Satori Smiles

I’m joining the “Yes! We Did Science!” Friday bloggers, as an incentive for everyone to do science more. To see other homeschoolers blogging about their Science Friday, click the image below.

We actually started this on Tuesday of this week to learn about the respiratory system. Using R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey, we did a Lab Activity where we measured Satori’s breath after different activities, just like we did when we learned about the circulatory system.

We read a few books on respiration.

Satori filled out her breathing chart.

We compared it to our Circulatory Chart where we did the same activities. I now see I should’ve used the same colors, but you can see they aligned up for the most part.

Today (Friday) we did the second RSO Lab on respiration was to make a 10-foot Giant with four major parts: Nose to inhale/exhale, lungs, heart, and a foot for walking.

David was the Giant who inhaled and exhaled. Satori acted as a little red blood cell. She moved the red counters (oxygen) around, through the nose as Daddy inhaled, down the trachea, to the lung, to the heart, down to the foot, dropped off the red blood cell, picked up a blue disc (carbon dioxide), went back up to the heart, and to the lungs. Then the Giant exhaled, so the blue carbon dioxide went up the trachea tube, and out the nose. We did this cycle five times, so Satori got a great workout!

That was just a warmup!

Earlier today I ran across a free download on Ellen McHenry’s Basement Workshop page called the Circulation Game. The target age group is 8-14, but I knew Satori and our whole family would have fun with it. It took maybe an hour to print off on cardstock, tape the back together, color it with markers, make the spinner, and all the other little game pieces. Here it is all finished and on the floor! (You can click the image to see it larger.)

It combines many body systems – circulatory, respiration, digestive and even skeletal systems, and demonstrates how they all work together. Here is the game setup before we started, the Sugar & Protein (food) is in the intestines, and CO2 and waste are in the hands, feet, and head.

Satori and David were Team Orange and I was Team Green. Satori took a spin on our spinner. This was printed on cardstock, colored, laminated, and the arrow was fastened with a brad. It spun perfectly!

The number you land on specifies a move through the circulatory system, and with a 20 you can get pretty far. To generate your red blood cells, you start from your femur bone, as your bone marrow produces blood cells. From there, your red blood cell marker can go up to the lungs to pick up oxygen (O2), then off to either the feet/hands/head to drop off oxygen and pick up CO2, and then back to the lungs to drop off the CO2. You could also select a Sugar&Protein to travel to the feet/hands/head, drop off, pick up Waste, and then travel all the way to the Kidneys. All this time, you have to follow the arrows through your arteries and veins, making a fun twist through the heart’s aorta artery and Vena Cava vein.

The game was amazingly fun for the family! David and Satori won, by just a little. They got all the oxygen and food to the right places, and all the CO2 and Waste to the right places first. Here is how the game looked once we were all done.

Today we finished the 100th lesson of First Language Lessons, which concludes Level 1 (Grade 1 equivalent) of the First Language Lessons grammar program. As I mentioned earlier, this program moves slow, but does an excellent job in getting the grammar-stage child to memorize important grammar terms, as well as memorize poetry. So we started moving at an accelerated pace, sometimes 5 lessons in one day.

Here’s our latest poem Satori memorized. I hope to get her on video saying all the poems she’s memorized. For now, we made this page with the poem, and Satori drew a picture. The girl understandably, has blushing cheeks, as she blames a dropped plate on “Mr. Nobody”. The squeaking door is also there, left for Mr. Nobody to oil.

Today we reviewed our fourth type of sentence, the Exclamation! Satori had a giggling fit when Mama demonstrated various exclamations to express excitement, surprise, fear and anger. We then drew a few sentences on our little whiteboard, remembering to add the exclamation point!

We look forward to continuing to use First Language Lessons Level 2, and my plans are to use it 2-3x a week, and do as many lessons that fits in a 10 minute period. I expect us to do 1-2 lessons at a time, but if they’re over in less than five minutes, we’ll add another lesson if I think Satori can handle it. In FLL 2, we’ll go into more depth with verbs, as well as learn about adjectives, conjunctions, adverbs, prepositions, and much more. We’ll memorize more poetry and do picture narrations on fine art. I have downloaded the new First Language Lessons 2 in PDF version which is easier to read than the 2003 book that combined the first two years.

We’re also adding a new grammar program, Growing With Grammar, that will give Satori more practice in writing instead of just copywork.

