Outer Space - Weltall

This is what happened after I completely failed a unit on stars for December. Well, maybe not "failed" but miscalculated. As in somehow I forgot December would be so busy I wouldn't have time to breathe, let alone do preschool justice.

So... this is what happened. And it's a lot.  And we're not done.

I now have a schedule for preschool/my day. 7:00 am - 9:00 wake up, breakfast, get dressed, make beds, etc. play. 9:00 Lukas goes down for a nap, school time for the kids. 10:00-30ish, play time. 11:00 am Lukas wakes up, and we usually go run errands. 12:00 lunch. 1:00 nap time/quiet time - my time to clean up and do whatever I want. 2:00 pm, Joshua/Mama time. 3:00 Lukas and Abigail wake up and the kids can play while I do whatever. 4:00 start feeding Lukas dinner. 5:00 Lukas in bed (for the night, I know, this is way too awesome but it's true) 5:30 Derek home and time for dinner. 6:00 Derek and I clean up the kitchen, the kids play or take baths. 6:30-45ish, the kids ready for bed. 7:00 pm the kids are in bed, lights off. And now that I've taken the time to write that down, it will probably change... probably tomorrow.

Anyway, from 9:00 to 10 or 10:30 for the last week or so we have accomplished the following.

We read about astronauts and rockets.

 We built our own rockets

 and we flew to the sun (10...9...8...blast off!) and learned all about it and the basics of a solar system

 And we used this little lantern in the dark to represent the sun while we orbited around it. It was fun spinning around while orbiting saying "Now it's morning, now it's noon, evening, night. Now it's morning, noon, evening, night." I think I got the concept across. You know, what is a day and what is a year, etc.

 We've also visited mercury, venus, earth, and just today mars. Each time we jump in our rockets, blast off, fly around the house, and land on our planet. Joshua makes sure to have his "solar system" map so he knows where he is. Each day we learn a new planet I review the ones we've already talked about.

 Here's some constellation math - aka dot to dots. I'm trying to help Joshua learn the numbers past 10. 11 and 12 are really tricky, but he does ok after that. kind of.

 Here's some more star math. The sum stars are star punch outs that Joshua had to glue in the appropriate spot. He was cute about this. He told me I couldn't say anything while he did it because he wanted to do it on his own - or I was just annoying him or something.

 This is Abigail's math worksheet. She actually did it right, but needed a little coaching to stay on task.

 

So already I've got this out of order. When "lernenzeit" starts we look at our calendar and move our snowflake to the appropriate day, mention what we did yesterday, what we will do tomorrow, and what we are going to do today. Then we move into the kitchen, pull our our Tagebucher, and write a daily entry. These are so far not very creative. After our desk work, then we do our "hands on" stuff. So here is a bunch of our desk work - and the math stuff about was too.

 This is Joshua's Tagebuch. Basically he is talking about how he likes certain characters from his new movie. But the last two days he's started writing out the alphabet on his own, which I think is fantastic.

 Abigail's Tagebuch pretty much revolves around princesses, babies, and loving her mom. I also especially like the line, "I'm learning potty training."

 This was a review Joshua did one day. After awhile he got bored of copying my letters and kind of went off and did his own thing.

 Ok, more focused here. A a and B b for Abigail. I helped her with the first letters.

 This one is Joshua's. He did them all on his own.

 More Arbeitsblaetter. Abigail's job was to color in the fields that had a B in them She decided just to color the B. And the second page was to color the pictures that started with B. She was really mad that she didn't get to color the house.

 Here are most of Joshua's worksheets. His job is to trace the word I wrote and then write it himself. I kind of think this is above his ability, but then again, I suppose my job is to make him stretch out of his comfort zone. I can tell that "d" is going to be a struggle. After he is done writing the word he gets to color the picture.

Another new feature to preschool this year is the integration of a variety of subjects in one unit. Therefore I included Music. Did you know Mozart wrote the music to "Twinkle, Twinkle, little Star"?  Of course, it didn't have those words back when it was composed. Joshua knew this song but Abigail didn't. So we learned it. We talked a little about Mozart. And I found a nice little accompaniment on the piano. It sounds sweet. We also are learning "Ich bin wie ein Stern, der hell leuchtet." I am like a star shining brightly.

 And of course art! What better than Vincent Van Gogh and Starry Night!

 We used Van Gogh's Starry Night to inspire our own versions. Here are Abigail's.

 Here is Joshua's.

 And here is mine. (I'm kind of proud of myself!)

 And of course, history! Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon!

 Ok, I mostly did this on my own. It has been my secret dream in life to make a diarama. My older sisters got to make them in school but I think we moved before I was old enough to make one. I've been dreaming about it ever since. So I made one. (I'm also using this for the cub scouts, so it wasn't entirely a selfish project. Ok, it was. I'm making the cub scouts make diaramas just because it's always been my secret dream.) Joshua did help me paint the planets. He painted earth all by himself, and helped out with Jupiter and Neptune. I'm still sad that Pluto was demoted. Even if it was like 15 years ago or something. Sorry about the glare. I couldn't get rid of it.

 I've already realized there a few photos on my camera that didn't get downloaded onto the laptop in time for this post. But there will assuredly be another post or two on space. 

Another thing we have done is watch a few videos on Youtube. Before we blasted off in our rockets to visit the sun we watched a real space shuttle launch online. Which prompted us further to watch a few other videos.  A lot of stuff out there is junk. However, there is "The Majestic Beauty of the Cosmos" which is amazing! It makes you just stand back in wonder and amazement at what God has created and puts things into perspective of how we know so little. Anyway, google it. It's awesome.