Last week we studied the letter W and water.
I decided to be very brave or very crazy (take your pick!) and set up the little pool in my kitchen.
I put an old comforter under it to catch any water they would slosh out and told them to be very careful! The 3 oldests were really good--it wasn't until wild lil' Kate joined the party that all the splashing happened!
After awhile I dumped all of the duplo blocks into the pool to wash them. They play with them for a few hours every single day and I figured they could use some cleaning. The kids loved playing with them in water!
My friend Camilla says that if the time it takes you to clean up the mess is less than the time they spent making it, it's worth it! They spent about 90 minutes in the pool and it only took about 10 total for the set up/clean up! Because it was in my kitchen, I just used the spray hose from the sink to fill it, and had the kids scoop water into a 5 gallon bucket to drain it. After dumping just 4 or 5 bucket loads it was done!
We learned all about how water is a liquid and takes on the shape of the container it is in. We made a solid/liquid/gas graph and listed things in each category. We observed water in solid form (ice) and as a vapor--steam boiling on the stove.
We did an experiment to see if oil, salt, and food coloring dissolved in water.
We did our binder pages--making raindrops with the blue water and a dropper.
Our key words were, "Jesus gives my spirit living water to drink."
We talked a lot about how Jesus is the living water and read verses from the Bible relating to the theme, as the curriculum has us do every week.
Ali got really fired up about this week's lesson and went nuts making "W" books. She made 3 folded books with her art paper, illustrating all the words she could think of that start with W. I was so proud of her for taking initiative and creatively adding to our lesson. Some of the words she drew were: whining, win, way, waffles, water, why, wood, worm, which, wig, etc.
One day I made bathtime extra fun for the kids by adding dishsoap and food coloring to their bath. They really enjoyed that!
The highlight of the week for the boys was reading some shark books I had picked up at a used book store at the beginning of the school year that they didn't know about. Sharks are one of their favorite things! We read other books about ocean life too.
Whale crackers were the perfect snack for W week!
We also had waffles a few different breakfasts last week, partly because of the W theme, but also because we were out of cereal and there haven't been any great cereal sales lately!
We did our usual letter coloring page and together we colored pages to make a water cycle booklet,
thanks to the links my friend Kristin pointed us to on her wonderful homeschooling blog.
The kids were proud to share with Daddy what "evaporation, condensation, and precipitation" mean. Turns out that evening we got some frozen precipitation too!
I tried to take the older 2 kids to the swimming pool one evening as we haven't been there in a while and they love going. We were in our suits, walking out on the pool floor, just staring at that inviting, huge, steamy hot tub when the life guard appeared and said they weren't open the usual hours that week. BUMMER! So, I went ahead and took the 3 kids on Sunday afternoon when they were open and we had our fill of swimming, splashing, and hot tubbing. Ali is getting to be a strong swimmer and almost worked up the courage to jump off the diving board by herself with no life jacket. Jer loves the deep pool now and can sorta-swim but he is reckless and tries to swim in water over his head when he can't quite stay up. So, keeping my two little boys from drowning was a full-time job! I'm glad our town has low-cost, high-quality swim lessons year round for preschoolers! In March I'm going to sign the boys up for the preschool swimming class again.
What things have you done to study Water in homeschooling?
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