Sunday, October 18, 2009

Our week of learning - 18th Oct - science, science and more science


It was primarily a week of science this week, but we did manage to fit in lots of other stuff too.

Current Readaloud: We've read a few Aussie Bites books together this week.

English: Lots of reading (mainly Aussie Bites series) & audio books.

Maths: He watched more Cyberchase episodes than I kept track of, but some of the topics covered were - volume, negative numbers, Venn diagrams, combinations and 2D - 3D.

Science & Technology: As previously posted, Billy went on a 2 day CSIRO Science workshop this week, and loved it.

We also did the 'celery' experiment to see how water moves through plants. We placed 3 pieces of celery in different jars of water - one coloured with red food colouring, one with blue and one just plain water as the control. I also added an extra one (after I took the photo) that was split and in both the red and blue jars.


Within about 10 minutes you could see the colour moving through the celery and into the leaves - by the next morning the results were quite obvious! The one in both jars had kind of turned purple as I was hoping.


He also watched several episodes of the science show SCOPE, and a video of the science behind water boiling by the Happy Scientist.

HSIE (Human Society and it's environment): We finished reading "You wouldn't want to travel with Captain Cook", and also read a book which contained the story of Joan of Arc.

You Wouldn't Want to Travel with Captain Cook!: A Voyage You'd Rather Not Make


Creative & Practical Arts: A friend came over on Friday with her boys for a visit and asked if I'd ever done paper-making - "no, but it's been on my to-do list for a while". She had all the equipment in her car in the hope that I wanted to give it a go - she's a TAFE teacher and was wanting to give it a trial run before doing it with her students. So we made paper!


It was a bit of trial and error as she didn't have the instructions for the actual kit, but we ended up with something approximating paper.


It was quite messy and disgusting actually :) But strangely fun. I think it could be addictive!

We were just using newspaper as our base paper, so that's the reason the paper is a greyish colour. Billy painted his with food colouring while it was still wet and came up with some interesting results!




He also did some straw painting with the leftover food colouring mixtures.


LOTE (Languages other than English): Nothing.

PDHPE (Personal Development, Health & Physical Education): Continued with his exercises and weights with his dad. Also did some catching practice with the baseball pitching machine. The "BTN Special" school tv show was about Health & wellbeing. Scooter riding, tips and lots of running around with other kids.


Life skills (cooking, gardening, housekeeping): He cooked breakfast of tea & toast for me one morning. He made hot chocolate for himself (boiled milk & melted chocolate) - yum!

He helped with the watering of the garden, and with general washing up & tidying. We had a big tidy up of his toy cupboard over the weekend.

School shows: Telling Tales, Numbers Count, For the Juniors (sun), Count Us In, BTN Special.

Other fun stuff: We had friends over on Friday so lots of time playing. He's also been busy with imaginative play, and finding "new" toys as we cleaned out the toy cupboard. He had his cousin's b'day party through the week.

3 comments:

Caz said...

Do you ever look at your entries when you write them and wonder HOW on earth you fit all that into a week? :) Sounds like an awesome week!

That celery experiment is uber cool... we just did a chapter on the plant kingdom 2 wks ago, but I think we'll have to do this activity just for the neato factor!

Kez said...

lol - I do! I often have to go back and edit them because I miss stuff out thinking "nah that couldn't have happened this week as well!"

We wouldn't have time to fit "school" in as well :)

Yeah go on - do that celery experiment, it is really cool!

Dana said...

What a fun and busy week! Over our summer we held our own science camp and it was fun to just do lots of experiments.