This project is from Artistic Pursuits – The Way They See It book, which is their Pre-K book. I’m going to try and finish it this month so we can move on to their other three books for K-3.   For this project, we took visual notes on trees we observed in nature. So we headed out of our house to find the right tree.

We only have Lodgepole pines and Aspens to choose from, and I happen to think the lodgepoles are ugly, so we headed out to an Aspen grove.

First we did some bark rubbings.

I did not plan on participating, simply photo-documenting the experience.

Then some leaf rubbings. We used Prismacolor Art Stix for the rubbings, which are perfect for large areas of color.

We used Derwent watercolor pencils for the actual drawing. I love these pencils!

We found a natural bench to sit on and sketch the trees around us.

Here’s Satori’s picture, she couldn’t resist drawing herself in the picture.

And I couldn’t resist quickly joining in on drawing a tree at the last moment.

Nor could I resist taking one more picture of our little tree-hugger!

Here’s a few photos from Sunday morning. The first thing Satori wants to do in the morning is write a letter to Daddy. She’s the little speck in the middle of this photo. We never used this area in our house until just the past few weeks. A few tables and chairs with art/writing supplies make a big difference. We’re calling this room our Atelier.

Satori is eager to learn cursive and even though she’s only learned 6 letters so far, she tries her best to write some of her notes in cursive.

It’s interesting to see what she’s picked up just by examining random cursive examples she’ll find on packaging, books, etc… She would fly through her handwriting book if I let her, but I want it to last a bit longer!

We set a few extra tables and inexpensive rolling office chairs so Daddy and I can join in on the fun. Here we did another of our family puzzles. This is the kind with three different size pieces I mentioned earlier. Satori finished the huge and the medium size parts of the puzzles before Daddy and I could finish the one tiny piece section!

Reading has been our number one priority this past year. We’ve been using Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading as our main reading/phonics program. I chose OPG as I wanted a very systematic way to go through all the phonics, and it was just the most thorough program I could find. I even started pronouncing some of the tougher words correctly after going through this! For example, I always pronounced “cordial” with a d, not a j sound. Even though I was taught phonics when I grew up, I don’t think it was as complete as this. Combined with our spelling program, I just see words in better clarity now (if that makes sense).

There are 231 lessons, although we did the first 30 lessons in one day. Satori had learned all her letter sounds in one evening by watching the  Letter Factory DVD. So we got to breeze through the first section, as she could already read/spell CVC words. So that leaves 200 lessons that we did one lesson per day, so it took us 14 months to complete the book. I think it was designed to take a few years. The last lessons were tough, we took two days per lesson to finish the last section, which consisted of 7-syllable words. This is one of the shorter pages from these last few chapters. Talk about tongue twisters for a 5 year old girl!

And our final lesson – a fourteen syllable word!

One of my next posts will talk about what we’ll be using next for our reading lessons – Beyond the Code. I talk about the good and bad for our experience this month with it.

This morning over breakfast, Satori asked if I knew what “I’m at the end of my rope” means. I asked her where she learned that phrase from. She then brought me the little vocabulary flip-books we just started using last month. This phrase was in one of the books.

I saw these little flip-books at a local Barnes and Noble and knew that they would be a hit at our house. I purchased from Amazon and used their 4-for-3 and started out with the Vocabulary Power Grade 1 and Raining Cats and Dogs idiom book. Satori is so thrilled with them! She even tried packing them with us on our summer vacations.

They are little flip books that stand up by themselves, each book contained 200 words selected by professional language specialists for the specified age. They’re cute and colorful and fun to use. We’ll definitely be getting Grade 2-3! There is only one idiom book, so we only flip to a new page a few times a week, while the First Grade 1 we flip over everyday.

The past few days I’ve been taking photos of a few of Satori’s stories, poems, journal entries and even instructions. Here’s a few, just to demonstrate how much she loves to write at age 5.75. I hope she keeps this up! I am looking forward to kicking it up a notch for our grammar and writing this fall.

We received a letter from our penpal today, and Satori rushed off to write her back a letter. She wrote a letter, and then asked if she could send her a song. I said sure, you’ll have to write down the words like a poem. So she did! While singing her song the entire time…  A lovely summer scene while nighttime approaches…

We are going to be learning how to write a poem down on a page soon, so I’m looking forward to seeing future poems from Satori.

