This week in first grade...
Our Poem of the Month~ This was our first week with the Poem of the Month. It's a simple poem about caterpillars and butterflies. Since we are taking next week off, this is also our last week with this poem!
Our Poem of the Week~
I had Ava copy the poem into her "sentence book" over several days. This is her first experience with copy work. It was very smooth.
Sunflowers
Sunflowers in the summer growing,
Growing up towards the light;
Light and warmth which draws them upwards,
Upwards striving in their might.
Mighty golden heads with seeds there,
Seeds to sleep in winter's ground;
Heads which turn from dawn till sunset
Following the sun's path round.
Heather Thomas
Silly Poem~
We read/sang "This Old Man" You know the one. "...with a knick knack paddy whack give a dog a bone!..." Afterward Ava made up her own versions of the rhyming verses and illustrated a song guide for us to sing.
We read The Great Kapok Tree, and talked about our impact on our local environment. We used information gathered from the USGS open house to talk about wet lands.
In the Kitchen..
We made fruit salad! So yummy, we'll probably make it next time too.
In Art..
We made paper feather collages. (Inspired by this page, and pinterest)
~First we made beautiful paper
~Once dry we drew simple feather shapes on the blank side
~ We cut our feather shapes, and added little diagonal cut edges
~Each of us had our own vision for assembling our finished collage
In Art Study..
Mount Saint-Victoire, by Paul Cezanne. This is our last painting of the year, this book was a little shorter than the others. Ava first commented that "It doesn't look like they were trying to be very realistic." then she was very excited to note "ooh, look they use lots of color in their sky like me!"
In Science We..
Sugar
Kosher Salt
Beach Sand
Another science project we looked at this week was a gift from the USGS open house. The biology department gave us two petri dishes. The first was an agar plate treated with very salty lake water (to represent Lake Mono). The second was an agar plate left neutral (only a small amount of salt). Then she had the kids carefully swab each plate with a sample of lake bacteria.
The microbiologist asked Ava which plate she would expect to see bacteria thrive? Ava thought that we would see the bacteria grow on the plate with little salt, since the bacteria were not taken from a salty lake. The biologist agreed with Ava, and explained that in science you need to prove your answers. We took our dishes home to wait for our results.
After three days we noticed results. (honestly we forgot to check the first two days!) Here's our results after 4 days.
The Salty environment showed little to no noticeable change.
The neutral environment had impressive growth.
I was very impressed by the Microbiology department. This is a great experiment. It's hands on, it requires a little (but not too much) patience, it demonstrates scientific method, and it smelled bad.
In Math We...
~Solved verbal problems using 2 digit numbers
~ made symmetrical patterns with two lines of symmetry
~ introduced the terms flipping vertically and flipping horizontally
~ started an extreme game of Corners. Playing over several days until one of us reaches 1,000 points and becomes Grand Master.
~ add multiples of 10 to 2 digit numbers with sums over 100
~ construct arrays of cubes from a 2 dimensional picture, determine number of cubes in a picture.
Try as Ava might, someone always wants her attention.
Our first full week back, and we are taking next week off! We have some very important (and very first) house guests coming next week. I love homeschooling.
No comments:
Post a Comment