U.S. Government

We want to know

-why do we have a government?
-why do they put stamps on papers?
-why do you have to give money to them
-why do they do that kind of work

What we did
Song
"Preamble of the Constitution"
we learned it with School House Rock

We the people of the United States,
In order to form a more perfect union,
Establish justice, insure domestic tranquility,
Provide for the common defense,
Promote the general welfare and
Secure the blessings of liberty
To ourselves and our Posterity
Do ordain and establish this Constitution
for the United States of America.

Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_were_the_words_of_the_preamble#ixzz1E2whAuUP

Set up a government at our house

Three branches of our government

legislative- Livi, Ezra, and Noah

executive- Dad

judicial- Mom

The kids made laws
1. drink milk with breakfast or you will have to stay upstairs for an hour doing nothing
2. everyone has to wear socks for three days or they will have to eat for an hour
3. if they teetor totter every morning they will have to smell a stinky sock
4. everybody has to wake up early, whenever the first person wakes up, everybody else does too, or they will have to count to 130
5. every Saturday you have to exercise, or you have to hold your breath
6. wear socks all day and night for one week you will have to get covered with a blanket for one minute
7. be nice or you'll have to wear a hat for an hour or go in jail for 20 minutes
8. you have to go outside everyday or you'll get spanked by the president

-Mike vetoed numbers 1 and 6.

-He signed numbers 3, 7 and 8

-He changed number 2 to say- Everyone has to wear socks at least once in three days or they will have to eat for an hour.

-He changed number 4 to say everybody has to wake up early, whenever the first person wakes up, everybody else does too, or they will have to count to 130 sometime during the day.

-He changed number 5 to say, every Saturday you have to exercise, or you have to hold your breath for 20 seconds. The kids went back and changed it 15 seconds.

After the changes he signed them all. Next step enforcing them and going to court for disobeying.

Court Cases

-Sammy, Ezra, and Noah teetor tottered

-all of the kids woke up later than me on Wed

Math, Cutting, Creating

we made U.S. flags. I printed the stars. The kids cut them out and counted them as they glued them on to the blue paper. We cut stripes with white, red, and orange paper. We ran low on red. They counted the stripes as well and placed them correctly.

U.S. Flag to print and color

http://www.internetfamilyfun.com/images/ameriflagcolorprint.gif

Good Websites for teaching about the U.S. and government

http://bensguide.gpo.gov/k-2/index.html

We Learned

Ezra- congress makes the laws, then the laws go to the president, he saw if he wanted those laws, he gets rid of some, changes some, and keeps some, he gives them back to congress to change, you have to talk to the judge if you break the law

we elect a president by voting, the constitution is the document of the rules and laws, the preamble says we should stay together, we should obey the laws

Owls

We Want to Know
-if the little owls really know how to fly

-why they are here on earth

-maybe I have saw an owl and I might see one if I did not see one, they might look cool, I might recognize it, or I might not
-how do they talk

-how do they say their sound

What We Did

Poem

"There Was An Owl"
http://www.101kidz.com/poems/birds1.html
There was an owl
Who lived in an oak.
The more he heard,
The less he spoke;
The less he spoke,
The more he heard-
We all should be
Like that wise old bird

http://www.dltk-kids.com/animals/mhandprintowl.htm

http://www.dltk-kids.com/t.asp?b=m&t=http://www.dltk-kids.com/animals/image/bshapesowl.gif

http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/animals/creaturefeature/snowy-owl/

Writing

question words: who (owl sound), what, when, where, why

Ezra read and wrote them

Math, Cutting, and Coloring

Identify the shapes of the owl cut out. Color, cut and assemble the owl.

Owl (needs hand cut outs)
Print This


Print This
Print the bottom two images and get a blank piece of paper to trace the kids hands and add them as wings.


Story

"The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" Amazon mp3 download, we chose this because of owl in the stories. It's really cute. It has a lot of classic Pooh Bear stories and songs.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00138D17M/ref=s9_simh_gw_p340_d0_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=124RCD3D37BNNX6Y0H70&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846

We Learned

Snow Owls- male hunts, they catch their food with their claws, they are the bird of prey that can live in the Arctic year round, they can fly well at 6 weeks old

Chess

What we want to know
-why people play
-why kings go diagonally
-when it started
-why do they have little people

What we did
Poem
"The Famous Chess Poem"
by Ashley & Ezra
Sing to the tune of "Farmer in the Dell"

You must protect the king
You must protect the king
The object in the game of chess
Is to protect the king

The queen is powerful
The board she moves across
She chooses her direction
To lose her would be a loss

Bishops move diagonally
Sometimes from far away
The like to help protect the king
So don't get in their way

Knights attack in L's
Be sure to count your moves
1 then 2 or 2 then 1
Will get them in their groove

Rooks move in straight lines
The start of at the ends
Do your best to keep them safe
They are the king's friends

Pawns move step by step
Their first move can be two
If they make it to the other side
They become a queen too

Game
Played chess every day. Ezra beat me on Friday. I helped him, but only by saying, "are you sure? you can get me, look at all your pieces, etc."

Writing
Ezra sounded out and wrote the names of each piece. He drew arrows to indicate the direction they go. He also drew a picture of the piece

Math
We rolled the dice and added or multiplied the numbers. Ezra loves to multiply. He draws groups with tick marks and adds them up.

Reading
Noah is sounding out the letters pretty well and blending the sounds really well.

