Weeks 26-27

The last two weeks have been kind of a mess.  Last Monday I took Emily to the doctor for allergies only to find out she also had strep throat.  A few days later the whole family had it and Emily had broken into a rash from head to toe due to an apparent amoxicillin allergy. We did manage to fit in some fun schoolwork though.  I was so excited about Pi Day that I pushed through with the activities I planned even though I lost my voice and had to whisper all day.

The girls were very excited about history this week.  We learned about the Crusades.  Emily surprised me by adding in all sorts of facts from books she's read on her own.

The girls made pilgrim badges.

A couple weeks ago they decided to start keeping track of all the different cars they see in a notebook.  They stuck with it for about a week, taking turns making tally marks of the cars while we were out.  I suggested they make a graph when they were finished.  Here's the end result.  Ford won by a landslide, but poor Mazda was sadly underrepresented, with only three sightings.

They learned a lot from this project.  Mainly how to identify each car by its symbol.

Pi Day! We did some pretty cool hands-on activities exploring circles and measuring circumference and diameter.  We also read Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi.
First we used string to measure the circumference of a circular object (of course, a pie).

Then we experimented to find out how many times the diameter could be measured by that amount of string (3 and a little more).  We tried the experiment on circles of different sizes, always coming up with the same answer.

My Side of the Mountain, our current read-aloud, tied in nicely with pi day.  The boy in the book is living in a tree six feet in diameter.  To demonstrate just how big that is, we measured out a six-foot piece of string, laid it on the ground, and took turns lying next to it.  Then Emily used a calculator to figure out the circumference of the tree.  I'm proud to say she figured out how to do it all by herself!  After that, we measured the circumference of a tree in our yard and used pi to find the diameter.  Then we compared the size of our tree with the tree in the story.  Huge difference! 

I ordered All About Spelling for Cami.  Emily finished level one when she was five and we both loved it, but for some reason we never got level two.