Lego Quest

I found about this through this blog. I thought it looked like a lot of fun! This weeks theme is natural disaster. If you're homeschooled/unschooled you have until Monday 28th to enter. (click the Lego quest picture for more information)


Brie and her volcano!



Zeke and his tornado!

Behind

We are nearing the end of our school year, and as I was checking to see if we were on track, I realized we had a problem. Brie was behind on math. Oops! So that means for the next 5 weeks we are drilling like crazy, and pounding her facts. She has already made huge improvements! She knew her multiplication facts pretty well to 3, so we started by working on the 4's.

We started drilling the Maria Miller way. You can watch a video here. (If you have any math concepts that need improved I would recommend going to YouTube, and searching Math Mammoth.) She is the creator of Math Mammoth. She also has math worksheets, which are free. We use these quite a bit. She has premade for grade level and some concepts or you can generate one with the things that need worked on.

Here is our drill work...
This is our skip counting outline. (sorry for the blurry picture!)



Then we went over the facts, again and again and again!



Something else we've been using is Timez attack. Brie hasn't had much experience with the number keypad, so her first time was horribly frustrating! I think by the third time she did this, she had all of them mastered.
( We right now are only trying the free trial. I'm still considering trying a paid membership, but haven't made any decisions yet. )

Ocean....

We have been studying oceans for a few weeks, and we've done a lot of experiments. More than we've ever done! I enjoy experimenting, and I think the kids do too! If you like experiments and are going to study the ocean I would highly recommend the book "Awesome Ocean Science!" by Cindy A. Littlefield.
Here are some of the experiments we did. The first one here was seeing what happens to salt water when it's dropped into fresh water. Because of the density it sinks!



We also put a piece of a carrot in the fresh water, and added salt til the carrot started to rise!


This one was about estuaries.

Brie is preparing the "fresh" water.




Zeke is adding food coloring! (He added a lot!)





As you can see Zeke's river "flooded" the ocean! *He was supposed to gently squeeze it in*


We did it again, so we could see how the river water floated on top of the ocean!


I think my favorite experiment so far has been about the Coriolis Effect. If you want to try it fill a bowl almost to the top with water and sprinkle on a pinch of cornmeal. Now blow easily and steadily across the water surface and watch the way the cornmeal is carried by the currents. The same thing happens when wind blows across the surface of our spinning planet. (and yes I'm easily entertained!)
Zeke made a Lego 3D shark, and Brie made a crab. Not something we normally do, but fun!

Brie and Zeke both wrote poems about the ocean. They are also memorizing "At the seaside" by Robert Louis Stevenson.

I went to the ocean

and it had lots of motion.

I dipped my feet in and it was cold,

but I felt so very bold.

by: Gabriela

I went to the beach and saw cool seashells.

I got wet from the waves, and it was really cold.

We went back to the house and I saw a ship sailing,

and then we all had some hot cocoa.

By: Ezekiel

This is the first poems either one has written. I thought they did good! Zeke was very adamant about his not rhyming!! After they typed them up, they made these creations! We sprayed adhesive onto the paper and sprinkled some sand on it for the beach!

I'm glad they both remember going to the Pacific Ocean last year. When I read their poems I could tell they were both recounting their experience last year! I wish we could repeat it! We still have 2 weeks of our ocean study left, so we may share more experiments along the way!