School Days - April 2015

Ok so now that May is already just about done, I'll show you what we did last month in April...haha! We didn't do much. My son had his First Communion!

I spent some time taking care of things for the party and there was plenty of house cleaning to do. My grandmother also stayed with us for a week afterwards, so we didn't get any school done during that time.

Here is what we were able to accomplish, or at least what I was able to get pictures of:

Tes is working here with the number rods. This is Exercise 4: Impression of Addition. I've given her this presentation before but it had been a while. As you can see in the picture, you start with the 10 rod and create all the combinations that make 10. When you get to the 5 rod, you show the child that if you flip it over to the right, it will create 10, so two 5 rods equal the 10 rod.  At this point she is working on Formation of Numbers with the cards and the golden bead material. I wanted to refresh her memory on this exercise so we can move on to Exercise 5: Impression of Subtraction and be finished with the number rod and card exercises. Obviously I'll leave this work out for her to choose, but I will be done presenting anything new with it and can focus on moving forward with decimal system work instead of filling in the gaps.

Here I finally gave the presentation on Separation and Saturation and Super Saturation.  I heated up hot water and added salt. I was supposed to use some sort of clear container but I figured it was easiest and fastest to just boil water and pour it directly onto my comal! I don't even know if I spelled that right. It is my cast iron pan used to heat up tortillas :). As you can see the salt is clearly visible, or maybe that is mostly calcium! Either way the kids see that something was left behind, so the solution was separable.

Next I used a test tube to mix water and copper sulfate. You can see the copper sulfate towards the bottom of the test tube. We shook it until it dissolved in the water. We kept adding copper sulfate until it would no longer dissolve.

Next we heated up the solution to see if it would dissolve the rest of the copper sulfate. As it dissolved we added more, until it wouldn't hold anymore.

This is what it looked like at the end. I put as much as I could into the test tube. The liquid was getting thick although you couldn't see the copper sulfate separate from the water. But when I reached the end, obviously there was some at the bottom because this is the point...to see how much you can get in there before it won't dissolve anymore. We stopped here and I believe Swiper woke up at this point. I don't remember what we did after that but when I got back to the kitchen, the solution was cooled down and it looked like this:

Pretty neat to see how much was actually able to dissolve because of heat. It was packed in there!

At some point during the month, the kids became snail crazy! They found one snail and it led to another snail and by the time I knew it they had collected about 30 snails! They wanted to keep them and had them all inside a tupperware container. This is where I come in to guide them with their freedom by reminding them of their responsibility. I told them that they had to many snails and they were all going to die in that container. I required them to read about snails or else release them back into our yard. We discussed how life is something that we should treat respectfully. We discussed our role as stewards of the things on this earth. They were happy to take care of the little creatures but didn't seem too enthusiastic to read up on them.

MJ is looking some snail info up in our encyclopedias. We found out that snails need green and brown matter as well as lots of water.

Here's one of the little guys. Or two of them actually. 

And some practical life work. Cutting up the sticks to put into the snail habitat.

Cutting up leaves for the snails a swell. Not sure why they didn't just put them in there whole. Cutting is more fun than not cutting I guess.

Well this is all I got on the camera, but we continued with the reading sequence with Tes. We didn't make progress into further works but just continued working on her command cards and phonetic booklets. We've also been reading some books on other cultures, although we are not studying any specific culture at this time. I just want them to get a little bit of exposure right now. I'll post more on the books in future posts. Most of my time has also been taken up by Swiper. I've been purging old things and trying to get this house simplified and organized for this little guy! He's working on me!