Friday, August 14, 2015

Classroom update (Earth Day and what we've been up to lately)

This post is a bit tardy, but better late than never, right?  With Earth Day being on April 22, we decided to touch on an entire Earth week within our normal classroom lessons.  Here is a quick recap of our Earth week.

Earth Day color pages.  You can grab this color page here.

We learned about wind power.  Green Science Windmill Generator by Toysmith (similar to the one below) to see how the wind can power certain electrical components.  

Our Kiwi Crate for the month was based on wind energy too, so it was perfect for the lesson plan we were on at the time.  You can grab one of these crates here!

  




We pushed paint around with the use of "wind power."  (A straw and blowing the paint)

We recorded the wind blowing outside the classroom by making wind barometers. 








Thanks to Kiwi Crate, we were able to incorporate this months' box of wind cars into our lesson.  Skylar made his wind car and tried it out on our windy day.  It also gave us a chance to review what kinetic and potential energy is and what they mean.









We made paper with wildflower seeds in it.  Skylar really enjoyed this craft and it gave him a good idea of where paper actually comes from.

We created some toilet paper/peanut butter/bird seed bird feeders.





PITA sat and watched as we strung cereal and our birdseed/peanut butter rolls in hopes we would drop something.





We planted cucumber seeds for Skylar to observe too.




Excited to see how they will grow each day and see how Skylar observes them growing.  Plus we added them to our outdoor garden once they were a good size to transplant into the ground.

We have also been up to reviewing for our state testing coming up in August.  Skylar is ready for it, but it never hurts to review of few things to keep them fresh in the mind.

A shot of our board lately.  

We love zombies in this house, so we did a study of a hypothetical scenario where zombies attacked.  This booklet can be picked up here.




For a craft, we painted canning jars as sun catchers.


These are just a few of the things we've done in the classroom the last few months.  Skylar is ready for his test in August and I can't wait to share what we have planned for the summer!  

  
If you don't follow my personal blog (South North South), you missed when we purchased a new school desk for the classroom.  The desk is from World Market (which I love their items so much) and we picked it up for less than $200.  It's a secretary desk and works perfect in our little space.