Week 5/02 - 5/07 THE ENVIRONMENT

We first discussed what the environment was. How without trees & other natural habitats, animals would have no where to live, we would not have beautiful places to hike & explore, and how plants produced oxygen for us to breath. We also talked about how these resources were given to us by God to use, but we needed to use them wisely & respectfully.

The kids were very fascinated with recycling. I got a pile of things out of the recycle bin & we identified them all & how these things came from the environment & how we take less from the environment when we reuse them. We got some neat books from the library about what happens to items once they are recycled. Michael especially loved the idea that paper we recycled became products like paper towels, kitty litter, and toilet paper. And I had no idea that fleece was made from recycled plastic bottles! And of course we made crafts from recycled materials like the above tp tube snake.

Planting trees & flowers is a great way to help the environment and so we tied that into our lesson by transplanting the flowers we planted from PLANT week into a bigger pot. Lizzie also planted a flower for mothers day at preschool and that was a nice surprise :)

This is a horrid pic of Michael, but what can ya do! While I went to Time Out For Women (a women's conference through my church) for the weekend, Daddy took the kids to a light house & old military fort. They had a great time riding the ferry and enjoying the environment & world around them.

Week 4/25 - 4/30 HUMANS

To start our human studies week off, we talked about the 5 senses. I've never had all 3 kids' attention so intensely before we explored this topic. They liked touching different textures of dry foods we had around the house. Above is sugar, oatmeal, & barley and I used chinese noodles as well. Sight allows us to see all the colors around us. We use hearing to detect danger or identify familiar things like moms voice, dogs barking, airplanes over head. We tried different spices & talked about taste buds, and the different sections of our tongue that identify sweet, sour, bitter, etc. And finally smell is wonderful to know when mom was baking cookies, if clothes were clean, and even when Alaina needed a diaper change.

Michael and I later talked about what it might be like to not have one of our senses. I remembered there were signs for the primary song "Love One Another" and we did that together, which was fun. We talked about deafness, blindness, and a story I heard about a little girl who did not feel pain.

We spent a day talking about what we can do to keep our bodies healthy. We did some exercises for fun (push ups, sit ups, jumping jacks, etc.) and talked about good foods to eat. Michael had just had a similar lesson at church & his teacher had cut out good & bad foods from magazines. So we used those props again and discussed each food (including an intro to drugs & alcohol) and how these effected our bodies.

We checked out a lot of books at the library about the heart, blood system, bones, and health. The kids favorite was the Magic School Bus "Inside The Human Body". After learning about these systems we traced our bodies on paper & drew in our inside workings. It was a lot of fun. First thing my 4 yr old daughter did after making her face, a few bones & heart, was to color her finger & toe nails pink. The things I would miss if my kids went to public school!