Week 1 MFW Adventures: Vikings and the Water Cycle

I am going to take a few minutes today to share our first week with my early elementary students. This year I am going to try to share our journey through My Father's World Adventures in US History with you.

 This week was FULL.

you can check out our classroom reveal HERE
and our curriculum  for 2014-2014 HERE
to give you a little more detail on where and what we are studying

Our first week was a bit less than I originally planned since most of us started the week sick. 
(And I did take a few less pictures than I originally planned.)
But that is pretty wonderful since when you home school you can alter it to be more restful and with a bit more snuggles and love. And I extended week one workload into the next, adding additional math and reading and that worked out so perfectly. 
 I may continue to spread out the base curriculum of MFW Adventures and Beautiful Feet early American History and take our time on some weeks, and not on others. I plan to be done by early summer, so I will see how that all works along the way.
I can promise you this blog will not share every little perfect moment, but will be an honest story of our learning.
very honest.
very real. 

so on to the sharing

 The weeks begin with our co-op Science Classes, Science Mondays, which we host here in our home. I am planning on creating units, most based off of the My Father's World Adventures in US History Curriculum suggestions. We will tackle quite a few basic science topics, so by the end of the year these children will have a good grasp on the sciences. I will share our basic overview and activities we completed each week, as well as fuller units, as I can. We have decided Science will only be done on Mondays and the remaining subjects and studies will be done the following days of the week. The only other required work on Mondays are reading (Bible and read-alouds) and household responsibilities, which were easily completed before science co-op began, so this frees up our afternoons on Monday for shopping and exploring.

One thing I really like about the My Father's World schedule is that this was easy to do. It leaves you room for adapting it to your family and rhythm. 

The Water Cycle 

We read
  The Magic School Bus Wet All Over: A Book About the Water Cycle  
by Patricia Relf
 A Drop Around the World by Barbara McKinney 

(While I read, the students were free to create water cycle bracelets)

You can find a great printout HERE to complete along with your bracelets.
yellow beads/bands to represent the sun and it's heat
silver/clear beads/bands to represent water vapor or evaporation
white beads/bands to represent the clouds or condensation
blue beads/bands to represent the rain or precipitation
green beads/bands to represent the land (plants and trees that use water)
 

Activities

homemade rain sticks

I created these simple "rain sticks" out of felt scraps, leftover twine and ribbons and a pack of craft dowels. I stitched up the felt clouds, stuffing them with a bit of batting and hot gluing them closed with the ribbon, twine and additional felt, showering down as "rain". I shoved the dowel up into the cloud before the hot glue completely dried. 
We loved using these with classical music to pretend we were rainstorms, having to freeze whenever the music stopped. No one wanted to stop playing this game.

homemade felt water cycle

I simply cut out some clouds, pieces for a river, a pond, a piece of blue to represent fog and several little rain drops.
(this was wonderful for a preschooler, too!)

 water cycle mobile craft

This was a pinterest find with no directions, but I easily figured it out and wanted to share how we created ours. We started with cut paper strips of blues and white and a sun, cut from yellow cardstock. We also gathered cotton balls, oil pastels, bakers twine and clothes pins.

Before we began we discussed what each part of the mobile represented. I labeled them here for you. We used the pastels to create rivers, rain drops, and evaporation. We glued on our cotton balls to represent clouds along the top of our water cycle. We hot glued all the pieces together to form a mobile. Lastly, we added our sun to the top with twine.  This was one of the favorite activities for this unit study!

and we also created
a paper plate water cycle, which we used for our mini muffin tin lunch. You can find many interpretations of this all over the web. Ours were very simple and basic. These were more used for teaching and quizzing in our case.

Experiments

 creating a rainstorm

I really enjoyed creating these with my littles. The shaving cream is soft and pillow-y looking like real clouds and the blue food coloring really did "rain" down through it!


creating a cloud

This might have been EVERYONE'S favorite experiment! You will need a glass jar, a lid, hot water, ice cubes, and matches. You will fill the jar about half full with very hot water and then cover with the lid. You will then fill the lid with as many ice as you can. Leave this for a couple of minutes. Grab a piece of dark cardstock or construction paper and place it behind your jar. This will help you see the cloud more fully. Next light a match and throw it in your jar and quickly close the lid. Wait about a minute or so and lift the lid to watch your cloud appear! This was something we did a few times! It was still fun to watch each time.

a closed Terrarium

 The cool thing about a closed Terrarium is that the water cycle happens inside the glass, meaning that you don’t have to water it. Once it’s made, it’s very low maintenance and you just get to enjoy it. We created these with small cactus plants that a local garden center donated to us for our project.

Supplies Needed:

• A lidded glass container. Anything with an air tight seal will work. I choose a quart sized canning jar.
• Small Rocks. We choose some from around our home.
• Activated Charcoal
• Soil. I sent one of my older children out to the garden to gather some for this project.
• Small Plants- succulents are best. We used a cactus plant. This was donated by a local greenery for our experiment.

I was very happy that most of this stuck within our guidelines of trying to use mostly what we have one hand for our schooling this year.

