Nature Study: Enviromental Nature Center

This week we hit up the environmental nature center.  In the summer there have a really cool butterfly house full of mostly monarch butterflies, but a few other species as well.  We go every year.  Green Bubbles loves finding the caterpillars hanging around and gets so excited when we find them. A special treat this year, we got there just in time to watch two different butterflies emerge from their chrysalis. 

It was also a good oppunity to talk about how nature sometimes makes mistakes.  One of the butterflies just wasn't doing well, got stuck on his way out, and I'm fairly certain wasn't done going through his metamorphsis.  The 2nd butterfly was in a hurry to fly.  He was out fast and climbed to the very top of his box.  We found him on the dirt shortly after.  He was in such a hurry to fly, there was no time to wait for his wings to stretch and dry out.  Poor little butterfly.  I couldn't help myself and asked the kids if there were ever in to much of a hurry to do something too.  I got some laughs.

The ENC is totally free to park and enter.  They have a really cool nature center with a lot of hands on things, live animals, coloring pages, books to read, and even a Native American hut with some tools they used in the past in our area and information about how they lived and games they played.

Here's our pictures from the day!

Watching the snakes.

Inside the hut.

Butterfly #1 coming out!

Caterpillar

Butterfly #2 on left, newly hatched but not witnessed butterfly on right.

Dead butterfly, allowed us to get a really close up look.

There's a stream near by that we always go to after the butterfly house.  We eat our lunches on the pinic tables and the kids play around the stream making bridges to cross with fallen branches and playing inside the giant pine tree near by.  I always bring clean clothes for the kids because, if they somehow manage to not to soaked by falling into the stream, they still get plenty dirty!

Science: Comparing Cells

This week was learning about cells.  We got a chance to learn what cells are and how they make up all things that are alive.  The first hands on experiment was observing a chicken's egg.  We looked at the different parts of an egg and labels with in our chart below.  It also gave us a chance to talk about why eggs have shells and the white part of the egg.  Hint, it's for protection.  After we finished our observation Green Bubbles gently poked the yolk of the egg and watched it break and spread out around the bowl.  We talked about how delicate it was and why it needed the protection.

For the second lab we got to compare animal and plant cells.  This one was fun and Green Bubbles really retained a lot of the differences such as shape and chloroplasts.  Or as Green Bubbles says, grapes!  We made jello to represent each cell.  The strawberry in both cells is the nucleolus and the grapes are, as mentioned above, chloroplasts.  I think the only reason Green Bubbles loved this one is because he loves jello.  The grapes through him off though and the animal cell was the first to be devoured. 

Bonus things we did this week?  Based on the recommendation we took out our book, Greg's Microscope, and started reading that.  I broke it up into three readings because of Green Bubbles attention span, about 15 pages each.  It's an easy read though and older children, or good readers, shouldn't have a problem reading this themselves!

We also watched an episode of Magic School Bus on netflix all about cells.  Season 4 episode 5 is called Goes Cellular.  This one explores skin cells and addresses how cells are alive, they need to eat, they divide, and how long it takes a skin cell to reach the surface of your skin.  It even talks about how your body is made up different types of cells such as blood, bone, and muscle, but the focus is totally on skin cells.  Green Bubbles loves Magic School Bus, but doesn't realize it until after I turn it on for him.  He always complains and says he doesn't like it, until it starts.  And then he begs to watch more episodes after it is over.  Every single time.  It makes me laugh.

Weekly Wrap Up - The one with sick kiddos

This has been our first official week back to school and, in true fashion, there were a lot of bumps on the road!  All three kids are sick, each with a different cold!  It all started with Green Bubbles' eyelid starting to swell.  We got him started on eye drops and I'm happy to say by the end of the week his eye is looking almost normal again.  Little Miss followed shortly by Green Bubbles both ended up with head colds which meant I was awake about every two hours in the night for the past week because of poor Megatron.  He's starting to sleep better now although we still aren't getting the kind of sleep we did before so this Momma is tired!

But life goes on!  And since Green Bubbles wasn't really 'sick' we still did school.  Monday was the start of math for us which means it was the first day we had a full load of subjects!  That means first day of pictures of course. 

