FIAR-The Story About Ping

 This week's row was The Story About Ping. We learned about ducks and China. Lily was excited about this. She has told me before that China is her favorite country.

The first thing I did was print out some Chinese symbols, so Lily could see that they don't have the same letters and numbers as we do. I didn't expect her to memorize them, I just wanted her to see them.

I printed out her name in Chinese. She was confused by this one. She expected there to be a symbol to represent every letter of her name, and there wasn't. (We did her full name)

I have a Muzzy online subscription. We usually watch it in French, but Mandarin was actually one of the choices, so I let Lily and the daycare kids watch it in Mandarin this time.

We colored some Chinese dragons and made lanterns for our arts and crafts. We also painted with water color paints. 

We discussed some of the many things that originate from China. Tangrams, Dominos, Paper and the Abacus. We looked at a few of these things this week.

In our Singapore math, we are talking about weight and balance, so we got out our balance and counters, and we played around with the abacus for some math fun.

We put together a GeoPuzzle of Asia. We also looked up China on a map and the globe.

The cooking projects were a lot of fun (and tasty!) this week. The first thing we made was chicken fried rice. It was much easier than I expected. For lunch that day, we had the rice, mandarin oranges, and fortune cookies.

We made egg drop soup. Again, very easy and yummy. My child-the pickiest eater on the planet, asked for seconds!

 We discussed ducks-what they eat, where they live, why they don't get wet, and how they float. This led to some interesting science. We did a sink/float experiment:

We also did an experiment with oil and water, and discussed how ducks have oil on their feathers to keep them from getting wet. We did an experiment to show what would happen if paper was covered in oil and dipped in water, or just dipped in water without the oil.

 In the book, Ping almost got into trouble by following the crumbs of a rice cake and eating it. We went to the lake and fed the ducks some rice cakes.

I found a Pandora station that has traditional Chinese music, so we listened to a lot of that this week while doing our art and eating our Chinese food. This was a fun book. We both really enjoyed this one. Next up? Ants!

Five In a Row-Owl Moon

We had a LOT of fun with this book. We took a couple of weeks on it because there are so many things you can pull from the story. I decided that we would focus on owls, nocturnal animals and the moon. We could have easily pulled more out of this story. We probably could have gotten a month of activities from it.

We went to the library and checked out lots of books about owls to go along with the story:

The first thing we focused on was owls. This was a lot of fun. I made an owl shaped sandwich to kick off the unit:

Lily recently discovered that she enjoys painting with watercolors, so I found a printable owl, and she painted and glued it together. We hung it on the wall when she was finished. We end up with a whole wall of projects/activities by the time we are done with a unit. She loves to show off her work, and it keeps it fresh in her mind until we move to the next unit.

We went "owling" in the house. Daddy hid the owl, and we turned off the lights and gave Lily a flashlight. She had fun finding the owl.

 

Lily had been begging to dissect an owl pellet since the beginning of the unit. I love that she gets so excited about her learning activities. We printed out an animal bone grid from the owl pellet website, and she got busy:

Most of the bones were too tiny to identify, but we were able to see that this particular owl had eaten 4 mice for his dinner!

We decided to make a feather covered toilet paper roll owl. (The cat tried to chase this around for the entire week)

We made a little booklet about the materials owls use to make a nest. We went outside and collected leaves and twigs, and added some craft feathers to the mix.

The booklet was part of this awesome lap book from homeschoolshare.com. It had lots of great information, and was pretty easy to put together.

Lily really doesn't enjoy handwriting practice. I found a site: www.handwritingworksheets.com, and it lets you type in your own words or sentences for handwriting practice. This has worked a little better, because Lily gets to dictate the sentence.

Valentines Day fell during this unit, so for math practice that day, we did some fun math graphing and counting with conversation hearts. (As a bonus for finishing all of math that day, she ate the hearts)

This was her first time working with tally marks. I think she did a great job!

We discussed animal tracks, and did an animal track art project.

We talked about which animals are nocturnal and which ones are diurnal. I found this little print out chart, and Lily had to predict which ones she thought were nocturnal. We used the chart to find out if her predictions were correct. She started to get upset if they were "wrong," but I told her that it was just a guess, and there is no right or wrong guess. 

We finished our discussion about owls by making some owl cookies. They turned out cuter than I expected: 

After we finished talking about owls and nocturnal animals, we discussed the moon. We didn't spend too much time on this, because we had covered the moon in an earlier curriculum just a few months back. We did talk about the phases of the moon using Oreos, however. I even found yellow Spring Oreos, so they made perfect little moons. :)

 

Lily loves all things science related, so we talked about how the moon acts as a magnet and affects the tides in the ocean. After this, she was able to experiment with magnets, and see how polarity works.

We also went on Youtube and Discovery Education streaming and  watched short clips about owls and also found a great clip that had the sounds that different owls make. Lily said the screech owl was her favorite sound. 

We had a lot of fun with this unit. I think this has been our favorite unit so far. We are just getting started in our journey, though. Next up! The Story About Ping!