Week 6

9/20/10 - 9/24/10

My Father's World 1st Grade Days 23-27

This is a page from the Reading portion of MFW, where Davin made a little "Animal Tales" book.  The sentence was "A cute bug rode a mule" and Davin didn't know what a mule was, so we looked it up in our World Book Encyclopedia, of course!  (Thanks, we're getting a lot of use out of our set, Uncle Jonny!)  We discovered that a mule is the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse, has long ears, and a short mane.  I asked Davin what was coming out behind the mule and he said, "That's the steam.  He's going full steam ahead!"



We studied "Rain" this week for science, and after reading about it in Things Outdoors, Davin's narration and illustration are pictured below.  I could not believe that he drew a diagram of the rain cycle, as there was not a diagram in our reading; so it showed how his brain synthesized and organized the information so well!  Loving this way of doing science!  A short reading from one book each week, followed by a narration & illustration, then some books from the library to reinforce the idea, and an "Exploration Day" to do experiments or other activities, and time for reading library books.



Here's an activity from our "Exploration Day," titled "Cloud/Rain Model".  We boiled some water (representing the sun heating rivers, oceans, etc. and causing water vapor to rise), removed the water from the heat and covered it with a bread pan full of ice cubes (representing the water vapor rising and getting colder and changing into water droplets).  It was neat!  We also read about rain in:

• World Book


• Usborne Internet-Linked First Encyclopedia of Science


• Kingfisher's 1000 Facts about the Earth


• ***Rain by Peter Spier


• Sun Up by Alvin Tresselt


• Down Comes the Rain by Franklyn M. Branley

Some things we learned:

• The sun heats the water in oceans and rivers and causes water vapor (a gas we can't see) to form and rise.


• Rain isn't new water.  The amount of water in the world is always the same!

"Make a Lake Model": marking a jar filled with water and watching the level drop each day due to evaporation.



We made a rain gauge out of a gallon milk jug.



Fall is here!



Davin's project on "Herps" from homeschool co-op.  He's really enjoying co-op and even said that his favorite part was Gym!!  I never expected that and I'm sooo happy he's enjoying gym time.  Gym time at Sparks is still kind of a tough thing for him, so this is encouraging.