watched Old Yeller. So it's on to a new classic now-                                                                                     -Peter Pan!

Week Five -- Verb Is the Word

With a good grasp on nouns, we moved on to learning about verbs. Being as a verb is an action, I didn't think we'd want to sit around doing a lot of worksheets. We started the week out with drawing a verb word from the jar and performing the action.

Little Mario saved the day by picking a verb and matching it to the correct item. He may have taken the game a little too literally when he took a bite out of the paper mushroom o.O















By the end of the week we were ready to sort both nouns and verbs.

Little Bug's great behavior with Mrs. Rebecca earned him a special treat. It's much more fun to write out some digraphs in shaving cream than with a pencil ;)

We don't really get to see the leaves change in this part of Spain. But that doesn't keep us from starting some fun fall activities, like our fingerprint leaf tree.









We also started learning our +2 facts in math and only have two chapters left in Charlotte's Web :)