 On Monday we also went to park day, a soon to be weekly affair for us. We always go to at least one park day a week and this year it's looking like we will be going back to our Monday friends!  Green Bubbles speech therapy is on Monday and Thursday this year and the timing and location are right by Monday park day.

We signed up for a busy bag exchange with park friends which was a lot of fun to make.  I made 7 toddler busy bags and passed 6 of them out to friends with toddlers.  In exchange I got a lot of new busy bags for Little Miss to help keep her, well, busy!  I'm hoping this will help with the rampaging mess that is my school room whenever I try to sit down with Green Bubbles.

And speaking of rampaging messes..  I tacked the house and started to clean out my closet and clutter in my bedroom this week.  I'm an on again off again Flylady follower and that was the zone to work on this week.  While cleaning I came across Green Bubbles Iron Man mask I made him for his 4th birthday party a year and half ago now.  He was so excited to have it as Iron Man is still ranking up in his top 5 coolest things ever.  Little Miss wanted in on the action too and was wearing the mask around when Green Bubbles wasn't.  At one point she even announced, "I am Iron Man!"

I didn't get very far in our room though because everything broke at once in our bathroom this week as well.  The toilet started leaking and the spout in the bathtub just flew off.  I got to google my way to fixes and, after a few trips to the hardware store, managed to get our bathroom back to normal again as well.

Just to show it wasn't all cleaning, fixing, and school, here's a picture of poor, sick, little Megatron.  He couldn't breath unless he was upright which means he was just tired too.  He kept falling asleep everywhere, even in his jumper!

 On a positive, he's feeling much better now and hit 5 months this week!  I can't believe how big he is getting.  He's starting to sit up really well, loves to jump in his jumper and has already moved onto the 2nd setting since he's so tall.  He rolls everywhere, as soon as you put him down, which makes diaper changes challenging but fun.  He's also tried real food now and loves apples, trying to grab the spoon from me because I'm not fast enough.  He really dislikes rice cereal, and hasn't made up his mind about green beans yet. 

So that's been our week.  How was yours?

Linking up to Weird  Unsocialzed Homeschoolers.

Story of the World: Introduction

Mentioned before, as are using Story of the World Vol. 1 for our history this year.  This covers nomads through the last Roman empire.  Each chapter has activities to complete and I love things that are hands on so I thought I would share some of what we do.

The introduction is all about what history is and how we learn about it.  A big focus is on archeology.  Some books we read in addition to story of the world include Me and My Family Tree and Archaeologists Dig for Clues.  Both books were really informative and Green Bubbles listened to both but between the two, the archaeologist book was perfect since we did an archaeology activity to go along with the introduction.

 I have to admit, I never thought our garden box would have been used for school purposes but this is the second time we've used it for that!  I buried some objects in our garden box that represented our culture.  What did I bury?  A fork, knife (dull so fingers wouldn't be cut), a letter W, coins, a toy car, and a comb.  There's all sorts of things that could work as well though.

The first thing I did was divide the area we were going to dig into four squares using pencils and embroidery floss.  Why floss?  Because it was the closest thing I had on hand to string and I have a lot of it! 

We then talked about the book we read and how the archeologist are very gentle and take only a little bit of dirt at a time when looking for things.  This was a very hard concept for Green Bubbles and I don't think he really got it.  It's just way to much fun digging in deep and throwing dirt all around!

Once we found something I had Green Bubbles take it out and clean it off.  We had an empty squirt bottle that I filled with water and an old tooth brush we weren't going to use again.  Green Bubbles loved squirting everything off with the bottle and I think he used the tooth brush once just to humor me.

After our artifacts were cleaned off Little Miss jumped in to help.  She took all the cleaned artifacts and put them in baggies.  Little Miss the Little Helper!

While all of this was going on, I showed Green Bubbles the paper I made to log everything we found.  I drew a map of our dig area and below it a list of everything we found.  This was shown in the book as well and we talked about how important it was to keep records when doing science.  Even though this was history, it totally counts as science too!

Of course, I know there are still things out there in my garden bed.  Namely, coins.  Green Bubbles was able to find all the bigger objects and eve the quarters, but pennies and nickels were just too elusive with the big holes and thrown dirt!

