Our Bodies and the Plan of Salvation and Easter

I felt good about myself for making our study of our bodies coincide with Easter, but truthfully, it was mostly just a coincidence.

The one thing we didn't do as well as I would have liked, is learning the song, "He sent His Son" from the primary songbook. I did try to teach it to them, and we worked on it two different times, but they were difficult days and difficult times and although I learned the song a little better and now they are a little more familiar with it, they can't sing it on their own. I suppose there is no reason to stop learning the song just because Easter is over.

Our basic outline for the week was as follows. Our discussions and scripture readings and activities coincided with the topic for the day.

Our week went like this:
Monday - Spirit world and before we are born - without a body, just a spirit.
Tuesday - Story of Adam and Eve.We are born and our body and spirit come together. While alive we need to get baptized and go to the temple.
Wednesday: We die. Our bodies and spirits separate and our bodies are buried in the earth while our spirits go to heaven.
Thursday - We will someday be resurrected, just as Jesus was. Our bodies and spirits will come back together forever and we will live in Heaven with our families and Heavenly Father and Jesus.

Because I generally think people are more interested in photos anyway, I've just posted a gazillion and I am going to make comments underneath them. Here goes...

 We read from the children's stories from the Old Testament book. Joshua really loves this story. It is curious to me, the things he find particularly interesting. This is one of them.

 Here is the song we kind of learned. I would like to add more singing. (more singing, more reading, more math... we'll just see how things go and what I can do.)

 We made little "plan of salvation" books. We used squares of paper and I wrote the text and the children drew the illustrations. The story begins before we are born and ends after we are resurrected. We put our finished pages in little photo albums and they wanted pictures of Christ (and Joseph Smith) taped on them - and there are a few inside the books too. These were just missionary hand out cards they found, but they were all Easter themed and very appropriate.  Anyway, this above photo is Joshua drawing himself when he was a baby sitting in a car seat.

 Who knows what Abigail is drawing. On the day we talked about death and she was supposed to draw something about her dying and being buried, she drew a monkey playing with a toy that would kill it. I don't know how to comment on that.

 Here is are little Adam and Eve lesson and learning about how we get our bodies. The kids liked the fact that we had to wait a long time in Heaven just as spirits until it was our turn. And that there are more spirits just waiting up there until Heavenly Father is ready to send them down. They thought it was interesting too that there is a spirit up there somewhere that will one day be sent down to our family when we have another baby, but we all just have to wait until Heavenly Father is ready to send the spirit down. I think that's interesting too.

 The first page says "In Heaven I didn't have a body" Joshua drew 5 spirits upside down in Heaven - those are clouds. One of those spirits is named Mr. Bogart. I have no idea who Mr. Bogart is but he is on another page in Joshua's book too. The second page says "I was just a spirit". I like Joshua's drawings. He often adds fingers and toes - but no ears.

 "Someday I will die. My spirit will leave my body"  The only graves that Joshua really ever sees are of my grandparents, who have their names right next to each other on the same stone. So to Joshua, it made sense to draw two headstones, one for him and one for Abigail, right next to each other.  The second illustration is awesome. Can you tell that the spirits are leaving the bodies?

 "It will be very sad, but it's ok"  Joshua drew one of those "happy face, frowny faces" you learn about in Nursery - the kind that when you turn it upside down, it's no longer sad, but happy.

 This is Abigail's. It says "I can do many things with my body" and she drew, on the right, a man eating food and taking a walk to his bed, which is on the left. She pointed out to me the bed and his pillow. It's kind of hard to make out now when she isn't around.

 This is the illustration of the monkey playing with that lethal toy.

Ok - before I jump to the last photos of today and yesterday, I feel like I have to say, we really did spend a ton of time talking about the plan of salvation. I just don't have photos of our discussions. I feel like the kids learned a lot, and what they already knew has been solidified. On our day when we talked about death, they were very reverent. I think kids know that it is a solemn topic but an important one. Anyway, so most of the next photos aren't very spiritual or religious really. While decorated the sugar cookie Easter Eggs we did talk about how the egg represents new life and Jesus' resurrection and our eventual resurrection as well.

 And again, painting eggs isn't very spiritual, but it is a tradition and we love it.

 I couldn't find the $1 egg dye kit so I had to spend $2 for this kit. It came with gold paint that you could use to make golden eggs. Ours were only partly golden. But I liked how they turned out anyway.

 Even Grammy painted a few with us.

 Random out of order photo of our Easter Egg Cookies.

 And when Derek came home from his bike ride, he painted an egg too!

 Random out of order photo of Abigail eating a cookie. She uses an interested technique with her decorating and frosting spreading.

 Here are our finished eggs.

 Easter baskets the next morning. I know the Easter Bunny is totally ridiculous and I know Joshua knows there is no such thing - I don't know about Abigail - but it is hard for me to do away with this tradition. I read from someone they put religious items in their baskets. I like that idea.

 Eating a peep for breakfast.

 After church we went to the Heber City Cemetery to visit Grandma and Grandpa and we talked about all the bodies that weren't yet resurrected, but they would be. I love visiting cemeteries. I think they are good places to be. I hope that isn't too morbid. I think they are peaceful and spiritual.

