A Few of my Favorite Things

I adore fall. I love the crispness in the air. I love being able to wear my jeans and a light jacket without sweating or freezing. I love leaving the windows open. I love the colors. I love the smells. I love the food. And I love my view. Check out the colors on those mountains! And it's so much better in real life, the picture just doesn't do it justice.

School is still going really well for us. I feel like we've done a good job of finding a groove and working it. We've got enough outside-of-our-house things to do, but not too many. And now that soccer is winding down (one more game to go!), I feel like the set-up of our week is as close to perfect as I could possible plan it to be.

While I'm very happy with everything we're doing school-wise, I find that the two things in the week I look forward to the most are our Art Class on Tuesdays, and our Science Club on Wednesdays.

This week for Art, we made Vincent Van Gogh Sun Flowers. It was fun because even though there were a lot of steps to the project, all the kids did really well at following directions, and everyone's flowers turned out different and awesome.

I really liked that some of the kids chose to put their backgrounds vertically, and others chose horizontally. I also liked that they chose different numbers of sunflowers. I really like the way Ivan staggered the height of his sunflowers. And I really like the way Lincoln's red and yellow mixed a little in places to make some orange. And Adelia's just makes me happy because she had so much fun making it. Originally, I hadn't planned on her doing the art projects with us, because they are above her level; but, she pretty much insists that she gets to participate. So I help her with cutting and such, and let her do the gluing and painting.

I was also impressed with how well most everyone followed the directions to just dab the brush, instead of making long brush strokes while painting. I also thought they filled in the space nicely with their yellow and red. This has probably been my favorite art project so far. I had them hanging on the wall in my school room before the paint was even dry. :)

 Ivan's

 Lincoln's

Adelia's

My other favorite activity is Science Club. It is just so awesome every week. And it's great to be doing fun activities about something besides the ABCs. (Not that there's anything wrong with the ABCs, but I've just done a LOT of lesson plans revolving around them, so it's nice to switch it up a bit.) Today was our last day of mammals, and I was teaching about cows. 

As always, I introduced the topic by reading a book. It's another from my favorite Let's Read and Find Out Science series called Milk From Cow to Carton. It taught us about cows, and how cows eat grass and hay, which they digest using four stomachs! The cows body then turns the chewed up food into energy for itself and milk for a baby cow, or for us. 

We talked about how if a farmer has a few cows, he usually milks them all by hand, twice a day. But if the farmer has a lot of cows, he may milk them using machines. Then the book taught us what happens to the milk after it comes out of the cow. It gets homogenized, which means heated up really quickly to kill all the germs, then the milk is measured for it's butterfat content. To make different kinds of milk, you either leave all the butterfat in the milk (whole milk), or  you take out some of it (2%), or take out all of it (skim). The butterfat that is taken out of the milk is used to make other dairy products like butter, cheese, yogurt, and ice cream. 

When we were done reading the book, we did a couple of fun activities to go with it. First I gave the kids each a pentagon with flaps. Each pentagon had a cow in the middle. Then I gave them a strip of paper with pictures of different dairy products on them. They had to cut out the pictures and glue them on the tabs, then fold the tabs in. This was to show which kinds of foods come from cows' milk. 

We also did a milk taste test. I gave each kid a small cup of three different kinds of milk, whole, 2%, and skim. After they tasted them, we made a graph of which one they liked best. The first-grade class (blue) liked whole milk best, and the Kindergarten/Preschool class (yellow) liked skim milk best. Since there are more kids in the younger class, skim milk was the overall winner. Yuck! :) But, I think it should also be noted, that they tried whole milk first, then 2%, then skim, so I'm wondering with the little kids, if they just picked the most recent one, because that's what they could remember. Either way, we were still able to make a cool graph. 

For our last activity, we tried our hands at milking a cow. I set up a board to run between the two counters. On the board I tied two strings. To each string I tied a latex kitchen glove filled with water that had small holes in the finger tips. (I made the holes by poking through the glove with a push-pin. Sometimes I had to stretch the hole a little bit, but be careful, if you stretch the hole too big the water will come out to quickly, and that finger will be ruined. You want the water to drip out very slowly when the glove is hanging, and to squirt out a little faster when you pull on the fingers. If the water is coming out in a steady stream, that's too much, your "udder" will empty too quickly.) The kids pulled on the fingers, the same way a farmer would pull on a cows teats to get the milk to come out. Some of the kids tried to squeeze the big part of the glove instead of the fingers, when they did that I told them that a real cow would have kicked them if they'd squeezed her like that. :) 

And my last favorite thing for today is the new book I'm reading. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I'm only about 100 pages in, but already I love it. The narrator of the story is Death, which I thought was an interesting choice. And this Death has a beautiful way with words, and a very funny sense of humor. The story is a WWII story, one of my favorite subjects. I don't want to jump the gun, because I still have about 400 pages left, but it seems as though the stars might be aligning for this book to be one of my favorites. I'll let you know how it goes. But in the mean time, here's the movie trailer. Doesn't it look awesome?!