8/17 - 8/20

health - diabetes education, nutrition
science - anatomy, dinosaurs, sea life, beekeeping
math - counting carbs, fractions, counting by 5, money values
english - letter recognition, writing
reading - Mammoths on the Move by Lisa Wheeler & Kurt Cyrus
                 Fancy Nancy, It's Beauty Day by Jane O'Connor & Robin Preiss Glasser
                 T-Rex and the Mother's Day Hug by Lois Grambling
spanish - random words here and there
geography - North America, ring of fire, Tennessee
history - looked up events from the years we were born (2006 & 2008)
chemistry - bread baking, homemade volcanoes


Mara can recognize M, R, A, D, O and her name on a page!


I promise my next post will be more pics and less notes!  Things have just been crazy around here!!

Chemistry in Kindergarten, yes please!

I know you are thinking, no way, seriously?! You are teaching your kid chemistry? Why yes I am, and today we made a volcano. Excuse the quality of our volcano, I ran out of flour and had to half the dough recipe so you can still see the coke bottle. Oh well, it still worked.

Before adding vinegar

After the vinegar

Again, not the greatest but the kids were thrilled.  Here's the science behind how this works:

1. The lava is the result of a chemical reaction between the baking soda and vinegar.
2. In this reaction, carbon dioxide gas is produced, which is also present in real volcanoes.
3. As the carbon dioxide gas is produced, pressure builds up inside the plastic bottle, until the gas bubbles (thanks to the detergent) out of the 'volcano'.

In reading about volcanoes, we also fit in a bit of geography, and talked of the place where there are volcanoes.

We also ready some cool books about Woolly Mammoths and watched Ice Age. Cory asked where mammoths lived, so we looked in the book and pulled up a map...and we talked about Siberia.

Then we talked about the weather in Siberia and how it differs from the weather here in Memphis, TN.  We also managed to talk about how many days are in a month and how many months till his birthday (in Dec). This convo was brought up by his asking for a toy for his b-day; guess what, its a mammoth!

See Tremor here!  And in discussing Tremor, we again had the discussion of the value of a dollar, how many dollars Tremor costs and Cory could do to earn the money for Tremor if he wanted to buy him before his birthday. 

That led to a wonderful talk on responsibilities and respect and chores and I just love how this works!!!!!