Yellow Ball

This was our first long weekend since we started homeschooling a month ago (gasp! can't believe it's been a whole month!). Since Labor Day was Monday, we didn't start our week until Tuesday. This week's book was Yellow Ball by Molly Bang. It was a really pleasant surprise. The artwork in the book was very pretty but the story was basic, one word per page basic, so I feared it would be hard to keep him engaged. The simplicity though allowed a lot more room for activities than I would have thought!

We started this week off with an experiment called "Hopping Corn". This experiment used yellow food coloring, baking soda,vinegar, popcorn and when you mix it just right, the corn begins to hop on it's own. Our corn hopped and looked like a lava lamp for an hour! We discussed solids, liquids, and gasses and how they are all forms of matter. We also discussed how they can move differently and also make each other move- like rain in a cloud or popcorn that hops because of gas.

We also discussed what the word interpretation means. We used the cover of our book and made our own interpretation of the cover. This was special to me because he really took his time to make it his own but loved looking at the cover for a guide. It was fun to observe his mind working and figuring out how he could make his similar.

The following day, we read our story again and were careful to notice the artwork on each of the pages. It really is a beautiful book. We then used play dough to form balls and build with toothpicks. We were going to make our balls yellow, but of course, we were all out of yellow play dough! We choose green. We made balls with our hands and learned that they are called spheres. We then made some balls with our hands and smooshed them flat and we already knew these were called circles. This was fun. We did this for a while before we ended up making pizzas with our play dough- haha.

Then, we squeezed in some more work on our letter S. These are hard for us but we really want to get confident in it, considering there are two S's in Silas! He will do it with help but on his own still makes him nervous! We also worked on Y this week. We made a big Y and a little y out of yarn- and yep, you guessed it our yarn was blue because we were out of yellow! haha

Our last day on the Yellow Ball was packed with learning because he was especially into school this day. We opened with reading our book. We recalled our discussion on matter and talked about how a force is necessary to move objects. We talked about that in the book the storm was the force that moved that yellow ball all the way across the sea. We decided to reenact this, but again our ball was not yellow, because the one we found was blue. Silas moved the ball across our sea by creating wind! We also stirred the water to make it choppy and saw that water can be a force to move an object too. We then made guesses if we put the wall under water would it come back up or stay down...what if we pushed it really hard? Each time it came up and we learned the reason why is because of gravity.

We also used our cars later and discussed how one car could move the other car if it pushed it enough. After all of this, we decided to watch the storm episode of the Magic School Bus and learn more about what happens in a storm. Then we made our own storm with construction paper and paint.

And mom squeezed in some more handwriting! Look how serious. The next week we are taking off because daddy has a few vacation days so we are spending time as a family of four before Ruby hits the scene in the next few weeks!