Hello Spring....

What a rainy spring we are having. Lili is collecting a lot of rain water in her jar. We are at about 3 1/2 inches in there so far. There has also been a lot of spring planting going on in our front yard. The girls planted bushes with Daddy and in the process found bugs and a worm. To my surprise Lili picked up and held the worm and even got Gabi to touch it while she was holding it. Daddy also planted a tree. We planned on planting it on Earth day but due to the cold and rainy weather we bumped that to the day after. Lili also got to look around the yard and pick up a few pieces of trash that had blew in.






We learned about fire safety. We read books about preventing fires, what to do if there is a fire and many safety rules. Stop! Drop! and Roll! Stay low, 911, etc... After the stories and talking about fire safety we made a firefighter craft by cutting out of paper a head and hat for our firefighter and drawing on the face and gluing it together. They turned out cute, sorry no picture of them.

The girls helped me plant some seeds in the garden. We read a book about planting seeds and how they grow. We talked about roots and what they are for. To see a root at work we put a carrot in a jar with colored water and let it sit for a few days. Then we cut the carrot in half lengthwise to see that the carrot and pulled the colored water up through it's center. Lili was surprised that a carrot is a root and that she EATS ROOTS! lol

We took a field trip to bella boos, no pictures uploaded yet. The girls loved it! They had a water play room that they went to twice and had a great time. Gabi really liked the train room. They both loved shopping in the play store and cooking in the pizza parlor. There was a face painting room, reading room, dress up room, house/kitchen play room and a ball pit/slide room. Gabi lost her sock in the ball pit, yay daddy for finding the lost sock. We spent some time in the art room making a pirate ship out of a cardboard box, string and paint. Gabi painted a couple pictures and we brought the art and ship home. Since then Lili has added some stickers and a treasure chest made from a box from butter. For earth day we worked on the treasure chest and also pulled some stuff out of our recycling bin to possibly use for a project. There was a small cardboard box in the pile and although we didn't use it that day I left it in our school room. A couple days later Lili was in there cutting away at this box. She asked me for help with a couple things. She designed and had started working on making the box into a space ship. It came out really cool. We painted it and she gave it to daddy. Some creativity has been sparked!

long time, no blog.....

My last post was in February, wow! Well we have had a busy couple of months here but between fighting colds and 2 funerals we managed to still get our school plans accomplished. Here is a brief overview of some of what we have been doing...

• Reading - we are still using and enjoying bookadventure.com. Besides earning points to redeem for prizes for Lili I like using this site to find books for us to read that I otherwise probably would not come across. We have found some great books that we really enjoyed. And I can already see a great improvement in Lili's comprehension skills. She is doing great answering the questions about the books.
  
• Reading - Now I'm Reading level 3 books. Lili has gotten her sticker in a couple for reading them on her own. Her reading speed as recently improved as well.
• Math - addition, subtraction and telling time using the white board, worksheets, flashcards, math mat floor game and a couple online games. I am still searching for a great online math game. I have found a few but most are either to easy or to hard for her right now.
• Science - Let's Learn About Science book series from the library. We are still using these and drawing and righting in Lili's science journal. Now that spring is here there are many books that would be great to go along with some outdoor adventures and investigations.
  
• Science/Health - topics include healthy eating and eating the colors of the rainbow. One day we drew a rainbow and filled in each color with foods of that color. We then pointed out which foods we like and which new ones to try.
• Writing - letter journal back and forth with mommy.
• Shapes - new shapes including...octagon, trapezoid, hexagon, pentagon, cylinder, cone, sphere and cube.
• Lang. Arts - breaking down words...adding and taking away the s, es, ed and ing from words. Also, compound word...lunch + box = lunchbox. Lili loved this! She likes to call it word math.
• We are currently working on a rain project for the month of April. We have a jar we put outside to catch rain water. We check after each rain and mark on the jar with a black marker and measure the water level with a ruler. Lili drew a picture of the jar in her science journal and we are keeping track of the amount of rain in the journal as well. We'll see how much rainfall we have this month. We also read a science book about rain, water vapor, evaporation and clouds. An addition activity to go along with the evaporation topic was...we put 2 tbsp of water each on two plastic plates and put each of them in a different place in the house. We checked on them daily to see how much water had evaporated. One plate was on our kitchen counter and the other was on my bedroom floor next to the heat vent. Both plates were completely dry after 3 days.
• We have started going back to the library weekly and also attending the story / activity hours for both girls. They LOVE going!
  

That is what we have been up to for school lately.