Digestion - or sometimes not

To coincide with our flu bug - now we've all officially had it although only 3 of us have thrown up - we jumped right to the digestive system and we'll work on the heart and lungs in a few days.

Since I don't have a lot of time, we crammed this all into one day. This is a topic we covered two years ago and Joshua hasn't really forgotten a thing about it. He almost could tell me all the organs involved in digestion (well, we don't really talk about the liver or gallbladder, not yet anyways.) So we read a book about digestion, we looked at our diagrams in our big books and that was fun. We talked about why Abigail had been throwing up all last night and how that works (that's the not digesting part) and then I had a couple of mini coloring sheets for them. The coloring sheets were in pairs, one set was already colored and labeled, and the second set was blank and black and white so they could fill it in.

Then our visual. This was kind of gross. You know, the body is a magnificent and wondrous thing, but it's also kind of gross sometimes.  I took the leftovers from their breakfast and threw them in a plastic bag, then I added some vinegar and told them that was like the stomach acid. After I closed the sphincter (made a VERY tight knot in the bag) we watched the "stomach" digest the food. Sick. Joshua wouldn't even touch it. But we could see that when the stomach twists and turns and squishes itself the food gets smaller and smaller and smaller until the other door (whatever that other sphincter is called) opens up and the food moves down it's journey. I thought this was an awesome idea. I know the kids were really interested, but they were too grossed out to participate more than listen and look a little. I don't blame them, it looked like vomit. And we've all seen a little too much of that around here lately.

Bones and Muscles: Field Trip and Hands On

Before I get to our field trip, here is another crafty thing we did with bones.

Our field trip was to the grocery store where we found muscles and bones. Because the bones were cut through it was easy to see the marrow and reemphasize to the children what happens inside the bones. They thought that was interesting. Joshua also just liked poking the meat.

And our hands on experiment... this is kind of gross... we dissected Cornish game hens. We put on our doctor outfits (the masks were because 1, I didn't want the kids touching the raw meat and then their faces, 2, Abigail threw up all over the couch last night so Derek doused it with Spray N Wash and our house was so full of chemicals it was really hard to breathe, and 3, Abigail still had the flu and I don't want to get it... again. I didn't make her wear it all day.)  We found lots of skin and muscles and bones. We found joints in the wings and we found bone marrow also. This was a little yucky, but the kids were very excited about it and they enjoyed doing this alot.

And then we ate the hens for dinner.

Bones and Muscles

I don't think I have very many pictures, but we've started up again where we left off with the human body. Last time we did Lernenzeit (learning time, that's what we call our preschool time) we had gone over the 5 senses. This second section of the human body will go through what's inside our bodies. The third section will talk about the spiritual nature and potential of our bodies. This is where we bring in Adam and Eve, why we even have bodies, and it should coincide with Easter, so of course we'll talk about the Resurrection and eternal bodies. Stuff like that. I might add on the end a little unit on emotions. That's still the body - except I'm not bringing up neurotransmitters and hormones and the like. It's a little out of our range of complexity. We'll wait until high school maybe.

Ok, here we go.

For skeletons we first read some books - which were really good, and tried to feel our own bones - mostly our knee caps and collar bones. We had a few other books to just study the bones. The kids were supposed to learn and discover things just by looking - and then point at the things they found that were interesting to them. Except Joshua decided nothing on that page was interesting so he found another page and started telling me about some other body part. So that exercise was less successful.

We have a print out in German of the skeleton and names of the bones, which both kids found fascinating and they carried their papers around with them all day - even on errands in the car.

We learned the song "Ich bin so gelenkig" which is that song, I'm so full of hinges that everything bends... I can't remember the title in English. Maybe it's just called "Hinges." Anyway, that was a HUGE success. They totally loved it.

And we checked out one of Joshua's favorite Eyewitness Videos from the library called simply "Skeleton." It talks about animal skeletons as well, but that's fine. When we learned about the body 2 years ago - wow, have I been doing this that long? - we saw this movie and Joshua has remembered it ever since. I think because there is a walking skeleton computer graphic throughout the film and he does different cool things. Anyway, they wanted to watch this movie twice. It's only 30 minutes, so I said why not.

Today we started our muscles section. Again we had a book to read and did some learning with our own bodies by just flexing our muscles. Then we pulled out the same three books about the entire body, found the muscles pages, and did our show and tell learning by observation, which was also less of a success, but I really want to work on that so I think we're just going to keep doing it, maybe I'll tweak it a little in the future.

