Science Journal entries

I thought I should share our recent Science Journal entries, in case some one is interested.  We try to do something in the journal for all the science we do.  D decides between drawing or writing or sometimes both and I do the rest for her.  She is only 6 and there is no requirement that she do the work all by herself.  In a Montessori classroom she might have chosen to do these with a group and might not have done all the writing and drawing by herself.  I always keep this in mind and share the journaling with her.  You might have seen in our Mushroom studies that she did the drawing and I did the writing.  Here are the journal entries from our recent experiments.

She choose to use a green check mark for seeds that germinated and a red X for no change.

We love journaling Science and many times I've caught D going through all the previous entries and recall interesting things from our experiments!  As you can see we use a regular lined notebook.  When I was in school, back in India, we had what we called "Observation" notebooks for science that had a blank page to the left and ruled page to the right, where we recorded all the Science entries.  Is there something like that I could find here?  I would love that format as almost all our entries have some drawing and some writing.

Day 5 Pictures of our Bacteria

D's Hand - Left without and Right with Antibiotic cream

D's Mouth - Left without and Right with Toothpaste

Bacteria with Yogurt

D's Fingers - Left before and Right after washing with soap.  There is mold growth on this one, probably  because of using wet fingers?!

Toes - Left mine and Right D's - Yuck!  Mold growth on this too!

A day of science experiments

Today has been a day of science experiments. We infected some agar Petri dishes with our own bacteria and sowed some Lima beans! We have wait for the results though!

Nature Hike

We are very fortunate to live in a sub that has beautiful woods!  Here are some of the clicks from our hike earlier this week!

We spotted a lot of wild mushrooms and discussed how they are plants and also why not to touch these wild things!

We saw this young deer sitting just a few feet into one of our trails

We spotted this and many other colorful butterflies!

In Science this week we were working on Botany and this tree was a great example to discuss the parts of the tree with roots that were visible!

Poinsettia, Free Downloads and More Holiday Works

I added a small unit on "Poinsettia" on D's shelves.  I placed a live Poinsettia plant and the following tray on our culture shelves.

The tray holds "Parts of the Poinsettia" 3-part cards and a small booklet that D can read by herself.  The booklet is my test to see if she would be ready for the Classified Definition work.

You can download both the 3-part cards as well as the booklet here. If you end up using these cards, you will have to color in the parts and the booklet is meant to be printed back-to-back. 

I created this tray so, she could also make her own booklet.  The tray contains 4 Poinsettia pictures and blank labels.  The basket contains stuff she can create and color her booklet with.

You can download the page to make the booklet here.

I had to help her punch holes and create a label for the book.  But she was able to complete the rest by herself.  Here is her finished booklet and an page from inside.

We followed this culture work with the reading of "The Legend of the Poinsettia", to understand the significance of Poinsettia and Christmas.

Here are a few more new trays on D's shelves.  D is free to choose any work from M's shelves, so these are just a couple of new trays for her.

Shape Tracing and Pin Punching those out

Some Christmas themed Sticker Work

This post is linked to Montessori Monday.

Another good week at our home!

We had another great work week at our home with D. She is moving along great with her reading and in Math we have covered all the four basic operations including exchanging at the bank and D loves this work. We will probably work on it some more next week and I will introduce the stamp game the following week. I need to go through Karen Tyler's culture albums and put out more work in that area. I also need to put out some holiday themed work for next week. So much to do and so little time! Anyway, here are a few pictures of some serious work this week!

More Stitching

Writing the different phonogram variations

Tool Box Work

3-Part Matching work

3-Part Card Label Matching and verifying using the Control Card

In addition to Montessori work, we also completed a couple of lessons from All About Spelling Level 2 and proceeded with abstraction using the Base 10 picture cards, which is similar to the stamp game.  We baked a chocolate pie for my husband's birthday.  All in all we had a fun week!


I am linking this post to Montessori Monday.

FIAR - Volume 1: How to make an Apple Pie and See the World

We rowed "How to make an Apple Pie and See the World" mid October around the time we went apple picking to a nearby orchard.  This is a cute and funny story of how to make an apple pie a little girl goes around the world to get the various ingredients!

Of course there are ample opportunities to indulge in some World Geography in this row.  We located the various countries on our world map and discussed how certain ingredients are native to certain countries.

We went apple picking to a nearby orchard and the kids had so much fun there.  We ended up making apple sauce and some snack sized apple pies with those apples.  We discussed the different kinds of apples we picked and had a taste test to find which one we liked best!

We did some Science by cutting an apple in half and naming the parts of an apple.  We used the free cards from here.

We also got the free lifecycle cards from Montessori for Everyone and D loved this work.

We made some red and white playdough and D made apple pies.

We made apple prints, cutting an apple in half both sideways and length-wise.

We also worked with this poem during this week and poetry is always a favorite in our house.

We had checked out an "Apples" kit from our local library.  So, in addition to the main FIAR book there were other lovely books on Apples that we rowed.  Here are a few from the 10 books we rowed.