Science: What is Life?

In case you missed it, we are using Real Science Oddessy - Life for science this year.  Since Green Bubbles is only in Kindergarten we my plan right now is to stretch this out into next year by adding in a lot of extras including science kits, videos, and tons of books!  I thought it would be fun to go over exactly what we do and what we add on though soo... Week 1!

The first unit is about What Is Life?  There were two activities to complete and we didn't really add on to anything this week since we are easing our way into school.  The first unit was a comparison of different things using the characteristics of life.  We compared two things that were alive to two things that weren't.  Green Bubbles did well at this and picked up some of the harder to see characteristics pretty easily including respiration (which he just called breathing).  We even talked about how plants 'breathe' too. 

The second project was more hands on, and a little dirty!  We did a plot study where the intent was to find different things that were alive and not alive.  While the instructions recommended a wild area, we just used my over grown planter box.

A lot of plants were recently pulled but there's still a lot to see.  Green Bubbles found bugs, mushrooms, and of course my tomatoes and carrots.  He found signs that animals had been there and pointed them out to me all by himself including the leaves eaten by caterpillars, or really cabbage loopers since we caught a few in our bug house and watched them cacoon and turn into moths.  He also found one of my tomatoes eatten right off the stem.  I have no idea what animal did that.

We recorded all our findings on our log and Green Bubbles drew a picture of his alive and not alive items (a mushroom and a dead leaf).

And then, as always happens when we are outside, Green Bubbles and Little Miss decided to water the garden.  It starts off cute, but always turns into a water fight with two soaked children.  Perfect play for a hot summer day.

Screen Printing Tutorial - Frozen Style

Frozen has become this massive landslide of snowflakes and glitter.  Every little girl I know loves it.  Let it Go is heard wherever we go.  And don't even get me started on the mad dash to get the recently restocked Elsa dresses at Disneyland for Little Miss that we had to do.

So, in honor of the awesomeness of Frozen, here's a tutorial just for you!  Little Miss loves Elsa.  She walks around pretending she has Elsa powers, holding her hands out infront of her with an intense concentration on her little 2 year old face or stomping her foot hard upon the carpet turning everything to ice with joyful glee.  But besides the before mentioned Elsa dress, she doesn't have anything else that's frozen.  I tried to buy her a shirt but she's moving up into girl sizes now and for whatever reason, a size XS Frozen shirt we found is fitted instead of straight and just doesn't fit her right.  We had to return it. To make it up to her I made this.

I found an Elsa template from Heidi and Finn.  I decided instead of sewing it on like in their tutorial, I would screen print it instead.  Copying another Frozen design on their site I planned out my design on a plain white tank top that was on sale at Target.

 

Next I sewed on the words Let It Go.  I tried to do it on the machine but it just wasn't working for me so I ended up doing it by hand.  I traced the words with pencil so I just had to follow the line.  Using this system, even doing it by hand, it went fairly quickly. 

 

After the words were complete I washed the entire thing just to make sure the thread was secure and nothing was going to shrink on me.  Then I took my template and cut it out using an x-acto knife.

 I placed the paper template onto white contact paper that I got from home depot.  You really don't need anything fancy for this.  Screen printing can be very complicated, but it can also be very simple as well. Make sure you cut the shape out without cutting through the rest of the contact paper.  The Elsa I cut out isn't needed.  For the screen printing, it's the missing pieces that will receive the paint.

I peeled the backing off the contact paper and placed Elsa onto my screen.  I have an actual screen printing screen we got from a yard sale awhile back.  The screen is dirty though and, because of that, doesn't always work just right.  I really should just toss it but I can't bring myself to do it.  We also have screens we've made when Green Bubbles did Curiosity Hacked (previously known as Hacker Scouts) last summer.  There's a great tutorial at One Golden Apple that talks about making your own screens as well as the contact method above and how to do it with kids!

