World overview

These first 2 weeks of school will be getting an overview of Earth-- "our world". We read Me on the Map and did an activity to help the little ones better understand how they can live in so many places at one time. Earth, North America, USA, Illinois, etc. So I cut out circles which were labeled with our planet down to our house of decreasing size and then the kids glued on and wrote/colored the appropriate map or drawing. It is shown laying on the shelf in the pic above along with our FIAR book and library books. Luke also wanted to make a map of his room so I did a rough outline for him and let him fill it in accordingly. I do think this helped them put things into a "bit" of perspective. He also completed a couple of pages in his maps workbook which was on the earth and a globe and the similarities and differences. We also read Toot and Puddle.

We are studying ants these first 2 weeks for science since they pretty much live all over the earth (on land anyway). We read Ant Cities, Ant, and Insects (focusing on the ant content). We all learned many new things about ants this week. Lucas colored an ant picture while we learned the parts of an ant. We had a little experiment going on in the back yard. On a paper plate I sectioned it off into quarters and place a different food in each one- strawberry, watermelon, bread, and pasta salad noodle. They RAN from the pasta..stinky italian dressing :). Initially they were loving the strawberry and we watched them come and eat on it for a bit but when we came back out to check them after a while, someone had STOLE the strawberry so they had moved onto the watermelon. We learned that they like fruit and this proved to be true. We also made chocolate covered ice cream ants. They were not the cutest ants I ever seen, therefore no picture, BUT they were the tastiest (and only) ones I ever had! We used 3 small scoops of Choc chip cookie dough ice cream and covered it with the magic shell chocolate. Then we applied pretzel sticks for legs and antennae and mini M&M's for the eyes. Mmmmm Mmmmm Good!

At the end of the week we talked about animal classification and added our first animal to our wall chart.  Also we made a new Word Wall board for the new words Luke is learning. I made it out of repositionable letters that I glued on to a tri-fold project board. As Luke masters new words we will add them to the board of the words he can read!!!



I wanted to just touch on some of the fun things we did for this post but yikes it just keeps going and going. I think I am going to have to narrow the view a bit next week or these are going to be really loooong posts.

All of the other things will just have to stay put in my brain and planner for future reference. Oh how fun this week has been. I think that is why I am so anxious to write so much. I sure hope we keep up like this for a bit anyway. Yeah I am realistic. Not everyday will be a ball of joy in the realm of homeschooling :).

Blessings to all,  Julie