I had planned on heading out with the boys for a final week of field trips. Imagine my surprise when Evan informed me that we're doing to much lately and he'd like to just stay home. I was even more surprised that his brothers seemed to agree!
Every year we try to get out and enjoy all our favorite places before schools let out and I guess this year the boys would rather just stay home.
I am fine with that! In fact I was quite happy not to have to pack lunches and drive around.
Alec wanted to work with the new Draw Write Now book. He chose to learn how to draw a red fox and he did a really great job! When I asked him if he liked the lesson he told me that he LOVED it (with LOTS of emphasis on the love!)!
After drawing the animal, he got to color it in, add a background and then he had four sentences to copy. I told him to pay close attention to capitalization, punctuation, spelling and penmanship. He made a few mistakes and I just told him to check it over; looking closely at his capitalization. He immediately found and fixed his two mistakes and happily went on to playing sight word memory with Evan.
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| His completed fox |
Evan and I read one of his mini books to start school today. He was re- reading his Ants go Marching book from a few weeks ago and read through it without any mistakes. He told me it was both a counting by two book and a rhyming book.
Once we were done reading we set up all his sight word flash cards face down on the coffee table and Evan, Alec and I played a game of memory. Evan lost the game but was able to read most of the sight words he turned over. We talked about the difference between b and d, discussed the sounds letters make, looked for smaller words inside longer words, talked about beginning, middle, and ending sounds and had fun reading together.
Once the boys were done we all sat down to listen to a few stories. Evan wanted me to read
Great Big Guinea Pigs before returning it to the library so I started with that story. We talked a bit about guinea pigs and whether we thought the story was fact or fiction. We also talked about rodents, the capybara and the raccoon.
From there the boys asked me to read another chapter in
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. We noticed it was lunch time by the time we finished and the boys asked if I'd read a second chapter during lunch-- as if I'd say no!
It was finally warm and sunny today and the boys wanted to go swimming. I offered to bring out the boys
For Wizards Only Magic Science kit that we had started playing with yesterday and spent a bit of time doing some fun science magic with Evan and Alec.
They brought out their Harry Potter wands and really got into it!
We talked about:
- acids
- bases
- red cabbage
- reactions
- chemical changes
- density
- color theory
Alec then spent the rest of the afternoon playing with the wand, test tubes, water and food coloring. He had lots of fun mixing colors, making up potions, adding ingredients and having a ball.
Evan joined him and they played with different amounts of water, different numbers of food coloring drops, they kept emptying out the test tubes into a giant bucket and watched that change color too.
They noticed that the oil floats on top of the water and beaded up. They noticed it made their test tubes, hands, and everything else slippery and slimy.
They were messy and having so much fun. I love that this kit has lasted us more than two days and we have even more experiments to work with for another few days.
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| Yesterday they even used the Harry Potter Robe when playing |
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| Color changing fizzy potion |
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| Playing with acids and bases using red cabbage powder |
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| Overflowing the fizzing potions |
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Our completed crystal ball; they could NOT see
the future.... |
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| Making a "crystal" ball with oil, water, and color changing tablets. |
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| Alec mixing up his own potions; it's serious business! |
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| Our crystal ball started separating; oil vs. colored water |
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| Playing with the water, oil and colors |
While the younger boys were perfectly happy doing wizard science Ian spent the afternoon in the lake working with his toy boats and jet ski's trying to figure out how to hook up a tuber or skier behind them. He tried skipping rocks for a bit and brought the dump truck, buckets and other assorted toys down to the water too to play with.
It was a really nice, relaxing, quiet day at home.
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