Five in a Row-Storm in the Night

What a great first week of second grade! We have tried to row Storm in the night before, but something always got in the way. We had lots of thunderstorms in the forecast this week, so this seemed like a good time to try again.

Storm in the Night is about a boy and his grandfather. The power goes out during a thunderstorm, and the grandfather tells the boy a story from his childhood. It is very sweet. 

We kicked off our week (and our year) with a yummy cloud snack!

We Googled "cloud viewer", and found an image to print. We went outside every day, looked at the clouds and determined what types of clouds were in the sky. Some days, there were more than one type!

We watched the weather report every day, and at the end of the week, Lily gave her own weather report.

We made a rain gauge and placed it outside. We got lots of storms this week, so we had a chance to see it in action.

We made an anemometer to help us see how fast the wind blows. The faster the cups are spinning, the faster the wind is blowing. We placed it outside near the rain gauge. We had our own mini weather center going on!

We watched several movies this week to help us learn about weather. We watched Rachel and the Treeschoolers-Rainy Day, The Magic School Bus-Wet All Over, Rock N Learn-Earth Science, and The Magic School Bus-Kicks Up a Storm.

We made a water cycle bracelet. Just take a pipe cleaner, and put some beads on in the order of the weather cycle: Yellow-Sun, Clear-Evaporation, White-Condensation/Clouds, Blue-Rain, Green-Groundwater/Collection.

We made a water cycle mobile. I just checked Pinterest for this, and there are a couple of pins that have the pictures of them. 

 We did an experiment. The sponge represents the cloud. Lily put water into the cloud. She saw that clouds hold a lot of water, and when they get too full, it rains.

For math, we talked about patterns, and made some different patterns using the Geoboard.

We talked about "comfort food", and then we made the recipe in the cookbook-Baked Mac N Cheese.

The book didn't specify a location.  Lily decided to place our story disk on Northern TX after we discussed "Tornado Alley", and how some areas of the country get more storms than others.

We did another cloud/rain experiment. This worked the same way as the sponge experiment, but was a little more visual in nature.

The illustrations in Storm in the Night were done in acrylics. Lily painted a picture using acrylic paints for art this week.

Our final science experiment was a convection current activity. The ice cubes push the cold "air" down, and the warm "air" is forced up. This causes the instability in the atmosphere that produces thunderstorms.

We talked about onomatopoeia, and did a couple of activities with it. This is an onomatopoeia mobile. I found the idea for this activity at: http://homeschoolingmom2mags.blogspot.com/2013/09/storm-in-night.html

We discussed the five senses. In the book, the power was out, so the little boy noticed that he could hear and smell much better when he could see. We decided to play "Pin the Tail on the Unicorn", since Lily needed to be blindfolded to play. :)

We completed the Fold N Learn from FIAR. If you want to get awesome Fold N Learns to go with a lot of the books, just go to http://fiveinarow.com/, and subscribe to their blog. You will get a link to them. They are great!  

We also did the parts of the manual that were conversational. We discussed fears, aging, relationships, personification, sources of light and more. It was a great week! Looking forward to The Finest Horse in Town next week. See you soon!