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!

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?  ;)

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)!

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!

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.

We have family scattered all over the country, so Anna often asks what state so-and-so lives in.  I decided a month or so ago to slowly introduce her to the states and try to give her the basic facts about each one.  I’m sure she won’t retain a lot of it, but she’s enjoying the activities that we’ve done so far for the two states we’ve done.  Prior to starting, I emailed family asking them to send postcards for any state they go to, and to try to find one that has the state name on the front of it.  We already have a bunch of postcards that we’ve received (mostly thanks to my parents who travel a lot) that are ready to go when we do future states.

I created a binder, as you can see in the photo above and just put a simple map of the U.S. in the front of it.  Each time we start a new state I’ll let Anna color that state in.  You can see that so far we’ve done Tennessee (where Grandma lives!) and New York (where Auntie Em, my sister, lives!).  I didn’t get a photo, but we also locate the states on our globe so that she can see the scale of the states compared to the rest of the world.  She’s actually pretty good at remembering locations on maps or globes and knows the locations of several of the states already.

Inside the binder, we started with Tennessee.  Here’s our cover page with the postcard that Grandma sent of the TN Aquarium, a place that Anna LOVES.

She did several coloring sheets over the course of a few days.  The first one is just of the state and also shows the capital city in there somewhere.  We go over the capital a few times in hopes that it maybe gets stored in the back of her brain for a few years from now.  :)

The first of these next two I found on Crayola’s website.  They have one for each state that shows the state flag, and then a couple of other pictures of the state bird, state flower, state butterfly, state motto, or a variety other things.  I love these.  There are also flash cards that you can print at the bottom of that linked page.  I might print those out later down the road.  The second page is just another that shows Tennessee’s state flower (Iris) and bird (Mockingbird).

We also did a little lesson on Davy Crockett who hails from Tennessee.

Anna’s next state of choice was New York, since her Auntie Em lives there.  We received two postcards from New York so she glued those down and wrote “New York” on the cover page.

Here’s our state coloring page, and you can see that Anna likes things very colorful.  She couldn’t just color the state in a single color…and then when she was done she decided to continue and decorate the rest of the page…

Here are her other three coloring pages.  The first one from that Crayola site happens to show the state fossil (a Sea Scorpion).  Did you know states have a designated state fossil?  No?  Neither did I.  And I bet you’ve never seen a fossil as colorful as this one!

And then another of the state flower (Rose) and state bird (Bluebird).  In case you can’t read it, these tell you the colors to color each part of the flower and bird.  She actually read the colors and followed directions, which doesn’t always happen.  She is 4 (almost 5!) after all.  :)

Along with the coloring sheets, I want to sometimes cook something specific to each state and find some books at the library that have to do with the state.  As we go through I’m sure we’ll end up finding other fun activities (other than just coloring pages) to do with them.  When we’re finished we should have a big binder that she’ll be able to look back through, which I think will be pretty cool.

To finish off this blog post, here’s a tissue paper rainbow she made today, which has absolutely nothing to do with this post about learning the states, but it turned out looking pretty good.

I gave her a piece of paper with 6 circles on it and labeled the paper “Color Wheel.”  I had her color in the first three circles to match the colors in the glasses and then attempted to explain about primary colors and how those three colors are used to create every other color out there (except for the grayscale colors).

Then we mixed the first two colors of her choice, BLUE:

…and YELLOW:

Seriously, the look on her face was awesome.  She was completely amazed that these two colors mixed together would turn green like that.  It was like magic to her.

After that I had her color in green on her color wheel between her yellow and blue circles.  The next colors she chose to mix were red and yellow.  These didn’t work so great because I think the red was a little overpowering.  It was just light enough though that Anna saw that they created orange (which is one she already knew).

Orange was colored in on the color wheel.

She then mixed the last two colors: red and blue…

…and she promptly stated, “Look Mommy! Red and blue make black!”  Hmm..  It was a little dark.   I think my blue was too blue maybe?  I’m not sure.  I held it up to the light and she said, “Oh. It’s dark purple!” So those two colors didn’t work so great either.  I’m glad we started with the green though since that one turned out perfect.

She then finished her color wheel and VOILA! She now knows the primary colors and the three colors they make when combined.

We then completed our colorful day and made some big crayons in a mini-muffin pan using bits and pieces of old crayons:

Overall, great lesson, she really enjoyed it and she now has some new big crayons to color with.  It was a very colorful, rainbow-like day..which is gearing us up for her upcoming “Rainbow Brite” themed birthday party in a week and a half.

I took a bunch of photos at the end of July but I never updated here so I’ll show where the garden was then and then show how it’s grown SO MUCH in the last month.  It wasn’t really growing much into the beginning of July, but then I went on vacation for 2 weeks, came back and it had grown exponentially.  I guess maybe that means I really don’t have a green thumb…since it grew so much while I was gone..  Anyway, here’s how the garden looked on July 30th.  The cherry tomato plant is on the left, the larger tomato plant is next to it, there’s pumpkin and strawberry plants behind those.  The tall thing in the back right corner is supposedly a raspberry plant, but I’m not too sure…and then in front of that are two squash plants.

