Friday, September 3, 2010

Weekly Wrap Up: Mission Moon

This week we've been working on all things Moon.  I must say my goal to be more project oriented has worked so far.
Don't those sort of/kind of look like the phases of the moon?  Maybe?
This week has been a lot of fun with science moving to the end of the day because it is so happily anticipated.  Well....that and the fact that it tends to last a long, long time (by T's choice).

Last week we started a moon journal.  The cloud cover has cooperated and T has been able to record each night's moon.

While we were on the phases of the moon, T made some Oreo moons.  Needless to say this project didn't last long.   I had lots of teens wishing they were studying moon phases on that day.
We talked about the surface of the moon and created our own craters with a pie tin, some flour with a fine mist of cocoa sifted over the top, and a marble (meteoroid).
T's meteoroid marble tossing.
That would be a "crater!"
We will be working on our Moon poster next week.  T is cutting out cardboard Oreos and using a glass to make her circles on white paper before cutting into the different moon phase shapes.

Of course, we did other fun things like learning how to round in math by going to Starbucks and adding the order for mental math (rounding was a big help then!).

After our recent trip to Alaska, T decided to not just gather state facts, but to write a paragraph about the beauty she witnessed.  I love how self motivated she was for that....I came home from the post office and she had taped it to the garage door for me to see!  It made me happy to my toes!

I'm still trying to figure out how to make grammar fun and exciting for both of us.  We are enjoying the Daily Grams (a big hat tip to Kris for putting that on our radar!)....but....well....a piece of paper kind of pales in comparison to the other hands-on learning we've been doing this week.  Any ideas?

How was your week?  Check out what everyone has been doing at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschooler's Weekly Wrap-Up.

Happy Labor Day!

8 comments:

  1. I was wondering what the moon phases in your first picture were made out of of...my kiddos would LOVE that project, and we will be studying the moon in science pretty soon!

    As for grammar ideas...I don't know of any hands on ideas, but there are some pretty cute books by Ruth Heller about different grammar topics :)

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  2. Love the Oreo idea! I'll have to remember that when we study Astronomy in a couple of years!

    As for grammar, I don't know how old your dd is, but could MadLibs be a possibility? I remember LOVING those when I was young!! I know it helped me learn my parts of speech, but I didn't even realize I was learning at the time!

    Also, I had who college professors who did pretty cool grammar assignments. One had us read through magazines to find an example of whatever type of sentence we were studying at the time (e.g., simple, compound, compound-complex), and the other had us (1) come up with a new word for each part of speech (for example, I think the pronoun I created was a word to use when you don't know the gender, like for an unborn baby) and (2) do "Grammar Notes" where we had to document 10 occurrences of people misusing the English language, analyze what was wrong with their words, and speculate as to why they made the mistake they made. I'm not sure if those ideas help you or not, but I hope there's something in there you can use or at least tweak a little! :)
    Blessings,
    Jennifer at trainingthemup.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  3. Awesome and wonderful! I've already reserved her preposition, noun, and verb books at our local library. Thanks!

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  4. What great ideas! See, I just wasn't getting creative. Thanks for the jump start. I needed it!

    T is 8 yrs old and we have done MadLibs in the past and she's enjoyed them (as in fits of giggles enjoyed them). I have no idea why I didn't already pull them out of my bag of tricks this year. Sheesh!

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  5. Oreos as moon phases = fabulous idea! (And yummy, too!)

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  6. Sounds like a fun week. The Oreos are cool! We are going to be using MadLibs for my son's grammar. We did one thing this week to help with parts of speech. Have the kids put Post-It notes on some "nouns" (of course, if they can put a post-it on it, it must be a noun!). Then, have them go around and write on the post-it a verb that the noun can do or that can be done to the noun. Do the same thing with adjectives. We stopped there, but you can also do it with adverbs. Winston Grammar is a grammar program that uses part of speech cards with worksheets to teach grammar. Some people really find it helpful. (My daughter hated it, but I think that's just her.)

    Have a great week!

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  7. Love the Oreo idea! I'll have to remember that when we study Astronomy in a couple of years!

    As for grammar, I don't know how old your dd is, but could MadLibs be a possibility? I remember LOVING those when I was young!! I know it helped me learn my parts of speech, but I didn't even realize I was learning at the time!

    Also, I had who college professors who did pretty cool grammar assignments. One had us read through magazines to find an example of whatever type of sentence we were studying at the time (e.g., simple, compound, compound-complex), and the other had us (1) come up with a new word for each part of speech (for example, I think the pronoun I created was a word to use when you don't know the gender, like for an unborn baby) and (2) do "Grammar Notes" where we had to document 10 occurrences of people misusing the English language, analyze what was wrong with their words, and speculate as to why they made the mistake they made. I'm not sure if those ideas help you or not, but I hope there's something in there you can use or at least tweak a little! :)
    Blessings,
    Jennifer at trainingthemup.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  8. Love the Oreo idea! I'll have to remember that when we study Astronomy in a couple of years!

    As for grammar, I don't know how old your dd is, but could MadLibs be a possibility? I remember LOVING those when I was young!! I know it helped me learn my parts of speech, but I didn't even realize I was learning at the time!

    Also, I had who college professors who did pretty cool grammar assignments. One had us read through magazines to find an example of whatever type of sentence we were studying at the time (e.g., simple, compound, compound-complex), and the other had us (1) come up with a new word for each part of speech (for example, I think the pronoun I created was a word to use when you don't know the gender, like for an unborn baby) and (2) do "Grammar Notes" where we had to document 10 occurrences of people misusing the English language, analyze what was wrong with their words, and speculate as to why they made the mistake they made. I'm not sure if those ideas help you or not, but I hope there's something in there you can use or at least tweak a little! :)
    Blessings,
    Jennifer at trainingthemup.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete

I love a discussion!