Ocean update

I just wanted to post about some of the work Q has been doing on her ocean unit.

So here is the food web that we created on the living room wall. Fred's actually been really nice about us hanging up school stuff all over the house. First paintings and drawings, then the time line, now this. What's next?

She had a really good time making this. First she went to enchanted learning and printed out the information sheets on like a dozen different ocean animals. I don't even know how many she finally printed out, colored, and then cut out. We used the information sheet to decide who eats whom and connected them with yarn. We worked on this for over two hours without taking a break and only stopped because M woke up from his nap and we had to eat lunch. Q was so into it she wanted to keep working on it even after "school" time was over. Which we did. It really came out great! She is really going to give me a hard time when it is time to take it down.

Q has been doing work on addition and subtraction with one digit numbers and we just introduced place value. She really likes using manipulatives especially the kind you can eat!

She is still working hard on her coral reef diorama. She happily showed me the star fish Dad made while I was at work and she can't wait until her clay coral and clownfish are dry and ready to be glued in. I'll put in pictures of this as soon as it is done.

Q used the "specimens" she collected at the beach to create her own beachcomber book like the book Out of the Ocean by Debra Frazier we read together. She took a picture of each item, printed the pictures out, stapled them together with a cover, and then wrote a short description of each one. It turned out really nice and although she won't admit it, I know she is proud of her work.

Today we finished learning about undersea explorers. Q researched Sylvia Earle and created a mini-book about her for her lapbook and we added the important people and inventions of deep sea research to our time line. My nephew stopped over the other day and I saw him looking around at the time line. In order to visually create the time space I wanted for the time line it stretches from our front door, down the bedroom hallway and back around to the back door. It took him a while to ask about it though, which was kind of funny. Q was so excited to tell him about the things on the time line. It was great hearing her explain about "Richard Trevithick who invented the modern locomotive in 1803" like she was an expert. Sometimes I think she just isn't getting it, but I guess something is getting in.