Here’s how the garden looks today (with much better lighting), almost a month later:

See how much it’s grown?  Crazy.  The big one in the middle is the large tomato plant (can’t remember the name of those tomatoes..  “Big 100″ or something??).  To the left of that is the cherry tomatoes.  The squash plants on the right are huge.  My raspberry plant is crazy.  It grew straight up taller than the 6′ fence and then it started bending over.  I think if I straightened it out it would be about 9′ tall.  I couldn’t get a full picture of it, but my pumpkin plant is INSANE.  You can see one end of it sticking out in front of the squash plant.  I planted it right behind the cherry tomato plant.  It is now going in 4 different directions and is in the shape of an X.  Each of the 4 directions is about 10-15′ long.  It’s taking over my garden.  I may have to trim it back.  A lot.

I didn’t really get any of the full tomato or squash plants today but here’s some of the produce from those.

This is our first squash that we picked!  I’m going to cook it up tonight and see how it tastes.

A couple more of baby squash (click for larger image):

Tomatoes from the big tomato plant (click for bigger):

Cherry Tomatoes (click for bigger):

A few strawberries we picked.  They are SO YUMMY.

Here’s part of the pumpkin plant.  Hopefully we’ll get a pumpkin before Halloween..

Last but not least…the crazy raspberry plant.  My dad thinks it’s not a raspberry plant.  I’m thinking maybe not either.  I believe he has one and it’s more like a bush.  This one just keeps growing up and up and UP.  Here it was on July 30th:

…and here it is today.  Unfortunately I just took a pic of the top of it, but you can see that it started sprouting things from the side and is bent over at the top.

So there you go.  Our garden is growing!  It’s so exciting to be able to pick the produce and eat it.  I think we’ll do a lot more next year now that I know we can actually grow stuff.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io6O4ZaQYg8

She was getting to where she could ride for pretty long distances without putting her feet on the ground so I thought we’d give the no training wheels thing another try.

Yesterday, I took her to a big, empty parking lot since it was a gorgeous day out. She practiced for a bit on the “no pedal” bike and then we got her bike out. I got a really good workout running along beside her the first few times. Initially I gave her a big push and put my hands on her just enough to keep her balanced. Once she realized that she could stay balanced as long as she kept her speed up, I just ran along side her, just in case, and then helped her stop at the end of the long straightaway that we were going down.  After maybe 5 or 6 long straight rides, she finally figured out how to brake using her hand brake.  I ran with her a couple more times (See?  A GREAT workout!) until I was confident that she could stop on her own.  I still had to help her get started as neither of us could really figure out how to get her going by herself, but once started she could ride around for a long time.  By the end of our hour or so in the parking lot she was able to ride all around everywhere, in circles, around curves and she was stopping really well too.  Here’s a video in the parking lot.  It’s a little “bumpy” because I apparently can’t walk and video at the same time…..

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2Gg4RprCks

Later, after we got back home from her gymnastics class she wanted to go back out on her bike.  She kept telling me how much she loves riding her bike, that it’s so much fun!  We went up to an almost empty street with a cul-de-sac and she rode around there for a good 45 minutes or so.  She didn’t like riding on the sidewalks to get to that street because they’re too narrow, but she’ll get used to them eventually.  By the end of our trip to the cul-de-sac she was even able to get going all by herself too!  Here’s another video.  There’s a shot of her getting started by herself towards the end of the video.  And this one is MUCH better than the last one since I was able to stand still to video..

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQl6pRuCvD4

Pretty awesome, huh?  I certainly think so.  Today we went out again this morning and she rode around that cul-de-sac again and we went down a couple of other empty streets as well (so that she could stay riding on the street since she isn’t as crazy about sidewalks).  She’s pretty confident on the bike already and has gotten pretty consistent at getting started by herself.

The one thing I’m sad about is that Dan wasn’t here to watch her ride the bike without training wheels for the first time.  I took her out not really expecting that she was going to get it so quickly.  Dan was out camping with a friend, but he got back tonight and Anna was SO excited for him to watch her ride her big girl bike.  He was so proud of her and I can tell he’s excited to turn her into his little mountain biking buddy.  Towards the end of the evening when she was riding outside she was even starting to stand up and pedal a little.  I think she’ll be riding the trails with Daddy in no time.

Here are a few more photos from yesterday.  Click on all of the photos in this post for larger versions.

And you know, sometimes you just gotta stop and make a phone call…

Riding off into the sunset…sorta..

I really believe that the key to her learning balance on her bike was riding that “no pedal” bike for a few days.  Granted, she’s always had really good balance, but I do believe that helped her body understand how to lean on the bike to keep it upright.  I think that we will forgo training wheels altogether with our next kid (whenever we make the decision about having one..) and start them off with one of these “no pedal” bikes and then go straight to a two-wheeler when they’re ready.

What a great milestone though.  I’m so proud of Anna and she LOVES riding without her training wheels.