Phonics/Reading:
Abby's reading is coming along fine. We are finding that she tries to guess the word based on context and pictures, which can be hazardous since I want her to learn to decode unfamiliar words with phonics. Luckily, her Funnix 2 lessons don't have any pictures until the second reading so she does a lot better with those stories because in some ways she is forced to say it a sound at a time. She completed lesson 24 this week. While she CAN read harder books, she still gravitates to early readers for the large font, small amount of text per page and pictures.
ABCs:
Emmett's letter this week was W. He's pretty solid with his letters now, which is nice. He still loves to do them. Here he is saying, "W says wwww" as he wrote his Ws. He only actually does a worksheet/tracing on Fridays, the very last day we do letters.
Unit Study:
We are still working on weather. Monday night, we let the kids stay up late and have a "special night" to do this tornado in a bottle.
We also finished up our weather observation charts! Emmett LOVED this part.
This week we really focused on the water cycle. We read
The Magic School Bus Wet All Over, which was a
great introduction to the water cycle. The kids love MSB. I found a catchy little tune online that outlines the water cycle (to the tune of Clementine):
Evaporation, Condensation, Precipitation on my mind.
These are the parts of the water cycle,
And they happen all the time!
We took a day each week to focus on each part of the water cycle.
We did some experiments on evaporation. We put some water on the cement in the sun and then in the shade and observed what happened. In the last one, I had asked Abby what happened to the water and she responded, "It went up in the air!"
Then I asked Abby if only the sun could evaporate water or could we use another form of heat. She hypothesized it was only the sun, but was definitely willing to change her opinion when we boiled some water.
We made a cloud in a jar by watching boiling water evaporate and then condense at the top of the jar. Daddy was flying when we did this one, and he was kind of bummed he didn't get to see it. Apparently he's never done anything like this. I guess if/when we repeat it he can run it.
The next day, we held a cardboard piece over some boiling water and let the steam condense under the cardboard. When it got too overloaded with water molecules, it started to "rain" back into our pot. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of that one. Trying to keep a toddler away from the hot stove and explaining the cycle and holding the cardboard precluded me from taking any pictures.
Read-Alouds:
We finished The Littles! I have yet to decide what we'll move into next. I think we may wait to start another chapter book until after this baby is born...so we may just keep on reading picture books, which the kids love too.
Life:
We visited the Yukon Festival of the Child on Saturday. There were all kinds of exhibits to see. There was a neat "Mad Science" booth that had this tornado simulator. Even Ellie was pointing excitedly at it. Abby was also overheard telling the lady running it that "rain is only one form of precipitation." LOL
Of course, there were other things to see and do. When Ellie saw this, she immediately wanted to climb inside.
The music area was a big hit.
But both Abby and Emmett told us later that day that this part was their favorite! Of course!