Checkers

We want to know
-how checkers are made
-how do they find the cardboard
-how they can fly, but they can't fly
-who made up the game?

What we did
Poem
"Playing the Game"
Life is a game with a glorious prize,
If we can only play it right.
It is give and take, build and break,
And often it ends in a fight;
But he surely wins who honestly tries
(Regardless of wealth or fame),
He can never despair who plays it fair -
How are you playing the game?
http://www.apples4theteacher.com/holidays/graduation/poems-rhymes/playing-the-game.html



Drawing
Ezra drew a checkerboard. He learned how to make the board using long lines. We played on it. He counted the boxes and colored it correctly.

Played Checkers
we played Checkers or Chinese Checkers at least once day

We Learned
There is a huge checker board that you have to walk across. The pieces are so big that they look like they're already kinged
The longest checker game took 7 hours and 30 minutes

Frogs

We want to know
how long are their tongues? how they jump, how far can they jump in inches or feet? how can they go to the store and buy cake? how they go up into the mountains, how they open the cake and eat it, if frogs can push a car with just one frog, if they can live a cold, cold, cold, place or a hot, hot, hot place, or just in the middle, how frogs can see inside the water without goggles, how they fight in the water

What we did
Song
"Five Little Speckled Frogs"

bullfrog- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXqK5QulbJ8&NR=1&feature=fvwp
http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/animals/creaturefeature/american-bullfrog/

Lifecycle Coloring
http://www.kidzone.ws/lw/frogs/images/froglifecycle.gif

Wordsearch
http://www.dltk-kids.com/animals/m-wordsearch-frogs.htm



Sammy's frog birthday
We went swimming at the Legacy Center for Sam's birthday. I made him a frog cake and we had a movie party at home.

What we learned
-bullfrogs can eat a bird, snake, crab, and other frogs
-strawberry frog, it carries it's tadpoles on it's back and puts it in a little bit of water and puts every egg in water in one tree, then she goes to check on them and gives each one an egg
-leaf frogs blend into the leaves so you can't see them, you can only see the leaf, it's likes it's invisible
-an adult frog's tongue is 12 inches long
how do they catch their food? they blend in, sneak up then jump up catch it with their tongues and use their hands.
-wood frog- can live in the cold, he hibernates, his whole body can turn to ice, when it gets warmer he thaws out and comes back to life
-they like to be awake at night because it is more humid, they need their skin to be wet so they can stay alive. They breathe through their skin, so they need it to be moist.

Wood

What we want to know
-how many bird houses can a man make in day
-could man build a big house if a transformer got all the wood
-how did wood get so strong
-if you took some water and built up rocks and fold them in the wood and gather them and piece that little piece of ice cream then they throwed the rocks in the lake, then
would the snow go on the wood?

What we did

Poem
How much wood could a woodchuck chuck
If a wood chuck could chuck wood

how paper is made- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGH7kQ30SKo
how toilet paper is made- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrg_6dny6Po

Made Paper


We collected scraps of paper, toilet paper, and cardboard and tore them up into little pieces. We blended them with water, drained them on a screen and baked it in the oven. Noah and Ezra drew pictures on it.

Ezra's picture


Noah's picture


Math
We played baseball. The boys took turns and tracked their hits and misses. We counted and added them up at the end.

Writing
Ezra collected all of the wood items he could find in the toy room and wrote a list by sounding them out. He did a pretty good job.

Story of a Tree
Ezra drew a stump of a tree with eight rings making it eight years old. Here is the story he wrote about it.
This tree was planted in the forest. It is a peach tree. There are peanut, apple, pear, and orange trees around it. It's as tall as a big transformer. We get 100 peaches from it every year. It has 100 branches so it can carry all the peaches. They sell the peaches for money in Africa. They grow them in Italy and sell them, then they sell them, then they sell them until they get to Africa. Then they have money which they use to buy more fruit and dogs at the pet store. An eight year old boy takes care of the tree. The boy named the tree Soft Peach. The wood can make 109 wood.

Read "The Walnut Tree" The story of the pulpit of the conference center
story
http://www.sugardoodle.net/Conference%20Center/The_Walnut_Tree.shtml
picture http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_e1hQ3qa9H2U/SBaJ50zWlI/AAAAAAAAAK4/J3h2xZnpkD8/s320/pulpit.jpg
Summary
Ezra- There was a tree in President Hinckley's yard that was so tall. He went to the bank and told them we need to cut it down. People wanted to make money off it and put it in the news. They found someone else to do it. Then they made a pulpit, boxes for the kids and pens for the prophets

We learned
wood comes from trees, 4 billion trees are cut down every year for paper

how paper is made
Ezra- get wood and burn it and put it in a big fire, make it with water like oatmeal, then they get the water out, then roll it into big pieces of paper, then they cut it and wrap it

Uses for wood
Ezra- with wood we can make: pulpits, pens, birdhouses, robots, houses, little toy houses, puzzles, tables, banisters, boxes, doors, speakers, paper, handles of saws and hammers

Magazines

We want to know
-where the first artist made a magazine
-if magazine are useful to help you learn

What we did

Poem
repeat of the planet poem from last week

Made a magazine













It was fun making this with the kids. They thought up the words and helped with what they could. It was good writing and problem solving practice for them.

Made a collage of things we liked from magazines


Ezra made a page for everyone of things he thought they would like.

Looked up information on the history of magazines
the first magazine was "The Gentleman's Magazine" published in 1731 in London
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magazines

How magazines are printed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gEEaFT5z84