And then we pulled down our Body Posters from the wall and drew in some bones and muscles. We made these posters just out of butcher paper while we were learning about the senses. So the kids had already colored their ears, noses, eyes, mouths, and fingers (for touch). Abigail wasn't very interested in coloring her poster, but Joshua was. It was kind of a tricky day for us with preschool, but I'll talk more about that later.

And tomorrow for muscles - I guess I'll have to add photos later, we are going (hopefully, depending on how much we have all recovered from sickness) to a Music and Movement class that my friend in Provo is putting on (Hi, Charlotte!). That will give us a good opportunity to discuss muscles and bones and how they help us move.

Somewhat unrelated, I have kind of a problem. Some days preschool goes so well, like when we talked about bones. And some days preschool goes... less well, like today when we talked about muscles. As moms who home school or do little learning things like that, what do you do to get past those days and not feel like you are cheating your kid's education? I mean, I never dreamed of acting up in school like I did at home (thank goodness) but at home an in home school, what do you do when you kid acts up and will not, or will only grudgingly, participate? I would think a parent should be able to keep their kids in control better than a teacher, but I know from experience (because I was a very hard to handle child at home) that this isn't always the case.

And then any current or previous teachers out there, do you just have days when you feel honestly like the kids weren't into it, that they didn't learn anything, and that they were more interested in picking their noses than listening to you?  I would feel better about myself and my efforts if I knew this stuff happened away from home as well.

This is especially important to me now that homeschooling is becoming more of a legitimate option for us once again. I can't just put my child in time out every time they don't want to participate, can I? But do I really need another incentive chart? more stickers? Is this all just part of the package - some days you win and some days you lose and you just hope that when it's over they have picked up something useful?  Anyway, I'm trying to figure all that out. Any comments on this post would be especially appreciated.

St Patrick's Day

Sorry for the late post. As if having surgery wasn't enough, we all got hit with the flu. But other than feeling abnormally exhausted at the end of the day and a "lingering" sore throat, I personally feel pretty good. So here goes.

Here are our crafts.  A leprechaun...

And a shamrock necklace.  I remember as a kid learning something about St. Patrick beating all the snakes out of Ireland with a stick and that's why we celebrated him. But according to Wikipedia, he was a missionary that brought Christianity to Ireland and used the Shamrock to teach of the Trinity.  So that is how we learned about St. Patrick's Day. Except we didn't use the Catholic Trinity concept, but the concept that there is a Heavenly Father, and a Jesus Christ, and a Holy Ghost that are separate but unified in purpose. It was interesting to talk about how even though many people didn't have the Gospel after Christ died and before Joseph Smith restored it, there were still many good people who taught those good things that they did know.  Kids don't learn this stuff in elementary school. They learn about rainbows and leprechauns and wishes and gold.

Ok, and for lunch we had green tuna fish with green pickles and green lettuce on oat/wheat bread. I ran out of green spinach bread last week.

And for a snack the kids had a green donut. I usually make sugar cookies (for Valentine's, St. Patrick's, and Easter) but even though I LOVE them, a donut is consumed a lot faster than 60 cookies, frosting, and candies, and overall the sugar consumption is considerably less. I'll probably still make the cookies for Easter though.

He wasn't feeling well, if you can tell. It took him about 5 minutes to eat this donut, which I could have simply inhaled.

For dinner we had traditional corned beef, cabbage, carrots, and potatoes. Joshua wouldn't touch the cabbage (he was mildly sick) but ate his meat and potatoes. Abigail devoured her cabbage and meat but wouldn't touch the potatoes. Lukas only liked the carrots. Derek couldn't eat any of it because he was fasting. So I have been eating corned beef until, well, today actually. I guess that wasn't so bad after all. I crock potted everything for ease.

Here are our two books. They don't talk about St. Patrick either. But they were what was left at the library.

And at the end of the day, I picked up a book for myself written by an Irishman.  I haven't gotten very far in the book because I've had the flu, but hopefully I'll really like it.

finding a bright side

All my dreams (well, not all of them) were crushed the other day when I heard, no, the state revoked the funding for the immersion programs, but then yes, we pestered our reps enough that they've restored the funding, but then again no, they restored the funding to all the programs except mine. It never really was mine. But after emailing people and filling out forms and going to a meeting and contacting people on the phone, district people, school admin people, and meeting with a realtor to buy a house near enough the school so my children could attend and being so excited that this was actually happening knowing that NOWHERE near me are there any German immersion programs offered, I kind of felt like, you know, it was going to happen and I could claim it and plan on having my children attend.

