Nature Explorer's club--The Oak tree

We're back!
We had a week of vacation last week so that is why I haven't posted anything for a while. It was such a nice break, and we didn't do much by way of school, but now we're back to school and back to life.

The Oak tree

This was the nature assignment from 2 weeks ago, but we just got around to doing it today, grin. So, technically we've missed the "deadline" for this one ;-) But, I really loved the idea of looking at an Oak tree, and learning about it, so we still did it. I guess since this is our first time joining Jennifer over at Blissful moments for her nature explorers club I want to say thanks for letting us join and we look forward to joining as much as possible.

Finding an Oak tree in our lovely little city was a little tricky. I think our city leaders love maples, but finally we stumbled upon this lovely beauty today near downtown where the older part of town is. I'd also like to point out that all through our vacation and trips to various places I pointed out an oak to the kids and brought their attention to one every time I saw one because I knew that we would do this assignment when we got back.

I love fall! I love seeing all the colors of the leaves, and walking through them. Not a lot of leaves have fallen yet, but here are a few of the leaves, on the ground, from the tree we looked at
At first glance seeing these leaves I thought for sure that it was an oak tree, it looks just like one. But we didn't find a single acorn around this particular tree, so I wondered if maybe we were mistaken. This is an Oak, right?

My littlest explorer looking up at the huge tree! Amazing!

This is green flyer making an "o" for Oak with the acorns. This boy loves acorns! He wouldn't let those things out of his sight. Oh, and these are the acorns that we collected from 2 other trees (remember, no acorns around the tree we looked at) that we walked by on our walk, we just couldn't look at those trees because they were in people's yards.

He wanted to draw the "o" himself. Notice the 2 different types of acorns? I thought that was interesting that 2 trees, both oaks, produced 2 different looking acorns.

"Watch my acorns, please!"

Here is Miss Pink flyer, her job was to trace the leaves. We also had 2 types of leaves, rounded, and pointy (again, collected from the other trees we passed).

Mr. Blue flyer wanted to get in on the coloring action too!

And, finally one of my favorite pictures, pink flyer reading her book in a nearby tree (much smaller and not an oak) that she climbed. We had just walked from the library, and she thought that it was pretty funny that her book was about a tree house and she got to read it sitting in a tree. She said that she could have sat there all day in that tree (that girl loves trees!)

To see what others did for their Oak tree (or other tree) explorations go here.

Apples: day 3

This about wraps up our apple week. I mentioned that day 3 was our last day of apple study and my pink flyer was very sad, but there's only so much you can do with apples! We still might find a place to pick apples, plant an apple tree in our back yard if we can find one (or if our seeds grow), and these 2 other activities from A Mommy's Adventure's: Ten apples on top, and Mini caramel apples ( didn't have the supplies on hand nor the book).

Here's day 3:

Apple Science: I let the kids do some science experiments with the apples. They smashed, squished, picked out seeds (8 seeds from this apple!), and mixed up the apples to see what would happen. I made a worksheet where my 3rd grader could make predictions about what would happen and then write about what actually happened. She liked this a lot. Green flyer liked it too!

Green flyer smashing the apple, how many smashes does it take to make mush?

Putting the apple through the garlic press

Pink flyer cutting the apple

And finally...

Apple lapbooks: They aren't much, but here's Green flyer's. His has an apple matching game, and he made the small a on the front.

The matching game:

Pink flyer's apple book, front:



Inside: tic-tac-toe game, small a made by her, an apple book (found at enchanted learning, which includes apple facts, how to say apple in different languages, johnny appleseed, questions, etc.), and on the back is going to be the apple science worksheet.


We planted the seeds from the apple to see what happens. I don't know much about growing trees, but it'll be interesting to see what happens.

It was a fun week, still a little sad that we never found an apple orchard to pick, oh well. Happy fall!

Apples: day 2

We've been having fun this week with Apples--playing with them, learning about them, eating them...

Here is what we did on Day 2:

Bobbing for Apples!: We learned that they float, and that it's really hard to bob for apples! Here my green flyer has figured out the trick, just get the stem. He thought he was pretty clever, and he had fun getting all of them and putting them back into the bucket to do it again!

You can also compare other fruits to see if they float, we did an orange (that's about the only other fruit we had on hand) that was about the same size, and it did float.

Apple stamping: which didn't turn out very well (so therefore no pictures). The apples didn't stamp very nicely, if at all. There must be some trick to getting apples to stamp well! Oh well, the kids ended up making their own creations that didn't necessarily look like apple prints, that's okay! I did find a good idea afterwards at family fun called the apple stamp bag that was more like what I was going for.

Their apple lap books are coming along nicely too, I will post about them after day 3 (which is our last apple day).

Apples: day 1

We are doing an apple unit/study starting this week, and here is what we did the first day.

Here is a game that was in one of pink flyers boxes: She was to roll the dice, add the numbers and put that many apples on the tree by dipping the end of a pencil into red paint. She loved this game!

This is green flyer's game on one of his trays: It's a felt tree with felt apples, and he was to match the numbers on the apples to the numbers on the stem. I thought for sure he would like it, but he hasn't picked it to work on yet. We'll see if he tries it tomorrow, I've left it out.

We had an apple themed muffin tin meal: apple tree (key lime yogurt, with m&m's), an apple sandwich with worms, apple smiles(2 slices of apple with marshmallows for teeth), Oreo's (yeah, it's not apples, oh well), apple soda, and the word apple spelled out with letter cereal.

I'll try to post as many of our apple activities as I can through out the rest of the month. We also started apple lap books, and we hope to go apple picking.

Muffin tin Meal--homeschoolers lunch boxes

Yes, yes, I know, it's supposed to be muffin tin Monday, oh well! Here it is, on Friday. Well, there was no theme this week, so I chose to do "back to school". It's that time of year, and who says homeschoolers don't need lunch boxes?! I thought it was a fun idea and the kids liked it.