 I ran into a problem mixing the colors of screen printing ink.  I wish it turned out a little more like the color of the thread and less blue, but I don't think Little Miss cares.  (I have no problem sharing my mistakes with you!)  I used Speedball ink and I highly recommend getting Speedball Fabric Screenprinting Ink Starter Set instead of buying the colors separately.  It comes with all the primary colors plus green, black and white so you are able to mix the colors you need.  Once the ink is applied you do need to heat set the ink by ironing it.  If you forget this step your beautiful design will just wash out.  Or, if you make a horrible mistake and want to remove it.

I also made a tutu to make the tank top for Little Miss.  Do you think she likes it?

We'll be wearing this to Disneyland on one of our many trips.  Little Miss has an Elsa dress from Disney but it's just to hot to wear right now.  The tank top and tutu is a lot cooler!

Weekly Wrap Up - The one with yummy jello

So we are almost up to a full school load this week and so far it's going well.  Just like everyone, we have good days and bad days. 

Monday was our first full day and we filled it with stuff! We read, did a science experiement, played with wooden trains and just had a lot of fun!

Tuesday was more of the same except Megatron is learning to sit up without support!  He's getting so big, so fast.  It seems every child I have grows up faster then the ones before.  I remember the baby stage lasting so long with Green Bubbles and with Little Miss is seemed so much shorter.  Megatron is going by with a blink of the eye.  I'm sure it's just because I'm so much busier now then I was before but it makes me a little sad to think about.

Wednesday was our nature study day where we went to the beach. The kids had a lot of fun, except for maybe Megatron who really doesn't understand what's so exicting about a little sun and sand and just wanted to go home, or nap, or both.

Thursday we made jello!  Our science curriculum had an experiment where we compared an animal cell and a plant cell by making jello models.  This was by far Green Bubbles highlight of the week.  He sure does love his jello.  Besides the jello, this was one of those 'bad' days.  Green Bubbles was really struggling with school and focusing. 


Friday, today, Green Bubbles woke up with a swollen eyelid and was complaining about how much his eye hurt so we had a trip to the doctor.  Everything is fine and the doctor couldn't see anything causing it and he's acting like his full of energy self so went ahead and did a little more school today as well.  We started Story of the World this week and we were able to do the activity for the Introduction chapter and went on an archeology dig in our own backyard.  Today is also going to be errand day so we're going to be heading out this afternoon, all thee kids in tow!

Hope everyone else had a great week!  Linking up to weird unsocialized homeschoolers.

Nature Study: Little Corona Del Mar

This week we hit the beach!  School is official for most of us next week (although I know some schools are still out until Sept).  I thought it would be fun for our last 'non-school' nature study to just play at the beach.    While this is normally a tide-pool beach, I didn't plan to go during low tide because low tide in the summer is 6am and I don't know many families willing to do that!  We'll go again in Winter when low tide is right around out normal meeting time and you can see so many incredible things!

Just because the tide wasn't out, doesn't mean the kids didn't still learn anything though! Ginny from the city of Newport's recreation department had a great table set up with different animals that can be found at the tide pools.  She had many real samples as well as some plastic ones for the kids to touch and play with.  There was even some examples of unintended beach pollution with popped balloons and a forgotten baby sandal.  She had a picture of a seagull who's stomach was full of plastic trash.  It gave us a great opportunity to talk about why we should always be careful to clean up after ourselves.
 

The seagulls here will take any opportunity they can to get things as well!  It's a lot easier then you think to leave 'unintentional' pollution behind.  At one point a seagull opened up my beach tote and tried to take off with our pack of baby wipes!  Another seagull was sucessful at taking a plastic cup of oranges and flying off.  While we were able to retrive the plastic thankfully, we were much more careful about making sure all of our trash was zipped up in bags.  We even saw this poor little guy with trash stuck to him.

The kids all collected trash they found on the beach so that we could throw away more then just are own.  We pulled an old sand bag out of the ocean, found a grungy heeled shoe (not sure how they walked on the beach wearing it though!), plastic lids to jars and bottles, and an old soda can that was actually sharp in many places.  It wasn't all about the trash though.  We were able to talk about the awesome footprints the birds left behind and were guessing if the seagulls were drinking the ocean water or not.

We also talked about the flags on the top of the life guard tower.  The yellow flag with the black circle means there is a rip tide!

The kids had a lot of fun playing as well!