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!
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!
My son is odd - he won't get into snails, insects, bugs, etc. Probably too long living in an apartment :(
ReplyDeleteCongratulations on First Holy Communion! So handsome too! :)
Well I'll say it wasn't my son who started the snail thing. It was the girls. Cat thinks everything that is smaller than a cat is the cutest thing on earth! My son would rather chop something up with his hatchet at all times.
ReplyDeleteThanks!
Well, that makes me feel better about the boyness of my son then ;)
ReplyDeleteIs that where S gets it? She is always saying "CUTE!" to those things smaller than a cat!!
ReplyDeleteLove the saturation and evaporation work!
Is that where S gets it? She is always saying "CUTE!" to those things smaller than a cat!!
ReplyDeleteLove the saturation and evaporation work!
Thanks! "Cute" is their favorite word!
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