The Solar System

We had a great time looking at the Solar System.

It all started with a few new books and a trip to the library of course...

We talked about the order of the planets from the sun and I made a little sun, moon and earth from felt so that we could enact the orbits singing:

"The earth turns round and round,

the earth turns round and round,

once a day every day, the earth turns round and round.

The moon goes round the earth,

the moon goes round the earth,

once a month every month, the moon goes round the earth.

The earth goes round the sun,

the earth goes round the sun,

once a year every year, the earth goes round the sun"

(I've seen this little ditty on several sites so I wouldn't know who to credit it to)

We did several activities...

We made glittery night time pictures

Stuck star stickers onto a star outline

Star and planet cellophane cookies

And matched our planet cards to colour our planets correctly.

(The colouring sheet is from www.coloringcastle.com. The planet cards came from Montessori Print Shop) 

Lamb had a lot of fun on the Nasa Website playing games and things and we visited the planetarium at Scienceworks which was fun for all of us!

There are tonnes of great You Tube clips one can watch too on Aurora Borealis, shooting stars and the like. 

Introduction to Geography

I am sure I'm not the only one who snapped up Karen Tyler's Geography album for free.

I have had several unit studies planned for the beginning on the year so I have just popped in the odd Geography activity to introduce the children to the concept more or less.

Lamb was very weirded out by me bringing dirt inside the house but really enjoyed playing with the compass and getting the felt continents map out again.

We drew our first cornmeal maps

This was by far the most fun. We drew a map of the house and I laminated it that night for the following day. Lamb chose one of his favourite cars, I hid it in the house then drew arrows he had to follow to find his car. We did it about six times and would have carried on and on!

Metamorphosis

Over the last couple of weeks the Winkles and I have been looking at metamorphosis.

I had collected a few 'shells' left behind by cicadas at the beginning of the summer so firstly we had a good look at those with the magnifying glass.

Then we watched a clip of David Attenborough's about the life cycle of cicadas.

Here is the link if you want to check it out on Youtube

I made up some cards for the lifecycle of the cicada by doing a google images search

And once they were used to the terms that were in the life cycle we picked up some books from the library and I expanded our little chart to include pictures of ladybugs, butterflies, house flies and grasshoppers to cover the difference between complete and incomplete metamorphosis.

(For those who aren't sure: grasshoppers and cicadas have an incomplete metamorphosis from egg to nymph to adult while the others are complete going from egg to larvae to pupa to adult)

Here they are deciding on which picture comes next from the assorted ones I printed and laminated.

They both really enjoyed the activity!