We've been SUPER busy this year with Science (my favorite)! We started our year off learning about who a scientist is and what they do. We had some Steve Spangler fun then moved on over to gardening (my other favorite)! We started by learning about living and non-living things, then did some plant exploration with BrainpopJr.
We read (and sang) Are You Living and did some Living/Non Living activities in our science notebooks.
The next week we planted our seeds. We discussed what a plant needs in order to grow and live, talked about nutrients and soil requirements, and the proper spacing needed for plants to grow. We planted carrots, onions, broccoli, okra, and heirloom purple green beans. We logged our observations in a plant growth journal and will record our observations of it's growth for a whole month.
We talked about the parts of the plants and made a fun diagram which looks so cute hanging up in the class!
I plan on doing some recipes with my kids after our food comes in. I think this part is often missed when growing plants and vegetables with children and is such a key piece to the learning process. This summer I made a few recipes with my summer school kids.
I think it is so important to teach our children how to not only grow their food, but be an active part in what they make, and eat. Most of my kids had never eaten half of the vegetables I cooked/made but they said they would try it because they made it! It also got them eating healthy and being conscious of what goes into their bodies.
As I made the food, the kids recorded the process and ingredients and brought the recipe home to their parents. I promoted them making it at home with their family, although I'm not sure if any of them actually did or not.
Now we've moved on to learning about space, stars and the sun. We started by reading a book about the stars in the sky and discussed how there are BILLIONS of stars in the sky much bigger then our sun and how the small stars we see in the sky are only just a few of the really enormous stars we can even see. I was shocked at how easily my children picked up this concept. We then created our own night sky on black paper and tried to demonstrate how there are millions of stars so many we could never imagine seeing them. Some did better then others, but hey - they look great.
Next we learned about the sun and it's properties of heat energy and light energy. We watched a Brainpop Jr video then wrote down the facts about the sun we learned from a book and the video. They gave me some great facts to record. I wanted to demonstrate the heat energy the sun gives off (even when we can't see it), by using solar paper. They chose an item (some indoor items and some from outside), placed it on top of the paper for 10 minutes in the sun, then we took it inside and rinsed them and voila! Some came out really distinctly and others not some much. But they loved the experiment regardless!
We're going to do some smores cooking in a solar oven next week too. The weather has been absolutely crazy today, and it has literally down poured on and off every day for two weeks. So we're waiting for all this rain to go away - I mean really, we are the sunshine state…this is getting ridiculous.
After this we're going to dive into the topic of gravity, and how our orbit around the sun causes everything from seasons, to day and and night. This will transition us right into gravity and forces and motion. I absolutely love science and can't wait to share more with you! Hope this was helpful! :)
