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?  ;)

Did I skip the whole month of November?  Why yes, yes I did.

Anna and I did quite a bit of school stuff throughout November but I feel like I’ve been pretty busy and this blog, unfortunately, always gets put on the back-burner.  (Is “back-burner” two words?  One word? Hyphenated?  I have no clue.)  We started a new curriculum called Moving Beyond the Page and so far we are both LOVING it.  It covers everything except math and phonics, though it does include some activities that are more math centered.  I love this because I was having the hardest time coming up with science and social studies work so this is great.

Our first unit has been learning about animal habitats and our environment and Anna has seemed to enjoy it so far.  One of the books that is part of this unit is called Animal Habitats by Judy Press.

This is an awesome book.  There’s a couple of pages that talk about 6 or 7 different habitats and then TONS of art projects that you can do.  Anna and I made a little prairie dog that pops up out of a cup.  It’s super cute.  (I’ll add a photo later..)  We actually borrowed this book from the library but I think I may end up buying it since there are so many different activities to do.

The next thing that we have planned to do, which will probably have to wait until after Christmas at this point, is to go on a field trip to visit a habitat.  We’ll probably go to the park to visit a “forest” or woodland habitat.  She has my old little digital camera that she’s been playing with so I’ll probably have her take a bunch of photos of things she finds in the habitat and then we’ll make a collage of some sort.

So anyway, I love this curriculum.  We already have a math curriculum, RightStart Math, and that’s been working really well and I think I’m going to purchase a separate phonics curriculum soon as well.  I think I function better, at least at this point, with a set curriculum that guides me through it all.  Maybe at some point I can go back to picking and choosing different activities/work for each week, but it’s nice to not have to sit and scour the web for ideas like I was before.

I do have some things to blog which I’ll try to do at some point.  My mom is coming in town tomorrow so it’s likely to be a little busy around here until after Christmas.

Might as well end with a photo of Anna.  We baked Gingerbread cookies a week or so ago.  Anna loved helping (and licking the spoon)!

Here’s Anna’s letter to Santa.  I think she did a great job!  She did most of it by herself though we did have a short lesson on commas so I had her put those in.  Even though some of the words are spelled wrong I’m pretty proud that she was able to spell most of them right.  Dan and I were both really good at spelling growing up and I think Anna is going to be as well.  It amazes me that she’ll remember words that don’t necessarily have the most common spellings, like “have” and “year.”  I’m very proud of her!  Her handwriting is looking really good too.  It was only maybe 3-4 months ago when she had trouble with any letter that involved drawing a circle.  Now they’re looking great!

(click for a slightly larger version)

Our theme this week is APPLES!  You know, since it’s fall and apple harvest time is sometime around this time of year, and we live in one of the biggest apple producing states in the country…  This is actually the first week that I’ve selected a specific theme and have stuck with it.  Usually I end up finding one or two things for her to do that are related to the theme and that’s it.   …and it’s only Tuesday!  Go me!

We started off our apple theme week learning about Johnny Appleseed.  I found a little bio of Johnny (his real name was John Chapman) online that was age appropriate and read that to Anna.  I then let her watch the Disney movie about Johnny Appleseed on YouTube (part 1 here and part 2 here…it’s a really short movie).  It’s one of Disney’s older movies, but Anna loved it.  I found her a coloring sheet online and let her color that at the end of our school “day”.  We typically only do school stuff for a couple of hours, if that.  Yesterday afternoon we went to the library and found a great early reader edition of Johnny Appleseed by, Eric Blair.  Anna was able to read pretty  much all of it by herself, there were just a few words she needed help with.

We also grabbed a bunch of other Fall and Halloween related books while we were there.  Our library has a section with theme bags where you can select a bag of a certain theme and there are 4-6 books in the bag all related to the theme.  They just happened to have an “Apples” theme bag so I grabbed that and am excited to read her some of the apple related books in it.

I also found the following little poem online somewhere that we’re going to do every day.  You can do hand motions with it to make it even more fun.  We’ve recited this poem a couple of times today and yesterday and Anna already has it memorized.  Amazing how quickly they learn things at this age!

Two Little Apples

Way up high in the apple tree
Two red apples winked at me
I shook that tree as hard as I could
Down came the apples
Mmmmm…. Were they good!

