Heart of Dakota- BLHFHG Unit 7

I am trying to catch up on my posts, so I am doing another post this week about what we have been doing in school.  I get too confused and can’t remember what we did which week when I get behind!  So, here is a summary of what we did last week:

History:

This week we learned that the Pilgrims decided to leave Holland and head to America.  They would have to leave all of their friends and would not be able to bring very much with them.

I saw this cute idea at The First Grade Parade.  Hailey had to pretend she could only bring one suitcase with her and decide what she would bring.  I thought her answers were cute.

Language Arts:

While reading our adventure book we created this staircase.  Each step has a problem that happened during the story written on it.  As the problem was solved Hailey colored that step.

Math:

In math Hailey is learning to add with double digits.  She practiced by using pennies and ones and dimes for tens.

Unit Study:

We finished up learning about bats this week (several of the activities we did came from Batty for Bats and Stellaluna), and the started a unit about spiders.

We learned how a mother bat uses her sense of smell to find her baby bat.  I dipped cotton balls into different things like vinegar, vanilla, coffee and perfume.  I let Hailey pick a “baby” and then I blindfolded her and had her find her “baby” using her sense of smell.

Hailey made this project as part of the super fun Stellaluna unit we did.

The inside.

Hailey wrote an acrostic poem about bats.

Hailey just started a spider unit and this was our first experiment.  We learned how spiders eat their prey by injecting venom into it, which turns the insect into liquid and then the spider drinks the food.  We put our prey (a sugar cube) in a cup.  Then we injected it with venom (water) and drank our prey.

It was a really fun week!!

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Heart of Dakota- BLHFHG Unit 6

I am still a week behind in posting what we did for school and it’s confusing me :-/  We are getting ready to start unit 8, but I am only posting about unit 6.  Last week when I posted pictures for unit 5, I had things in there that we actually did in unit 6.  I am going to try to get caught up this week so I don’t confuse myself anymore!

History:

In history we learned a bit about what life was like as the Pilgrims adjusted to life in Holland. We talked about how they had a scrubbing day once each week where everyone scrubbed and cleaned.

Hailey and Hunter scrubbed the kitchen floor. They loved it and begged to do the dining room too 🙂

Geography:

We are using Road Trip USA and this week we studied Maine.

We learned that Maine produces 98% of America’s low-bush blueberries, so we made some delicious blue berry muffins.  Even Hailey, who does not like blueberries, loved the muffins!

Language Arts:

Our poem this week was “The Months” and Hailey enjoyed adding illustrations to it.

Hailey learned about collective nouns this week.  I saw this anchor chart and used that as a guide to do our own anchor chart.

We played a Fishing for Collective Nouns game, which Hailey loved!  It was a lot of fun and a great way to practice collective nouns.

Unit Study:

In our unit study this week we learned all about bats.  This unit covers science, language arts and math.  I love teaching using themes and Hailey really loved it too!  She learned so much (and so did I!) and had a lot of fun doing it!

(Several of the activities we did came from Batty for Bats and Stellaluna.)

We started out our unit making a Bat Schema chart.  Hailey listed the information she knew about bats and we added it to the Schema side.  As the week went on we added lots of information to the New Learning side and moved some of the information from Schema to Misconceptions.

One thing we learned is that bats wings are like our hands.  They have fingers and thumbs just like we do.  They are connected by a thin membrane.  Hailey put plastic bags on her hands to represent what the wings are like.

Hailey wrapped herself up in a towel, pretending that was her wings, and hung upside down to go to sleep.  Or maybe I just flipped the picture upside down 😉

Since bats use echolocation to find their food, we played a little echolocation game.  Hailey was blindfolded to pretend she was flying at night.  (Bats are not actually blind, as many people think they are, they just search for food at night which is why they need to use echolocation.)  She would call out “echo” and I would reply “location” and she had to try to find me.  It was so much fun!

We did a lot of activities after reading Stellaluna.

We played this game where we took turns spinning a spinner and seeing which category we landed on.  Then the other person got to select a question from that category to ask the person who spun the spinner.

Hailey loved it!

Hailey acted out the story of Stellaluna.

We made a Venn Diagram about bats vs birds, using information we learned in Stellaluna.

Hailey made her own Venn Diagram.

We filled out a bat attribute chart about 4 different bats.  We included how big the bats were.  The smallest bat has a wing span of only 1 inch.  The largest one we studied has a wing span of 5+ feet!  To try to help Hailey understand how big those measurements are she used Unifix cubes to measure and see how many cubes it would take for each bat.

I found this silly little poem about Bat Poop and Hailey laughed so hard when she read it!

We had another fun week and I am looking forward to the week ahead!

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Heart of Dakota- BLHFHG Unit 5

Has another week really come and gone? It just doesn’t seem possible!  This school year is going by so quickly.  I have actually gotten a little bit behind in my posts.  I am just now posting about unit 5, but we are going to be starting unit 7 tomorrow.  Anyway…

We started a new behavior chart a few weeks ago.  When Hailey has had 5 outstanding days on our chart she earns a reward.  Hailey made a list of the rewards she wanted to work towards- she has things like skip a subject, extra snack, computer time instead of calendar time, pajama day, show and tell, etc.  So, she had earned 5 outstandings and decided she wanted to pick show and tell for her reward.