 This has nothing to do with anything we learned about. Here are the men Easter evening about to race plastic ducks.

 On your mark! Get set! GO!!

And then we raced tractors. Thanks Grammy for such a fun Easter. We really did have a wonderful time. No time tonight for spell checking. Please just ignore my typos.

Lesentag Freitags

For awhile I was getting concerned that the kids weren't getting enough reading time... not reading for learning - as in science, etc, but reading for just the story's sake and enjoying. Also, I'm getting a little tired. So since Fridays we go to the library anyway, I've instigated a new program called Lesentag Freitag. Friday is our reading day and all we do is read as many stories as we can, all day long. We've created our reading logs and every time we read a story on Friday, we write it down in our logs. (We also discuss the story a little bit, like what was the problem, how did they solve it, how do you think so-and-so felt when..., stuff like that to encourage thinking and discussion. So I guess it's not just totally for entertainment's sake.)  We don't do any other pre-school activities that day. I'm decided whether or not to still do the calendar and Tagebuch, but for now we just read stories. Then of course, go to the library later for Story Time and to use the computers (when all the little kids are at the first Story Time session, the two best computers are usually free so we plan our library time then. We're kind of sneaky :)

In the future, we will go other places and read other places. I think it would be fun to go to a park and bring a book, or just wherever we go, bring books in the car and in our bag so we always have something to read.

Here are the books we are reading right now (I met up with one of my German professors from BYU and she gave me tons of her books her kids had grown out of. I am so grateful to her. I have so many great stories to choose from now. It's really exciting!)

Brain, Heart, and Lungs

I didn't use any special props or activities to learn about the brain. We mostly just read a book and looked at our pictures and diagrams in our big books. I did have a little print out for them, but it wasn't colored. The book we read, however, was really good. That entire series is really good. It had some pretty difficult concepts explained in very simple terms. I wasn't really planning on having the kids learn much more than what a brain is, where it is, and what it does, but we ended up labeling the brain stem, cerebrum, and cerebellum. And the kids could tell me what each of those three parts of the brain does generally.

Next we tackled the lungs. Same thing, we read and looked at the books and discussed what the lungs. We practiced using our lungs and talked about how when we are active our bodies need more oxygen, so our lungs need to breathe faster and harder, but when we are still we don't need as much so we don't breathe as hard. This is another of the body parts Joshua remembers really well from 2 years ago so we didn't need to discuss a great deal.  What we did do, though, is buy some balloons at Party Land and after I had tried to loosen them up as much as possible, the kids tried to blow up the balloons and see how much air their lungs actually could hold. I was surprised that my lungs don't actually hold that much air - I suppose to some degree it was compressed in the balloon? I don't know. Anyway, I thought my lungs were bigger. The kids couldn't blow up the balloons very well, although Joshua did blow it up successfully a few times, but they thought it was really neat to know that the air inside the balloon - as little as there was - was just moments before in their lungs and that the oxygen was gone! Magic.

For the heart we had to just look at our diagrams because I didn't have a book to read from the library. That's ok because I feel like I know enough about the heart (ok, I know enough about all of these basic organs) to explain it to the kids. We talked about the chambers and the valves (although I called the valves doors) and how the heart and lungs work together to get the oxygen we breathe into all the parts of our body. We discussed how blood comes into the heart and to the lungs to get oxygen, and that blood is from the veins, and then the blood leave the lungs and going through the heart back into the body is the blood with the oxygen and that blood is carried in the arteries. I felt like I had to explain that because every diagram shows blue veins and red arteries, as well as blue and red chambers of the heart and I thought it would be confusing if you didn't know there was a difference. I'm not sure if they understood that part completely. But it's ok, the main goal was to get them to understand where the heart is and what the heart does. We also mentioned other functions of blood, besides carrying oxygen.

That morning for breakfast we made heart muffins. I got this idea from my sister-in-law who mentioned on her blog that if you put a marble in the muffin tin the muffins would bake in the shape of hearts. Mine were less successful, but I know what went wrong. I think the bigger the marble you use (like a sharp shooter) the better, and also, don't use the cheapest flimsiest muffin tin liners, like mine. I think the silver foil muffin tins that are quite a bit more stiff would create perfect heart shaped muffins. Ours look like cupcakes because we dyed them pink (red) but I promise I used a muffin recipe and added dried cranberries for decoration. They were completely suitable to eat for breakfast.

We also found our veins in are body, and tested our heart rate at resting and after running around, although we didn't record our heart rates. I didn't have a stop watch or second timer, and I didn't think of it in time. That would have been a great little mini math exercise.  (I'm trying to get more math into our lessons. It's not going very well so far.

 

 

 I should also mention, we are up to the letter H h. It just happened to coincide with Heart.

And lastly, as we have completed learning all about our internal organs, we finished our body posters. Here are the final products, plus some detail shots of our hearts and lungs.

Joshua's heart has extra pumping capacity - notice the SIX chambers. He did that on purpose.