Leaves - part 2

We spent more time this morning on the topic of leaves.

We may still do a little after today, but I was attempting to finish most of the leaf things that I had planned (before a trip to the park)!

We started with Calendar this morning.  It had been almost a month since we had done calendar time, so it was great to get back into that swing!

Both girls began with a review activity - Charlotte matching words to pictures

I got some leaf scatter from the dollar store and wasn't really sure what to use it for.

I decided to extend/review venn diagrams from earlier this week!

I started with two colors (orange and yellow) so we could talk about how in real-life leaves can be more than one color, but these leaves were only made of one color (i.e.: there is no overlap items)!

Charlotte's categories here were: Maple Leaf and Maroon

Adelyn's categories: Beech leaf and Maroon

Categories: Green and Oak

Our CGI problem for the day!

I tried some "Muffin Tin Math" with Adelyn!

 Charlotte always seems to want to do an activity I design for Adelyn herself.  I try to choose activities that they both do, but also some really skill-specific activities that fit each of them.  However, I've found that if she wants to do it, I let her.

It took her all of 2 minutes to do the entire tin, so why not, right?

Not to my surprise, Charlotte wanted to do it too!

Math and science go SO beautifully together!

Next, we moved on to some measurement activities.

We talked about how there are so many ways to measure an object.

We tried to weigh a big leaf, but it didn't even weigh a gram.

So, we used pennies to measure its length.

I like non-traditional concrete tools to start teaching kids how to measure things.

A penny is a win-win tool for us right now because we're trying to teach Adelyn the names of each coin.

This measuring activity also gives us a chance to work on Adelyn's counting skills, so it's nicely scaffolded.  Charlotte can count quickly on her own, while I watch Adelyn and be sure she slowly counts, matching each number with a penny!

Since Adelyn's leaf was longer, this big smile is because her leaf was much WIDER!

I focused on talking with the girls about how we can measure both length and width of an object and their chosen leaves did a nice job of illustrating the big difference between a long and a wide object.

Next, we talked about measuring a flat object by covering it.

I even called this Area, so we were up to 3 specific vocab terms.

Charlotte's leaf had an area of 39 pennies!

Although they predicted Adelyn's was larger, her area was only 34.

We followed the ideas of predictions into our float/sink experiments.

The girls LOVED this!

We talked about whether we thought leaves would float or sink.

They predicted them to float.

Then, I asked whether they thought the leaves might sink if I put just 1 penny on them.

Our first leaf sunk with just 1 penny.  

Each leaf after that, I had the girls predict how many pennies it would take to sink the leaf!

By the end, the girls decided the larger leaves could hold more pennies before they sunk!

We joined a homeschool group this year to help us build even more community around this part of our lives.  After a little "school" this morning, we met 2 families at a nearby park!  The kids all had fun and it was great to chat with other homeschooling Mamas.

After naptime continues to be my main literacy time with Charlotte. We do reading lessons from our "Teach your child to read" book or a related game or word study activity!