Assembly Instructions:
First we layered in some of the dirt, adding in the plant and additional dirt to cover the plant well.
Next, we added in some of the small rocks we found around the house.
We added in just a little of the activated charcoal to help our terrarium avoid mold growth.
Lastly, we added a tiny bit of water, and closed the top.
 If your plants start to droop and look dried out, open the jar and spray them with a small amount of water. Ideally, unlike our first attempt, when you close the jar that first time you will have added the right amount of water. This took a few tries for us to get it right. That did not change our excitement, though, when it finally worked!

We were able to see drops of condensation forming on the glass, and then getting heavy, and “raining” down on our plant.
It was fun to explain how the plant soaks up the water in its roots, then “breathes” with respiration, releasing the water (and oxygen) into the air, which then condenses on the glass and rains.

We created a full water cycle in one closed jar. 
and that was VERY exciting.



Snacks

 water cycle cups
(using canning jars we already had is both cost effective and cute)

this is simply blue jello and whipped cream

and a water cycle muffin tin lunch we had after class

 we used our spinners we made in co-op class to "spin for lunch"

accumulation: plain greek yogurt with blue sprinkles

evaporation: cottage cheese

condensation: mini marshmallows

precipitation: blueberries and shredded cheese
the sun: a clementine

extras you may enjoy

 watch "The Magic School Bus: Wet All Over" on youtube

and you can create a

A Water Cycle Flip Flap Book

Maps and Geography

We learned the Pledge of Allegiance this week, which my girls were pretty excited to share for our whole family. 

We briefly discussed maps before beginning to study Viking history.

I decided to have the girls create a "Me On The Map" to give them a better understanding of how maps can show very large areas and very small ones and how they fit into them.

Vikings

We completed Week One in MFW Adventures in US History and added in 

 most of the first 10 lessons in Beautiful Feet Early American History 
 

We have started off really loving combining My Beautiful Feet with My Father's World and I know we will learn so much about American History through both literature and hands-on activities.  I am absolutely in love with the readings and activities in both curriculum and I am so glad we are using them side by side, but in all honesty, you ONLY need one or the other. I personally like to take our time, really explore each subject as much as possible and by doing both I feel we are learning and enjoying so much more. 

We my continue to use both, or not, but it is nice to have Beautiful Feet to add, if we wish.

We also read The Story of U.S. book and began notebooking with Leif Erickson. 

And honestly I can see we have a LONG way to go.

Beautiful Feet has some of the best literature I have ever seen in curriculum and we are devouring it up as fast as we can. It is painful for us to stop reading each day as we cannot wait to continue on with the wonderfully written Leif the Lucky" by Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire.

It really helped complete our view of Vikings.

and the girls have so enjoyed working in their composition notebooks. I admit I was worried over this when we began and whether they would enjoy the coloring and copywork, but they have really enjoyed it.

I am not sure how often we will pull them out, but if we are working on a section of Beautiful Feet, we will for sure. Otherwise, we will just use our notebooking pages from My Father's World.

This Viking Ship craft really made the lessons come to life for us, as we acted them out together. The best part is since we used a quart carton, the boats really float. This was really hard for me, as I wanted to "take over" several times in the creating, which honestly was a bit more time involved than I originally thought when we started, but I am glad I did not step in more. By letting them create them it gifted them the joy and satisfaction of a job well done, which is far more important than a a "job done perfectly" or a "job done by mom". Perfect no, but honestly have not seen cuter viking ships before. 

(before we added the shields)

(and after)

I am thankful for recycled items all coming together for this sweet project! I had to smile when my third grader said how she had never made anything this special before! That made all the time and effort  and improvising worth it. Oh, and the extra cups of coffee I drank that day to use up that half and half for the carton. *wink*

If you want to make one of these little recycled viking ships yourself, here are some basic directions.

You will need:

• One quart container for two ships. I used a half and half container.
• ruler, pen
• Masking Tape
• Paint, we had to make brown out of red, yellow and blue paints, since we did not have brown, but wanted that color. You can mix that, too, by adding 3 parts red, one part yellow and one quarter part blue.
• 5 skewers
• one dowel, cut in half
• fabric scraps or paper for the sail
• paper, brown and plain white printer
• watercolors (optional)
• string or twine of any kind, if desired 

Directions:

The first thing you will need to do is cut your quart container in half lengthwise. Next, you will cover the sides of your container with masking tape. This will make it easier to paint.

You will use your brown paper to cut both a dragon head and tail for each boat. You will need two of each for each boat. You will attach these to your container with masking tape.

Now you will be ready to paint your ships. We choose brown, but you can use any colors, or even just leave the tan masking tape and use tan heads and tails. 

While the containers were drying we took that time to use watercolors and paint circles we cut out of white paper for the shields. 

We created oars out of skewers, and added them to the ships through punched holes, added little punched out ovals to the ends. We alternated the oar holes with the shields that all painted and dried.

Lastly, a sail was added. Ours was created with scrap fabric, dowels cut in half and rigged with twine. We kept it simple, but you could elaborate on this idea and make a working sail, if you wished to. 

also, we watched Veggie Tales Lyle the Kindly Viking and How to Train Your Dragon, just for fun to finish off our studies

We also have enjoyed playing this fun game that we found here.

"Viking Voyages"

Now on to Columbus... make sure you come back next week to see how we are adventuring!