Tuesday, October 25, 2011

preschool in full swing


In trying to keep this log updated I'm trying to take even MORE pictures of our weekly preschool/kindy homeschool. I'll try to add some more informative posts soon but the kids are keeping me busy! I hope though that anyone looking around my blog can find some good ideas for doing activities with their own kids.




a science kit found at the dump leads us to the question; are different materials translucent or opaque? I rounded up a bunch of random items from around the house to experiment with.


How many sticks do you see? I would count them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. but we are trying out RightStart Math borrowed from a friend and trying to learn to see numbers. In this case I added the color coding to the process. 5 is 2 on the outside, 1 in the middle and 2 in-between. 
We are still working on this concept and often we are still counting them to double check.  


the book is How do you lift a lion? and we pulled out our simple machines set from Kaplan to see if we could recreate some of the machines used in the book. Unfortunately we discovered there was no way to make a wheel and axle  with the set so our wheels kept moving around and throwing out poor animals off the cart.


Oooooo it's a ghost!!!! Totally stolen from a Montesorri blogger (can't remember who at the moment) I took dry white beans and added sharpie marker to make eyes. Then Loch (4 1/2 yrs) got a set of tweezers to practice moving the beans from the left bowel to the right one. and Asher (22 months) used a 1/4th teaspoon to practice scooping and transferring the ghosts from one to the other. 


We are on a mineral kick having found some cool rock samples at a yard sale so we read some books and then broke out the Papier-mâché and made our very own 'rock' who we named fred.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

some school this week


We are on Oak Meadows kidy H week so we made a house. clothpins, silks, + chairs = fun! 


This started by using the icetray to mix together food coloring to see what colors they made. It then turned into seeing what happens when we add other things, like rice or feathers. Do they dye? what if you dip the feather into several different colors?


Kaplans 'simple machines' box has been great fun. besides the machines you are supposed to make it leads to many interesting configurations of transformer like robots and frequently, catapults. 'cus I have boys.


Weighing, does a square pyramid filled with rice weigh more then a cylinder filled with rice? what about a triangle pyramid vs square pyramid? 


tot school/ Stacking small blocks 4 high!