Spelling hopscotch is simple.  I write 10 words into a hopscotch board and then call out a word.  She jumps to that word and then spells it without looking.  When she was younger I used to do this with her sight words.

She has loved choosing her own activity and each month she gets a new list of ones to chose from.  Here are some of the activities I have had her do.

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We talked about the differences between rotating and revolving and had each girl pretend to be the sun while the other was the Earth.  This way they were able to see how the Earth spun while traveling around the sun.

I found a great printable Sun and Earth fill in the blank unit here.  So each day we completed a few pages of it.  I read another great book called Earth and focused on what Earth is made of and the layers.  The girls memorized each layer and learned different characteristics about each layer and then made their own model of Earth using play doh.  We used red for the inner core, orange for the outer core, yellow for the mantle, black for the crust, and then blue and green for the water and land.  I loved their faces once they cut theirs in half and they saw all the layers.

She asked for the globe to make sure her “lands” looked right.

Finally our last day we spent on the moon.  They got to write about what they would do if they could go to the moon.  Then we talked about the different phases of the moon.   We went outside and used their new telescope to look at it.  Then we used Oreo cookies to make each phase of the moon.  They learned (and I relearned) what waxing and waning meant as well as what a gibbous moon looks like.  They had to tell me each phase in order before they were allowed to eat them.

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I only took a picture of part of our “forest”.

The next day I introduced suffixes and played a fun game.  I wrote different prefixes and suffixes on index cards.  Then I would turn one over and the first one to shout out a word that had it in it got to keep the card.

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I found this great video explaining matter and molecules.  They also liked singing along with this song.  After watching the video I had them pretend they were molecules.  I called out either solid, liquid, or gas and they acted like those molecules.  For a solid they stayed close to each other and stayed still, for a liquid they moved a little further apart and walked around, then for gas (their favorite) they ran around and spread out.

One of the experiments we did they loved!  Pour vinegar into an empty water bottle about a third of the way.  Then get a balloon and fill it about half way with baking soda.  Without letting the baking soda fall into the bottle, attach the balloon onto the top of the water bottle.  Then have them pour the baking soda from the balloon into the bottle and watch what happens.

Writing down their hypothesises before the experiment.

The vinegar is in the bottle and the baking soda is in the balloon.

I love her face here.

Science behind it:

When baking soda and vinegar mix they form the gas carbon dioxide.  Gasses need room to spread out so the gas filled the bottle and moved into the balloon to “blow” it up.

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I had them make lots of different kinds of snowflakes.

Then I drew a tree in the winter and I had them decorate the tree using the snowflakes.

I told them that that tree was God’s family and that the snowflakes were like all the different kinds of people in his family.  They are all different but beautiful!

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Then they made their own penguins.  I gave them some books with pictures  and some different colored construction paper and they got to work.  They made an Emperor Penguin, a Macaroni Penguin, and a Little Blue Penguin.

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• Turn one Ziploc bag inside out and place it inside another bag. Make sure you have the “zippers” lined up correctly so that you will be able to zip the two bags together. Fill the space in between the two bags with a thick layer of Crisco then zip the edges together. This makes a type of glove with an opening for your hand to go in.
• Make a “control” glove by putting two other ziplock bags inside each other. This will you give you the same amount of plastic, but with no insulating “blubber” layer.
• I had the girls stick their hand in the “control” glove and put it in the ice water as long as they could.  We timed it to see how long they could last.
• Then they put their hand into the glove with the Crisco and put their hand into the ice water.  We timed them again.

They were amazed that they couldn’t feel how cold the water was inside the “blubber” glove.  We talked about this is how many animals such as whales, seals, walruses are able to swim in the freezing water.

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