We had great fun with this row!  I am so late in posting this! I am linking this up to Montessori Monday.

FIAR - Volume 1: Madeline

I am extremely behind on posting about the FIAR titles that we rowed!  But better late than never!

For our second row we worked with Madeline.

This is a delightful story about a little girl called Madeline what happens when she has an appendectomy.  This story led to so many interesting conversations about boarding school and why parents would do such a thing to their kids!  D still things Madeline's parents are cruel to do that!  We also had conversations about compassion and that was another idea from the book.

We located France and Paris on our world map.  D even colored a French flag.  We talked about the Eiffel Tower and worked with a $1 Eiffel Tower craft from Michaels.  The Tower was difficult to put together and collapsed with the slightest movement.  We had fun though!

We checked out "Crepes" by Suzette from our local library to go with the France theme.



What a delightful book.  We learnt a lot of French phrases and also tried Crepes with the recipe in the book.  I don't have any pictures of our Crepes, because we ate them before clicking some pictures!

Another delightful book that we read based in Paris.  This book is no longer available on Amazon, but here is a picture of the cover.  The author is Catherine Stock.

We also read "Suzette and the Puppy", a story based on a painting by Mary Cassatt.

Since "Madeline", the heroine has an appendectomy we had a lot of interesting conversations regarding taking care of our body.  We read a couple of books on the same topic.

Our Pumpkin Unit

We've been having a blast with our pumpkins that we bought for halloween.  Here is a glimpse of what we have been doing.

We got the free pumpkin lifecycle cards from here and have been working with those 3-part cards.

We also worked with this cute poem about pumpkins.  They offer a cute printable version of the poem and we just used that.

We also examined the pumpkin when we carved our jack-o-lantern.

Here are some of the crafts that we did with the pumpkin theme.  The first one is an easy one, I let D cut orange strips out of construction paper and tear it into bits.  Then she basically glued that onto a paper plate for the pumpkin body.  She drew and then cut out shapes for the facial features from black construction paper and stuck that on.  She then punched a hole and twisted a green pipe cleaner for the stem.  Easy, no mess project.

This is another one we did with a lot of help from me.  We basically stapled strips (cut by D) of orange construction paper onto a toilet paper tube to make this.  This was a cool center piece on our dining table for a week!

I did not get the parts of the pumpkin cards, since we already did something similar when we did our apple unit.  We did look and examine the insides of the pumpkin.  We also roasted the pumpkin seeds for a delicious snack!  We bought a mini pumpkin pie from our local store to enjoy for desert on one of the days!

This post is linked to Montessori Monday.

Halloween/Pumpkin activities on our shelves

Last week I had posted about the trays we added for M (18 mo old) in the school room.  D(4) had a lot of fun with M's trays! I made a few trays for D using the halloween and pumpkin themes.  Here are some pictures of what we have.

I added this pouring bugs(bugs from dollar tree) tray.  I found these cute small glass jugs at the dollar store too!

We did this skeleton puzzle last year too.  I added this to the shelf and D loved it and started working with right away.  Along with assembling the skeleton we also discussed the names of the bones.  This also tied in well with our Vertebrate work.

I made some black and orange play-doh made for some halloween fun!  Walmart had some halloween cookie cutters that I added to our ever growing collection of play-doh tools!

We are practicing counting by 5's.  We don't own bead chains, need to get those! We've worked on our hundred board, stamping using our dot marker.  I added this for additional practice.  I used a marker to write the numbers on the pumpkin picks and used a styrofoam block to stick it in.  I placed little dots to help her know where to insert the picks.

This next tray is NOT halloween themed, but I thought I would post about it anyway since it was on our shelves!  We are working on addition facts up to 10.  So I set some of our domino pieces (sum up to 10 only) and a bunch of part-whole circles.  D was free to use our Right Start Abacus if needed.  She started off using it, but eventually got the facts and never needed it.

We also made a lot of pumpkin/halloween crafts, but that is for another post!

Our unit on Vertebrates and Invertebrates

After the trays on Living, non-living I put together this unit on Vertebrates and Invertebrates. These are straight out of Karen's Albums. 

First you introduce to the child the concept of Vertebrates. For us we read these books on Vertebrates and Invertebrates and D was hooked. (Sorry, my Amazon affiliates widget is not working, so you will have to bear with only these pictures for now!)

The first tray is the concrete on Vertebrates. I used some animal replicas to represent all five groups.

Next is the abstract representation for Vertebrates.  I made these cards using google images.  I made these as three part cards, but for now I just put in the control cards for this tray. As you can see I included a picture of D for fun as "human".  D got such a kick out of this!

Next are the concrete and abstract for Invertebrates.

Once she is done working with these trays, I would mix up the contents and let her sort the vertebrates and invertebrates into their respective groups.  Also I would introduce the three part cards and let her work on these.  For now, this is how it is laid out in our shelf.