Hailey showed us her American Doll, Aveena and told us all about her.  Then she showed us her stuffed dog Mike and told us all about him.  She loved doing show and tell!

History:

In history this week we learned about how the Pilgrims found Holland to be very different than England.  Streets were canals and houses looked very different.  Everything was very different for the children and adults and the children even started learning to speak some Dutch.

Language Arts:

Hailey working on putting her poem for the week in order.

Hailey’s illustration for her poem.

Practicing spelling words… I am running out of fun ideas for practicing and would love some suggestions.

We have been learning about nouns and for a fun activity I had Hailey tell me a short story.  I wrote it on the board and had her erase all the nouns.  Then without looking, she named off new nouns to fill in the blanks.  Our own little Mad Libs :-).  It was a lot of fun and turned out really silly.

We started learning about common nouns and proper nouns.

Hailey made a word search with common and proper nouns.

We are doing an interactive language notebook, so Hailey added a page for common and proper nouns.

Working on listing common and proper nouns in her notebook.

Hailey did a cereal box book report about Helen Keller.

We started a new book this week.  It’s an adventure book, so we started out with a treasure hunt.

Hailey loved the treasure hunt!  She thought we should do one everyday 🙂

Science:

During science we learned about the heart and then listened to each others hearts using an empty paper towel tube.

Columbus Day:

Since these are activities from a few weeks ago, we made a boat for Columbus.

Then we made this fun map.  You can see everything we did here.

Unit Study:

Our Unit Study was all about leaves.  One day I had Hailey and Hunter dress in the color of chlorophyll 🙂

Hailey also made this cute Fall Tree Craft.

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Heart of Dakota- BLHFHG Unit 4

It’s hard to believe that it’s already the middle of October! The school year is going by so fast. Here is a review of what we did during unit 4.

I have changed a lot of our calendar notebook in the last week or so.  It was taking so long to get through everything, and a lot of it was just a repeat of what we did together during on our calendar board.  So, I have taken a lot out of the notebook.  One of the things I plan to continue though is the daily drawings.  Hailey enjoys doing them and I can already see an improvement since last month in her pictures.

History:

We read about the Pilgrims and how they left their homes in England to try to find religious freedom in Holland.

We learned about how different everything looked when the Pilgrims arrived in Holland.  Many of the streets were canals rather than roads.  We looked online to see pictures of what it looks like and it was really neat to see!

We learned about how dikes work by making this little model.  We put Model Magic down the middle a plastic container to represent the dike.  On one side was some water and on the other were the houses.

Then I made a hole in the dike and Hailey had to yell “ding, ding” like she was ringing a bell, as the people did back then.  Then she had to quickly repair the wall before the houses were flooded.  She loved it!

We talked more about what the city looked like and how there were a lot of windmills.  I saw this cute craft on Homeschool Survival, so Hailey and Hunter both made a windmill.

Geography:

We are using Road Trip USA to learn all about the states.  We learned about Delaware this week.

We learned about the Delaware Memorial Bridge that links Delaware and New Jersey and then made a model of the bridge.  Hunter and Hailey painted some cardboard blue to represent the water.

Next we put together some popsicle sticks.

Here is our completed Delaware Memorial Bridge.

Hailey added some animals to our USA Animals wall.

Hunter likes to do everything that Hailey does, so he added a fish for us.

We are also using Which Way USA by Highlights, so Hailey did some work in her magazine and learned more about Delaware.

Language Arts:

Hailey did some copywork using her poem for the week.

Hailey is working on a story, using the rules about sentences that we were studying/reviewing.  She has finished writing the story and is now working on her illustrations.

We finished reading Helen Keller by Margaret Davidson.  Hailey is working on a book report, but isn’t quite finished yet, so I’ll be posting that next week.  Here are a few activities we did about Helen Keller:

Hailey tried doing some writing and drawing while blindfolded to see what it would be like to try to write as a blind person.

We used glue to make Hailey and Hunter’s names in braille.

Once the glue was dry it left little raised bump that felt like braille.

We went to the Great Wolf Lodge for Hailey’s birthday and while we were there we noticed some braille.  Hailey was seeing what the braille on our room number felt like.

Math:

Hailey learned a little about fractions, and what 1/2 and 1/4 look like.

She did some coloring to practice what 1/2 and 1/4 of a circle looks like.

Science:

We did a couple of experiments in science this week.

Hailey held several different items up to the window to see if the sun would shine through or be blocked.  We used aluminum foil, construction paper, saran wrap, wax paper, and lots more!  Hailey tried all sorts of things that she found around the room to see what would happen.

She completed her science notebooking page about the experiment.

We also did an experiment to see how many drops of water we could get on top of a penny before the tension would break and the water would spill off.  We were surprised that it took 19 drops!

We tried it using other coins too.  It took 15 drops with a dime, 32 with a nickle and 30 with a quarter.  I don’t know why the nickle could hold more water than a quarter, but we tried it twice and got the same result.

Unit Study:

We started a unit study about leaves and Hailey is working on a fall tree craft here.

It was another great week and each day we get up excited to start our school day!  I hope that continues!!

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