Here’s a page that I put together with the poem and a couple of cute little apples on the top.  I’m going to save it in her binder with this years’ work.

Today, we talked about Johnny Appleseed a bit more and re-read the book.  I also taught her the Johnny Appleseed song which she remembered hearing in the movie.  I remember singing it when I was little.

Next I pulled out the three apples that she picked out at the store the last time we went shopping.  Since WA is such a huge producer of apples the grocery stores have lots of different varieties of them in the produce section.  The three that she picked were Red Delicious, Granny Smith and Honeycrisp.  I sliced one in half horizontally so that she could see the “star” of seeds in the middle, though she thought it looked more like a flower than a star.  We talked about the different parts of the apple and I had her color and label an apple (here’s the download I found for this):

While she was working on that, I cut up the three apples and put all but one slice of each in a big ziplock baggie.  I had her taste each apple and we talked about whether it was sweet or sour.  She thought the Granny Smith was really sour but that the other two were sweet, with the Red Delicious being the most sweet of the two.

I then grabbed the bag of apple pieces and had her shake some cinnamon in it.  We zipped the bag closed and she shook it up really good.

Then we had a snack.  They were REALLY good.  Well, I thought the Granny Smith ones didn’t taste as great as the other two varieties but Anna really liked the cinnamon apples.  What an easy snack!  We’ll definitely make this again.

While I was cutting up the apples I set aside half of the Granny Smith and half of the Red Delicious for Anna to stamp paint onto paper with.  She stamped green and red circles..

…and then painted stems on top:

She painted apples using apples!

I think they turned out pretty darn cute, if I do say so myself.  I’ll have her stamp the word “Apples” with her rubber alphabet stamps once the picture dries.

Tomorrow, we’ll sing the Johnny Appleseed song again and do our “Two Little Apples” poem again.  We’ll also read a book called I Am an Apple by, Jean Marzollo.  It’s another early reader book from the library and talks about the life cycle of an apple tree.  After we do that I’ll have Anna color these apple tree sequencing cards and then see if she can put them in order.  We’ll also attempt this fingerprint apple tree and see how messy Anna can get.  (Click on the photo to go to the webpage that has instructions.)

It’s been a very applicious week so far.  We don’t usually get apples from the store for whatever reason (I think there are other fruits we usually prefer), but I think we might buy them more often in the future!

Yesterday Anna and I took a bike ride around the neighborhood and collected fall leaves in a variety of colors.  She loved hopping off of her bike and finding pretty leaves to add to the big ziplock baggie I brought along.  When we got home we dumped them all out on the table, so naturally I had to snap a few photos.

I then showed Anna how to place a leaf under a sheet of paper and use the side of a crayon to make a leaf rubbing.  She thought it was pretty cool, but I think I actually enjoyed making them more than she did.  I’m a nerd like that.

Here are a few of the leaf rubbings we made:

Anna and her leaf rubbing.  She was so proud of herself.

Today, I had her pick three of her favorite leaves and we looked at them a little closer to see the veins and other intricate details.  I had her describe the leaves to me and had to help a little bit with prompts of “how big? what color? how many ‘points?’” at times but she got better at the descriptions by the third leaf.

Next, I had her fill out three worksheets about her leaves.  She was able to do leaf rubbings on two of them, but the yellow leaf was too big so she attempted to draw it.  Click on the last two pictures for bigger versions.

This was a pretty successful science lesson all in all.  She loved looking through the magnifying glass and learned how to better describe an item.

After this we took 5 or 6 leaves and put them between pieces of wax paper inside a big book.  We’ll let them sit there for a week or so and see if we can preserve them.  The rest of the leaves got tossed in the trash.

If you’re interested in the “All About My Leaf” worksheet, click here to download a copy.  I saw a similar one online somewhere but it was just a photo of one, not an actual usable copy so I recreated it.

I can’t believe I have a 5 year old!  Anna had her birthday party yesterday, which was a blast, and today is her actual birthday.  It’s hard to believe my little girl is 5 years old now.  Makes me a little sad.  Here’s a photo from yesterday before her party (it was Rainbow Brite themed).  More photos and a longer post coming soon.