Here's Pink flyer with her nifty lunch box (with lunch type food in it): bananas, granola bar, peanut butter people (because we love friends in school and at home too!), trail mix, chips, juice box, and of course some fall pencils!

Here's green flyer with his nifty lunch box: all the same foods except he doesn't like bananas so he got blueberries!

happy eating! To see more muffin tin meals go here!

Weekly workboxes 2

This workbox system is so wonderful!!! I cannot believe how much it has changed/helped our homeschool every day! When I fill the workboxes each night I have to say it feels almost like Christmas! I look forward to Missy seeing what goodies I have for her each day in the boxes. She gets so excited to, and always wants to start right away.

Here are 2 pictures of games that were in the workboxes last week. I'm not going to put pictures of everything just because it's so time consuming. I'll list the other boxes out.

The first is a handmade word family game (to make go see The snail's trail)

Here is the game laid out, the letters or letter combinations in the windows change as you move it to each new color. Pink flyer really liked this game.

I saw this game on Walking by the way, and thought it was genius. It is a writing game where a topic is picked from the strips of paper, and then the dice is rolled and the child starts writing with that many words. Then Mom/teacher takes a turn rolling dice and writes that many words. I thought we came up with a pretty good story, but I have to admit that even though I really liked this game, my p. flyer did not. She played, but wasn't interested in doing it again. Oh well. Cute idea.

1. 

Here is a list of other great boxes from the past week:

1. Abeka 3 math lesson 20
2. Daily grammar
3. Magic tree house book on CD
4. Human body skeleton puzzle
5. Journal-one topic was "how to make pizza by P. flyer"
   
6. Write out 3 x 1 =3 20 times (help with memorization)
   
7. Math speed drills (abeka)
   
8. Master reader (hooked on phonics)
   
9. Multiplication keys (another awesome school tool to help with multiplication memorization)
   
   
10. Copy work (bible verse)
11. Vocabulary workbook
12. Skeleton poster center
    
    
13. Thank you note to great Grandma for a birthday present (I love that things as simple as this can be put into the boxes)-great writing lesson: she wrote it in cursive
    
14. Ballet lapbook-make ballet clothes book
15. Music lapbook-fundamentals of music mini book
16. 3 napkins and 3 inches of tape (think challenge) to create something
    

Okay, that's obviously not all from one day, there are 12 boxes maximum per day. But, that's a cumulation of many days. I just wanted put up some of the most fun and interesting ones she had. Happy workboxing! To see more workbox ideas go to "My two happy homeschoolers" and see what others have done!

"F" is for football!

One of the letters we worked on last week was the letter F.

On G. flyer's tray I put: The EF book from the BOB books, felt f card, f bean bag, f block, F sesame street card, and the letter F to decorate. He put foam footballs all over the f, and notice there is also a sheet of flowers, those didn't make it onto his F. I thought for sure he'd like the flowers, oh well the footballs were definitely cooler.

Tot school=#2 and #3

Green flyer is 39.5 months
Blue flyer is 13.5 months

Here are the last 2 weeks of tot school.

We have been having a great time with tot school/preschool the last few weeks! Some of these pictures are just priceless, and they catch such great glimpses of how much these guys are learning. Some of it is tot trays, some itty bitty bookworm, and some just different things we did.

On with the show...

This one is one of my favorites! So, I got the idea to make a-b-c bean bags from Carisa who hosts tot school, and they are a huge hit! My green flyer just loves them! Here he is playing with the 8 that I have done (A-G, plus an extra A). He keeps asking me: "mom can you sit down and make more green bags" (I love how he says green bags). I need to just finish them so he has the whole alphabet...someday they'll be done ;-)

Green flyer working on a puzzle, he's getting better at these. He needs me to be helping him with almost every piece though. He really liked this parts of the body one.

The final piece...such satisfaction!


This is one of my favorites of Blue flyer. He is getting a ride on his big sister's scooter. Going outside and riding bikes and running around is part of our daily school (at least until the weather gets more rainy).


Okay, this was an absolutely fun activity for G. flyer! I actually made it up on the cuff because he really wanted to use the school glue and glue something. So, I thought of bows from the silly sally book unit that we are doing, and decided to color the bow tie pasta for him. We talked about colors, and used A LOT of glue. We're still working on the glue conservation ;-)


Good thing is easy to clean up!...Look at that smile


He sure loved this activity too! We played "easter egg" hunt, and I hid all the a-b-c blocks for him to find! This kid has been obsessed about eggs since easter so he was all over the hunt.


This was one of the trays he could choose from his tot trays. It had his I spy a school bus (easy level 1), and an i spy bag. I asked him to look for certain objects in the bag, and we read the book together. He really enjoys the rhyming of the words in the book, and being able to find the items all by himself!


looking at the i spy bag


Okay, so this was our body outline, and I decided to tie it in with the silly sally book worm unit that we started. We traced his body, and he liked that part a lot, but he got grumpy about halfway through (I think something didn't go his way, not sure), so here he is with his grumpiness. I wrote on his poster "silly Aaron goes to town walking backwards upside down" (like the book) and then we hung his poster upside down on the wall. He liked that part.


Look at this kid color! He has been so precise in his coloring recently. Look how well he is staying in the lines, when he feels like it he can color really well.


I don't really do trays for this little guy yet (blue flyer) because he's so young, but sometimes he is really interested in them so I let him do the ones that are most interesting and he really wanted to do this one! He liked it even more than green flyer, and he loves that spoon. It was just scooping beans into a mancala tray.


Look at the happy tot schooler!


To see what other tot schoolers are up to click on this link> 1+1+1=1