Did I mention she spends half her day writing stories? She’s got one wrapped up as a birthday present for me – “Barky the Dog”.

Today she is working on “The Scary Night” (her title is spelled “sceiry” but she has since learned how to spell “scary”).

She still writes in her Bird Journal. Here is her notes on the Pgymy Nuthatch. Yesterday she wrote about the Great Blue Heron.

Here’s another – “Egypt’s gods and Tut” by Satori. I don’t think I knew how to spell Egypt when I was five years old. Come to think of it, I didn’t even know what Egypt was at that age!

I am glad she is retaining her history studies, we studied this way back in early spring. Here King Tut prays to Horus, Isis and Anubis.

Blue Bairy Intrukcins count as writing too!

Our RSO science lab this week was to make blood! Ask someone what blood looks like, and they’ll probably say a red liquid. But blood is made of different components, and this activity shows us the main components of blood. Below we have everything measured and prepared. Our light corn syrup will be our plasma (1/2 c), the red hot candy the red blood cells (1/2 c), dry lima beans the white blood cells (5 pieces), and the dry lentils as the platelets (1 T).

Red Hot Candies were very hard to find, so I settled for generic hot cinnamon candies I found in Target’s bulk candy section. Of course we had to get a few jellybeans while we were at it, we rarely eat candy, so this was kinda fun.

Pouring the Plasma!

After mixing it all up, our final blood mix! All those red blood cells are what makes our blood look so red.

Topside view.

Satori knew about blood already because she’s fascinated with the human body, but this was helpful for her to also remember what roles plasma and platelets perform in the blood. She colored and labeled this diagram.

After the activity, she also drew her own blood model, and she remembered to include all the parts.

Found this lying on a table folded up, and found the money inside… Curiosity prompted me to open it. Click for more detail.

Looking at it with an analytical perspective (I never correct to Satori these things she does for fun), most words are spelled correctly, except for “dear”.  One backwards “D”. Sentences have proper end marks. One sentence fragment. One apostrophe is correct, one is out of place. Pretty good for not going over most of this stuff yet for a 5 year old.

Look for a new letter we’ll be sending out soon Gramy! You’ll even get to splurge on something.

This weekend also marked our very first foray into our new art enrichment program, Meet the Masters! Satori and David had been coloring on the living room floor, so I snuck a laptop in front of them and started playing the lesson. This program is online, so we watched both the Preview and van Gogh Unit lessons. This viewing was Step 1, and we loved the lesson and enjoyed listening to “Starry, Starry Night” by Don McLean. (music and video shown at end of this post)

Step 2 of our van Gogh lesson explored texture and had a few worksheets in the Downloadable Art Packet for Satori to practice drawing texture.

Step 3 is the Create a Masterpiece Art Activity! We used van Gogh’s technique of using little line dabs to make texture, and made our own starry night.  We used black construction paper (actually sulphite) and used oil pastels. The oil pastels really stood out upon the black paper.

The whole family made their own artwork, and we had a print of Starry Night propped up in front of us. (This is our new Art Appreciation binder I made a few days ago).

Here’s Satori’s Starry Night masterpiece!

We used the directions for Track A, Year 1 ages 5-7. There are two other levels you can use if you have older children, so you can get a bit more sophisticated. For Track A, there are age levels of 5-7, 8-9, and 10-adult.

Satori turned around and made another picture, she wanted to draw birds flying on a landscape.

It actually reminded me of Vincent van Gogh’s painting “Wheatfield with Crows”, although I don’t think Satori ever saw it. Now I have it up as a desktop wallpaper on the kitchen computer. We have various van Gogh painting as wallpaper on all our computers now.

Vincent’s story was very sad and tragic, but we loved learning about his life and his passions and sorrows.

Lyrics and explanation found here. An alternative YouTube video without the depressing text at the end is found here.

We are now seeing van Gogh’s paintings everywhere! Now that we studied him in just this initial lesson, we can’t miss his unmistakable art techniques, colors, and subjects. This is exactly what I wanted in starting an Art Appreciation program!

I have a bunch of read-alouds and other activities that we’ll do the next few weeks to continue with our van Gogh study. Meet the Masters only has 7 units, so we could easily whip through the entire first “year” in just a few months. We loved our first lesson, but I’ll have to find ways to slow it down by doing this more slowly, and adding our own fun supplements.