Well, that dream is crushed. And every time I think about it makes me want to cry.

But I'm sure that we'll find a better school for us, and a better house for us, and better opportunities for us and our German and that this is all part of that great big plan. And I'm working on finding a bright side to all of this... so I started looking at homes near Foothill and Orchard and Canyon Crest schools.

Anyway, it will all be for the best because we will make it for the best.

No tonsils = no voice

a funny thing happens when all you can do is whisper to your children. They start whispering back.

and then when it hurts too much to whisper, and you start using hand signals to get them to do what you want, they figure out their own hand signals to respond.

Children, you still have voices. Please use them.

One more week.

The Scout Dinner

Our ward has a fundraiser dinner every year for the scouts. Everybody brings a cake and then they get "auctioned" off. Really, they give you a number and when they call your number you get to come up and pick whichever cake you want, and then you can donate however much money you want to the scouting program.

I wasn't even going to go. Even though I'd been prepping my cub scouts for weeks. But we went. Here was the cake we made.

It's just a chocolate cake with white chocolate chips baked into the actual cake. In between the layers there is chocolate frosting and a layer of more white chocolate chips. Obviously the outside is frosted in chocolate frosting and then we filled every little spot we could with the remaining white chips, and almost an entire bag of regular chocolate chips. I put this in my garage for a while to let the frosting cool and harden. I have never had a more delicious smelling garage - although I think just smelling the air elevated my blood sugar levels. Wow. Derek later questioned whether such a cake would actually taste good but in my opinion, that is totally beside the point.

Anyway, I thought our cake was kind of cool, until we saw THIS one!

There were actually a ton of really awesome cakes, many of which I would have been delighted to take home. As it turns out, our number was called second out of about 45 so guess which cake my kids picked?

We are enjoying it.

The Body: 5 Senses

This is going to be a long unit. I'm breaking it up into 3 major chunks: 1) My Five Senses, 2) Inside of Me 3) My Spirit and My Body.  But besides that, we're taking a break starting tomorrow that may last up to two weeks, so you know, that kind of draws things out also.

Here is what we have done with our 5 senses. Oh I just remembered, we did do a lot of worksheets as well, you know write out the letters or the words, color the pictures, etc. But I didn't take any photos because they are kind of the same as what we did the last month. Just imagine the same worksheets with the letters E and F, and words like Finger, Eye, Nose, Tongue,  and Ear.

We started with taste. I didn't have any cocoa, which is what I would have used for bitter, but online I read that onion juice is also bitter. So I made my own onion juice. Gross.

 Bitter

before and after

  Sour

We  created a little table where we could sample food and then check off whether they were sweet, salty, sour, bitter, or a combination. And then we took our papers and pens and clipboards to Costco to get some samples - except they only had ONE sample person out. I was totally disappointed.

 We ended up sampling our dinner and recorded our tastes down for that.

 For the sense of smell we went to a flower shop and smelled all their flowers. This shop is owned by a man in our ward and he let the children each take home a Gerber Daisy. They were so excited and kept smelling their flowers for the next few days... until they were all wilty. Then the kids pulled out all the petals, drowned them in their vases, and I ended up throwing the mess away while they were distracted somewhere else. :)

I combined the senses of sight, touch, and hearing all into one. For a little history, we studied Helen Keller a bit. The kids really liked the movie, they watched it twice. It was an interesting conversation to have with little kids, about what life would be like if you couldn't see or hear anything. After our first Helen Keller lesson the kids went into a dark room and played around with flashlights to have a little fun with their sense of sight.

 In the next activity I blindfolded the kids and made them use their other senses to guess what object I had placed into their hands. I had a few things you could smell and hear, besides just touch, but this "lesson" really had more to do with the sense of touch than anything else. They had a good time with this.

 Smelling a lemon.

 Smelling an apple.

 Besides our discussion and mini lesson on Helen Keller, we didn't talk a whole lot, or do very much, with the sense of hearing. I wanted to go to a music shop or something so the kids could hear a few different instruments. I suppose I could have found sound bytes online, but I didn't. It's been a busy week and it's been hard to stick even this stuff in, so I'll just have to be happy with my best. And I am.

Our closing for the 5 senses was to draw those parts of the body used in the senses on our bodies. On our paper bodies. These hang up in the kids' room. After we learn about a different body part, we will draw it on so that in the very end, we will be able to see all that we have learned on a really big poster. So far of course, there hasn't been much to draw, so the posters are a little blank.  That will all change in about 2 weeks, when we start learning more of the internal organs. Should be fun.