13 January 2010

Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you

Our week in Homeschool
My new very, very,very, very, very organized homeschool shelf :) (Thanks, Mom) We don't do folders or drawers here, but we do now have a shelf. Each boy has his own shelf and the bottom shelf is for general activities. We pull from this each day.
Monday, the boys wanted to learn about the human body. The Grandparents gave us a great second hand book this Christmas about each part of the body. It was perfectly detailed and led us to a great website. We played with our new model of the body, and then proceeded to build this guy.. He has 20 teeth like children do (Eli had to count them.) He has funnel ears, which is how our ears work. He has flashlight eyes. Our eyes let IN light. We did pupil experiments in light and dark. His trachea is a pitch pipe, his heart is a pump, his stomach is a bag with food in it, his kidneys are footballs, his intestines are rope, his veins, also rope, his joints -balls connected together with rubber bands or tendons. We talked about functions and names and the boys helped come up with each part of this guy. I loved this activity.
We then measured how much sugar is in a soda. 37 teaspoons said one source. (We don't drink soda, but we did want to measure it.)
We also found this book in our collection and began to talk about fractions.
We cut paper plates into pieces and began to explore and played with fractions. Ollie's reader is pictured above. We practice with it weekly, and he loves to read stories from it.
Yesterday we had Spanish class, library, and Yoga class. Our Yoga instructor references animals and body parts correctly. She is Montessori influenced and jives with my educational philosophy. So far, so good this semester.

2 comments:

Shug said...

What an AWESOME activity!!!! I love all of the body parts; the boys really thought about function for each part. I wonder what the "Letter of the Week" kids did while your boys learned about body parts, fractions, sugar in drinks, organizing,reading, yoga, and more. Good job, Teacher!

Mandy said...

The sugar thing really puts things into perspective. Now I don't feel so bad about a tablespoon or something in some cookies!

Your shelf looks great!