Moons and More

 This week we continued Owl Moon and explored the animals and moon more in depth. We read a book called Where Are All the Night Animals? We learned the words nocturnal and diurnal as well as echolocation. To talk about that more, we tried an experiment I'd read about in several places. Place rice grains on a stretched piece of plastic across a bowl and loudly hit a pan over it to see how sound waves can move objects. It totally didn't work- and we tried many variations. Here are the kids yelling at it!
 (please forgive my blurry iphone pictures this time around)

Then I remembered that often when I practice, my horn sends all sorts of things into vibration mode in the house. So we tried that.

 As you can see from the video, it worked great. They had a lot of fun watching individual rice grains turn while others stayed still. They also saw that the higher in pitch I played, more grains danced.

 Since it's been cold and rainy here lately, there's not much chance for outdoor play. Dax and I are participating in an online fitness group, which motivated me to find these videos on YouTube for the kids. Cosmic Kids Yoga- They loved it and I was entertained the whole time, too.

 We learned that bats eat about 1/4 of their weight in food each night. I thought this was a good opportunity for math since Hannah has been learning simple fractions. It backfired a bit since their weights had to be rounded down for even numbers and the tally marks I tried to use to find the right numbers totally lost their attention-  and not a lot of food would fit on that scale at a time. They still loved getting to raid the pantry and fridge. Here, we came up with what they would have to consume in a day to equal 1/4 of their weight.

 This guy weighs more than Chloe now. And his default outfit is indeed a velvet vest and plaid pants Nana made him for his fancy Christmas outfit. I often find him in it when I wake up.

 Hannah also filled out a worksheet about nocturnal animals and did some cut and paste work after we learned about categorizing mammals, amphibians, and reptiles.

One of my favorite things we did was find audio files of all the nocturnal animals in their book. We tried copying the sounds and assigned each other animals- then depicted a forest night when we all howled, hooted, and chirped at once. : )

 Another fun idea I found online was to study moon phases with cookies. This again was less productive than I imagined. We read a great book about the moon, watched the moon landing, and watched tides pulled by the moon's gravity. But as soon as the oreos came out, all was lost! haha It was quite difficult to get them to only eat half or one-quarter of the icing. And the results were much gooier than the fancy photos I saw. In any case, they liked comparing the phases and when we saw the bright moon out this afternoon, they immediately applied everything they learned and made guesses on the phase it was in!

 We also tried the classic ball and lamp experiment to see the moon's phases. Looks like Barbie had a late night back there.

 We shined the light against blocks to check out the varied length in shadows and how that causes the craters to look so dark on the moon. Hannah had the hardest time remembering the word craters! I heard all sorts of crazy variations.

 We tried this fun experiment with plaster of paris. We flattened a few cups of it in a bowl and dropped small and large pebbles from different heights to create craters. We sprayed it with water and waited for it to dry.

After an hour, it wasn't quite ready so they took it upon themselves to speed up the process. :)

 

Of course it broke when we took it out of the bowl, but we just called them quarter and crescent moons. They painted their moons gray....and now I'm not sure what to do with them...

 Today, I tried to get Hannah out of her math book and into more thinking skills, so I asked her to write ME a math test. Boy was she excited. She used her book for reference but wasn't allowed to copy any of the problems exactly. She had me solving word problems, telling time, doing subtraction, fractions, and matching words to numbers. I thought she did a great job and was very thorough. I earned a smiley face for my 100% : )

 This was our final art project. I saw it on Pinterest and knew it was a great opportunity to talk about color mixed with white and black as well as the use of light and dark to create a glow. Here's mine above. It's the moon in the night sky.

Colin did not participate as he spent the whole time stubbornly not finishing his lunch :/
The girls did a nice job. I got onto Hannah a little for working so hard on her moon and then nearly covering it up, but it actually works quite nicely the way it glows through the tree, so what do I know?!

For our last week of the 6 weeks, we'll read a beautiful book called Miss Rumphius.