Today.. THE MOON!

The Moon. It's magnificent, it's magical, it's the source of many a poem, but the lad says "There's no bunnies or cats there!" (ergo in boy language...why bother learning about it).

We skimmed and picked our way through the last four days of Magnificent Moon. Day one is HERE. Since doing this study was NOT a hit with the lad (for the fore-amentioned reason) I thought picking and choosing what we did would be more beneficial to him learning something. This is something that I LOVE about Amanda Bennett's studies. They are SO easy to pick and choose from. Seriously... if I don't want to study tides.. I don't have to and it doesn't affect the integrity of the rest of the units. If I want to amaze my lad by showing him that the moon is sometimes orange/red or sometimes blue and sometimes it's hiding...I can do that! It's all good.



So today we looked at moon colours, we followed moon trees around the USA, we located the different moon landings and had a ton of fun zooming in and out on google maps with those landing sites. We found the "bunny in the moon", and found out that the moon gets colder than colder and hotter than hot. We had a hoot building our two stage rocket and even more fun learning about eggs and gravity. We watched interesting videos, went to a whack of different websites, and thought hmm... that looks like an interesting experiment... Which I would list here...but my computer is being stupid and I'm borrowing hubby's so that will have to wait.

our two stage rocket. Take two balloons, one paper cup with no bottom, and voila...a two stage rocket.
Learning about gravity

should mention that I made a point of boiling the eggs first
I have a five year old.
Eggs, water, gravity = mess
therefore boiled them. still had a mess, but not a goopy one! :)

Oh... and while the boy was playing trains (which is what he really wanted to do instead of take part in homeschool) I read every single one of the moon books we got out of the library to him. He would stop once in a while and ask questions. We found some of the old stories from different countries funny about how they thought the moon came to be. We know the truth... GOD made the moon and the sun. They mark the seasons, and light the day and night. But "the stories are funny mommy" or "That's wrong mommy". I know buddy, but sometimes people don't want to believe that God can do it all, so they make up stories to explain things in ways that makes sense to them. AND sometimes they don't know the truth and they have to learn it.

We haven't finished our painting of the moon craters yet. Need to find the paint first! (what can I say, renovating issues)!

This overall is what we studied.
Day 1: What Exactly Is a Moon?
Day 2: Getting to Know the Moon
Day 3: The Story of the Moon
Day 4: Science Secrets of the Moon
Day 5: Cool Things About the Moon

These unit studies come ready to use. Copy and paste into your word processing program OR just print as is. It's all good. Colouring, drawing, writing, thinking, laughing, it's all part of this study. Enjoy it! For despite the lack of bunnies or cats...we had some good learning going on today. :)

Here's the link to the post on the books we used for this study.

And to think... you can do this too. Just go here and get it! :)


First of all, the Cabin Fever Fun Pack, which includes Magnificent Moon, Winter Wonders, Expedition Canada, and Popcorn is currently on sale, and will be through 1/31/11 for $20 (regularly $28). The link for this product is: http://unitstudy.com/Cabin_Fever_Fun_Pack.html

Guess what... we are going a giveaway! The contest will run from 1/24-28/11, with the drawing at 9pm on 1/28. We will be giving away 2 standard Moon Maps from National Geographic, valued at $16.99 each. The link to the maps is: http://www.natgeomaps.com/moon.
Here's the link to the giveaway.

Just so you know, I got a free copy of this study so that I could give you my honest opinion of it. :)

Links

Human Body - lots of links on this page.

Valentines Day

Last Night's Experiment - Capillary Action

Last night we added food colouring in 8 different bottles: yellow, blue, green, red, orange, purple, light green, and blue green.

We added celery to each bottle.

We let them sit overnight.

This morning we took a good look at each of them.

This is our results in Justin's words.
blue-green - the leaves have colours in them mommy!
yellow - oh...it did nothing
orange - this one has nothing either mommy.
blue - it has blue dots on the top!
green -oh rabbit nuggets...this one has nothing mommy!
red - this one has dots mommy! See them!?!?!
purple - has dots on it mommy, but they are differenter then the water!
light green - nothing mommy

I hope you can see how the blue worked really one on this one.

I would like to try this experiment again using white carnations, see if that makes any difference in what happens.