Time for a Science Experiment!!

The rain let up for a little bit today, so the boys were finally able to get about 10 minutes of outside play.   I have never been so happy to see the sun, even if it did mean that there would be muddy footprints through out the house.

Today we rocked day 5 in the workbooks.  The kids have finally adjusted to the new schedule, so they tend to get right into it.  Next was the journals.  They each wrote a story about their masks that they had made yesterday.  A's was pretty straightforward and filled with facts from yesterday's assignment, K's was more imaginative (somehow iron man was involved).  

I decided to end the day's lesson with a simple experiment regarding chromatography.  It was designed to see how ink dissolved into water.  We took a standard coffee filter (I only had the basket type), crayola markers (not permeant), and three glasses of water.  Used those plastic cups that the boys always get when we go out to eat because I could throw them away when we finished the experiment.  We cut the coffee filter into three strips.  Each strip got a different color dot about 1/3 of the way up the filter strip.  We used Blue, Red, and Yellow as our test colors.  Next we dipped the filters into the water leaving some dry area between the dots and the water line.  Finally we watched and recorded how each of the colors reacted when the water finally reached them.  The whole thing turned out pretty neat and the boys seemed to enjoy it as well!

Coffee filter chromatography

A Stormy Day Lesson

Today was rather difficult to get outside like I had planned.  It seemed like every time we went to put our shoes on to go out to play the sky opened up or there was a loud clap of thunder.  Thankfully I had planned on discussing storms as part of the science lesson today, so the outdoors was a wonderful exhibit.

We started the day by completing Day 3 in the work books.  There was no cursive writing today, so A was a happy kid.  Instead we discussed different types of sentences.  K's page was rather simple because it was the letter "C", since he is already reading basic books, letters are "easy peasy."  The boys really enjoyed writing a fiction paragraph yesterday, so I continued the theme.  The topic was a story starring their Lego people that they colored in yesterday.  True to form, they both came up with some real cool stories.

As I stated earlier, storms were the topic for today.  I wanted to really cover Hurricanes with the kids. We live in a hurricane prone area, and neither one of the boys has actually been through anything larger than a Category 1, so the thought of a hurricane can be rather scary.  We started out by watching Bill Nye the Science Guy-"Storms".  I found the video on YouTube and it is the complete episode without commercials.  Then we went to our local new station website and watched a video on how we can prepare for a hurricane.  We went over the hurricane prep list and discussed why each of the items was needed and how much we as a family would need to acquire.  You can find the list at the Bay News 9 website.

A is also in charge of tracking the storms each day on his very own hurricane tracking map.  I printed it out from the NOAA website, the numbers are rather small and hard to read.  Normally the local stores have maps and "hurricane season guides" out in the stores, but I haven't seen any so far.  Honestly, it scares me that so many people in the area are completely unprepared because it has been 10 years since we have had a hurricane, and the community has become rather comfortable.  So far there is nothing in the Gulf or the Atlantic, but that has a habit of swiftly changing at a moment's notice.

A's tracking map- There is one in the Pacific!