The whole Sun week started when we got out to the car after gymnastics and the car was HOT! I had forgotten to roll down the windows and everything was burning. I had to let it air out for a few minutes before I’d even strap the kids in. So Zachary started asking HOW it got that hot. I could explain it fairly well, but Zachary decided he wanted to know more, so we headed off to the library to find lots of books. We found more on temperature than how the SUN affects things specifically, but it worked out.
This was another “FINISH UP ZACHARY’S 1ST GRADE CURRICULUM” week. So most of the SUN things are simply BOOKS that teach awesome things about how the Sun affects our earth. Little bit about temperature, etc.
Experiment!
We MADE a Solar Oven! How cool is that! (Or should I say HOT!…. yeah, I’m punny…. you gotta forgive me, I watch too much M*A*S*H).
We got the idea BOTH from Steve Spangler, AND from one of the books we got. My (almost) 2 year old has become obsessed with Curious George, so when our lovely library lady found a Curious George Book about the Sun, we were required to take it home, and read it about 1,000 times!
At the end of the story, they have several kid-safe experiments that you can try. This was one of them. AND it suggested s’mores…. who can resist s’mores?!?!
Got to Cutting, Taping and Stretching (which I promptly forgot to take pictures of).
And Set our Solar oven out in the sun to start baking those squishy marshmallows and melting the chocolate into gooey squares of awesome.
(There are 4 of them in there)
My cat Montrose had to inspect them.
Fortunately there is Plastic wrap over everything so no kitty hairs (or tongues) invaded our snack.
We also set some in the car to test the theory that you could use the car as a solar oven since it gets hot.
(It worked better than the solar oven we made because it was already hot!)
mmmmmmm s’mores!
So, this is probably my favorite because it wasn’t only educational, it was TASTY TOO!
Skip Counting
We had a lot of fun with MATH this week. That’s what we did, we focused entirely on MATH so I could make sure he actually knew everything he needed to know so I started off with all the skip-counting I could think of.
This one worked because (while we weren’t do thing dinosaurs as our study) he’s still obsessed with dinos.
I was getting SUPER frustrated after a while, because we couldn’t get past 8 on skip counting, THEN I remembered, ZACHARY IS AN AUDITORY LEARNER! Doh! So, I made a little song that skip counts, and voila, it totally worked, he started skip-counting like a pro in no time.
We moved on to Skip counting Word Problems!
That worked beautifully. So when I did the Final “Skip counting by 2” exam, he was pretty happy to have done it perfectly.
Seriously, I you don’t already have a white-board in you home-school tools bag, GET ONE, they’re amazing!
Regular Math
One of the last things I had to do to make sure he was actually doing all his first grade stuff properly, was to do just have him do some math. I made a set of single-digit math problem flash cards using 3×5 cards (because I couldn’t find a set that I really liked that had all the problems I wanted), and used them both as flash cards, and as a “randomizer” when making his worksheets.
He was pretty pleased with himself when he got all of them right the first time with no help from mom or anyone else.
Books!
Curious George Discovers the Sun
This book was EXACTLY what we wanted. Zachary wanted to know how the sun made things hot, and this book was perfect. It also talks about Solar Panels and how we can harvest the energy from the sun. The only thing it didn’t really cover was how Plants also use the energy from the sun. But I didn’t get a book that did that, so I can’t be too disappointed with the George book. Both my kids LOVED it!
Temperature: Heating Up and Cooling Down
This was a good overview book. It told about how heat transfers from one thing to another and how conductors help it travel and insulators trap the heat. It did it all in language that small people can understand too.
After you talk about how the Sun is a GIANT BALL OF FIRE, you can’t NOT talk about fire and the energy it makes, so this was a good book for that. Its in the same series as the previous book.
This one is another book that’s full of kid-friendly experiments. Most of them are pretty easy and don’t require too many supplies to pull off. it was fun to look through and do some of the experiments.
Hope you have fun with your kids.
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