We’ve moved on from learning about habitats in the Moving Beyond the Page curriculum to learning about the weather.  One of the first little experiments that the curriculum had us do was to make rain.  We learned that when the air is warmer near the ground and colder up in the sky, those conditions create rain.  Our experiment called for a couple inches of hot water in the bottom of a glass, a thin plate (not paper), and ice cubes.

Anna poured the water in the glass (I actually ended up heating the water up even more because I don’t think that our hottest tap water was hot enough).

We then put the plate on top of the glass and put ice cubes on top.  This simulates cold air up in the sky and warm air down near the ground.

Pretty quickly the inside of the glass started to fog up and water droplets started dripping down the sides.

I think that eventually water would have started dripping from the bottom of the plate simulating the rain, but Anna lost interest in watching after about 5 minutes.  She got the idea though since she was able to see the water dripping down the sides and it helped her remember that cool air in the sky and warm air near the ground causes rain!

Anna had her first gymnastics meet yesterday and did great!  She’s on the junior team at her gym and they did an in-house meet for all of the junior team kids.  As you can see in the video, all of her routines need work but I still think she did great, especially on floor since they only did their routines to the music once before the meet.  They had some of the older optional girls judging, so they were giving very generous scores.  In the end though, the scores don’t matter because Anna could care less as long as she gets her medal and has fun.  She has three more little in-house meets coming up.  Hopefully she’ll continue to improve over the next few months.

Our Moving Beyond the Page curriculum has had us learning about habitats over the past few weeks.  Today Anna got to learn why some animals belong in certain habitats and we sorted a bunch of her stuffed animals into different habitats.  She also had to make up a story about an animal who ended up in the wrong habitat.  She had to tell me how he got there, what happened while he was there, and how he got out.  Here’s her story.  I thought it turned out really cute!

Once there was a monkey.  He lives in the trees in the jungle.  Then one time he was walking to the wrong spot where he couldn’t breathe.  It was the aquatic.  He was sinking and he couldn’t swim.  Then fish came and said, “You don’t belong here.  You belong in the jungle.”  The monkey pushed to swim and then he was on the shore.  Then he was on the sand.  Then he was walking back to his jungle.  Then he went to bed.  The end.

Pretty darn cute, huh?  She recited it to me and I wrote it all down.  Tomorrow she’s going to draw a picture to go with it.  I’ll try to remember to scan and post it.

Anna has been drawing a bunch of pictures today.  Usually she’d just rather color out of a coloring book so I’m loving that she’s actually drawing pictures of different things.

The first picture she brought me was of a dragon.  I love this one!  She made a point to tell me that the dragon is a girl because she has pretty eyelashes.

The next is a picture of her skiing when we went skiing at Crystal Mountain a few weeks ago:

And the last is a picture of a bat.

I thought she did a great job on these!

I hope everyone had a great holiday!  My mom came in town for two weeks, and my dad came a bit later and stayed for a few days over Christmas.  We had a great holiday and received way more than we deserved.  We took about 3 weeks off of school stuff over the holidays due to my family being in town, but we’re back in full swing this week!

Before the holidays I had started a unit on Habitats and our Environment in our new curriculum Moving Beyond the Page.  A couple of the activities that we did before Christmas included grouping animals in their own habitats and graphing pictures of animals to see which habitat had the most animals (click for larger images):

Earlier this week, the curriculum had us going on a field trip to visit a real habitat.  We went to a local park (where it was still super cold and snowy everywhere, though it was a beautiful day out) that had a little wetlands area along with a trail through a “forest.”

Anna had to become a scientist and observe the habitats and draw her findings. She wasn’t super into this whole activity since she knew that she would get to play at the playground when we were finished and really  just wanted to hurry through everything.  However, I think she did a pretty good job on her drawings.

(click for larger versions)

Another day, our habitat lesson had Anna pick an animal to learn more about.  Coincidentally we had just received several pamphlets about 5 or 6 different animals from a wildlife conservation society so those came in handy.  Surprisingly, she decided to learn more about sharks and she learned how to draw a pretty good shark, if I do say so myself.  On the following worksheet, she wrote the top part and the part just under her picture of a shark and then I wrote what she dictated to me about the day in the life of a shark.

…and here’s another picture she drew at a restaurant later that night of sharks and jellyfish.  Daddy helped her a little with the bottom shark (he was showing her how she could draw a half-moon for the tail), but other than that she pretty much did this all by herself.

We have one more week left to work on our habitat curriculum and then we’ll be moving on to learning about the weather.  That should be fun!

As my blog title states, I got some more new curriculum!  I’m so excited because I now basically have 3 different curriculum that cover just about everything.  I don’t have to scour the web for hours on Sundays anymore finding stuff to do for the following week for various subjects.  I’ll probably still find some art projects from time to time but it’s nice not having to plan as much anymore.

Anyway, my new curriculum is a Language Arts/Spelling/Phonics/Handwriting curriculum from McRuffy Press.  We went ahead with the 1st grade curriculum since Anna is already reading and spelling so well.  When I opened the big box of stuff that arrived a few days ago I was shocked by how much stuff came with it.  I was very, very impressed right from the start.  It comes with two teacher guidebooks that have all 175 daily lessons (there are so many that they’re broken up into 2 books).  It also included a Spelling & Phonics workbook, a Language & Reading workbook, a handwriting book (this was an extra add-on and not regularly included in the rest of the kit), 34 (!!) reading books that are printed in color, and a big resource kit full of various laminated games, coloring sheets, pictures to color and cut out to use as puppets to go along with the stories, and a bunch of other goodies.

The teacher’s guides, student workbooks and the handwriting book are all spiral bound.  She can work straight from those books and I don’t have to tear the pages out or anything.  I love that.  The 34 readers that came with it are printed on regular 8.5×11″ paper and then folded over and stapled, they’re not bound like real books, but they are printed on good quality paper, so those are fine with me.   It’s definitely not one of the more expensive curriculum out there so I am very pleasantly surprised with the quality and quantity of stuff that I received.  We’ve only gone through two days of lessons so far, but I am VERY happy with it.

I think that this curriculum is intended to be used 5 days a week because they give spelling words on day 1 and then on the 5th day there’s a test…but we typically only have school 4 days a week (Thursdays are always really busy for us so we skip school on Thursdays), so we’ll see how it goes wrapping our spelling over a weekend.  I think Anna will do fine with it, honestly.  I also like that they have included 4 or 5 BIG tests.  I haven’t really given Anna any tests yet, other than a couple of spelling tests, and I definitely like that I don’t have to come up with my own tests for her when the time comes.

So, to wrap this long post up, I’m super happy with the three curriculum I have now.  We’re also using RightStart Math and we’re about halfway through the first level (just finished Lesson 37 today and there are 76 total lessons).  She’s doing great with that and can add quite a few numbers now: anything+1, 2+2, 2+3, 2+4, 2+5, 3+5, 4+5, 5+5.  Not bad for a kid who can’t start public Kindergarten until next fall, huh?  ;)