Mike and Mary Anne

 This is the book we tackled last week. It reminded me a little of a book we already had at home (we get these from the library) and had a similar theme. When I got out our own book- surprise! It's by the same author, so it was fun to compare the two. So the story of this book is of a man who loves and cares for his steam shovel and likes to think they do great work. However, newer and better Diesel shovels are produced which renders his obsolete. Rather than send her to the junkyard, he finds a new purpose for them both. The kids loved this book, and I'm happy that even if a book is obviously old- fashioned, they aren't dissuaded.

 Since Mike takes great care of Mary Anne (the steam shovel), we talked about things we could take care of. I got out Chore Chart sheets and they chose a few jobs. Unfortunately I kept up with them very poorly this week, so it's more of a long term goal.

 I chose to take care of a huge pile of branches in the backyard. Hannah tried to rake enough leaves for a jumping pile, but it was so hot we couldn't do very much. Baby steps, I guess.

 In the meantime, Hannah is learning some basic fractions, so lemons and bread became their snack.

 And she's working with pennies, nickels, and dimes. It was nice to see a few light bulb moments when she figured out easier ways to count.

                                    This is just an embarrassing future picture for Mr. Colin. :)

 Since Mike is always saying Mary Anne can dig as much in a day as 100 men could dig in a week, we had a digging contest with beans, a cookie dough scoop, and an Iphone timer.

                                They loved it so much they had Dax play when he got home.

 Here's our score sheet. As you can see, we were really twiddling our thumbs when it was Colin's turn- haha

 We also talked about personification since Mary Anne had eyes and a shovel mouth. We found otehr books in our collection that used it and some toys around the house. Then the kids had to find any two things in the house they could add human features to. Hannah chose a doorknob and a flower pot- both looking a little like they came from the mind of Tim Burton.
Speaking of that, we also watched an episode from Pee Wee's Playhouse, another blast from the past. Talk about creepy personification! But it was really fun to see all those old characters.

Along with that video, we had a lot to choose from this week. One person wrote a nice song to go with the story and posted it on YouTube, so that was a good way to introduce music. Someone else made the entire book into a stop-animation video! Pretty neat. 
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3wTj-0pMwY
Of course being me, I was suddenly imagining my own stop-animation genius and looked up how to get started. I quickly came to my senses and figured I'd save it for an off week rather than try to fit it in now.

 For art, our Five in a Row book suggested we take notice of the different illustrations of trees in the book. We did that and added a bunch more from other books we owned. They tried lots of variety and did a great job noticing the details from each illustrator. Here's Chloe's.

 And Hannah's. She also learned to do a bit of shading and has been adding it into her regular artwork.

 We read some companion books about construction work since the steam shovel helped build canals, roads, airfields, and basements. We learned about construction zones and workers as well as the basics of building a house. The girls were fascinated that behind our walls are pipes and cords. They took a look under the bathroom sink- don't mind the paint spattered floor we will replace soon- or so we've been saying for a few months...

 Superbatman is checking out the water heater.

 We then designed our own houses. Hannah included shingles, siding, and bricks, as well as a variety of trees now that she had some new skills-  and I know she would never have thought of any of that  before.  She even chose a house number- 32040

              They completed their first verbal multiple choice quiz and got all the answers :)

 I was really looking forward to Science day because I've had an experiment planned for ages. I was never science-minded as a kid and it seemed like experiments didn't really work for me, so this time I was anxious to see it work. First we went over the basics of solid, liquid, and gas.

 We took 2 cups of water and boiled it then froze it so we could see all the states of matter. We also made sure to use a lid so we could watch the transition from gas back to liquid. I reminded them of the water cycle we talked about last summer and they watched a Magic School Bus episode about that exact thing. So handy!

After watching a video of a real steam shovel, steam boat, and steam engine, we talked about how the steam powers the equipment. The night before, I set it all up to create a steam boat. The instructions were only drawn, no photos or proof of it actually working so I ended up having to tweak a few things. Basically, there's a metal cigar tube (thank you Dax for getting us one) filled with water and suspended by wire above a wooden "boat." Too bad the wire and metal made the wood too heavy to float so I put in all on a pool toy. I put water in the tube, stopped it with a cork which had a nail hole through it. Tea lights underneath heated the water inside to boiling, making steam come out the cork...which would supposedly propel the boat forward.

Unfortunately now the boat could float, but was too heavy for the tiny bit of steam to move it. However, it did let out steam puffs and hiss like it was supposed to, so the kids were pretty happy with that. : )

This week we have off due to my needing to go out of town for two days. Chloe will also meet her preschool teachers this week during school time so we decided to pick up where we left off next week: the story of Creation- and I have a nice project in mind!