Happy Mother’s Day!

Sunday, May 12th, 2013

This Mother’s Day we celebrate…

The Moment We Became Moms:

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new. – Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

A new baby is like the beginning of all things-wonder, hope, a dream of possibilities. — Eda J. Le Shan

When I stopped seeing my mother with the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birth to myself. – Nancy Friday

The Love of Moms

A mother’s heart is always with her children. – Proverb

Some mothers are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together. – Pearl S. Buck

The Power and Influence of Moms

The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world — W.R. Wallace

All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel Mother. — Abraham Lincoln

My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. All I am I owe to my mother. I attribute all my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her. — George Washington

What the child says, he has heard at home. — African Proverb

The Belief Moms Have about our Future:

Mother love is the fuel that enables a normal human being to do the impossible. — Marion C. Garretty

Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall; A mother’s secret hope outlives them all. – Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Forgiveness of Moms

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.  – Honoré de Balzac

The Strength and Energy of Moms

A man’s work is from sun to sun, but a mother’s work is never done. — Author Unknown

God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers. – Jewish Proverb

The Giving Nature of Moms

A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie. – Tenneva Jordan

A mother’s arms are more comforting than anyone else’s. – Diana, Princess of Wales

Mother’s Intuition

A mother understands what a child does not say. — Saying

The Tired Mom

 There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep – Ralph Waldo Emerson

People who say they sleep like a baby usually don’t have one. — Leo J. Burke

A Mother is Always a Mother

Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that suppose to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing. — Toni Morrison, Beloved

No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. – Florida Scott-Maxwell

To all the Mothers out there… I hope you have a lovely day!! ~Liesl

Resources Used:

Random House Webster’s Quotationary by Leonard Roy Frank

All Great Quotes: Mother Quotes

Psychology Today: 50 Quotes on Mothers

Digestive System Free Worksheets

Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

The past couple of days I shared all of our hands on activities in our study of the esophagus, stomach, small and large intestines… everything from recreating the muscle movement along the esophagus to making fake vomit and measuring out the length of our digestive tract.  Here are the worksheets I made for my kids to go along with all of those activities.

I actually did a lot of those hands-on activities before we worked on these sheets… I just slipped information in as we did activities so that when we went over the sheets, most of the information was already familiar to them.

A good overall review sheet for the kids was the first page.  They checked off the digestive system part (such as the esophagus) and colored that same part in on their page.

The next day, we measured out the digestive tract. As they cut a piece of yarn, they colored that portion the same color on their sheet.

The next couple of days, we went over more detailed information about the digestive system. We’ll obviously have to come back to this in a few years when we rotate back to this material again. As you can see, there wasn’t a whole lot of writing so my daughter (7) was just fine with them.

The last thing they did was this matching page which gave a brief description of each part of the digestive system and the organs associated with it (it’s on page 3 of the packet):

Here’s a glimpse of the digestive system packet pages if you are interested in downloading them. This packet is actually 9 pages long, but the answer sheets are not shown below:

Digestive System Packet — Stomach, Intestines, Digestive Organs

We didn’t get to this activity yet (we were going to do it yesterday, but got carried away with our activities in our Africa Unit), but since this is my last post about the digestive system I thought I’d mention these cute human body stickers I bought at Oriental Trading. It was $8.00 for a pack of 12. The body is on an 11×17 piece of paper and the stickers are quite big.  I thought the set was pretty cute, though a little on the pricey side. Still, we did a set last year and will do another this year… so over the course of 4 years I guess it’s not so bad:

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Other posts in our study of the Digestive System:  This was the last post of our unit. We’ve now officially finished our human body unit for this year! Here were some of the activities and worksheets we worked on as we studied the digestive system the past month or so:

• Digestive System: It All Starts in the Mouth: We spent time looking at the important role the mouth has in digestion. We did some fun, hands-on activities related to teeth and chewing.  We also filled out a few pages for our science notebooks.  You can click on the link above for the first free download about the digestive system –the mouth/teeth — and you’ll see some of our hands-on activities.

• Digestive System: Hands-On Activities – Esophagus, Stomach, Small Intestines
• Hands-On Activity: How Long is the Digestive Tract?

Hands On Activity: How Long is the Digestive Tract?

Tuesday, May 7th, 2013

Digestive Tract:

So just how long is our digestive tract? We set out to find out with this activity. We measured out different colors of yarns for each part of the digestive system.

The page you see (above right) was in the Digestive System Pack I made for the kids. I’ll share that with you tomorrow.

After we had all the bits measured and tied together, we went out to the driveway to see just how long it really is!

The kids then spent time, trying to lay all that out on their own body.

I made outlines of the kids bodies on butcher paper (we did this the day before).

Then they carefully laid out the yarn in the appropriate areas:

LD decided he wanted to draw the parts of the digestive tract on his body, though he did it in pencil so it’s a bit difficult to see:

We went over quite a bit of information as we did all these activities. You can see a couple of those pages in the photos above. We read books from the library and then at the end of the unit, went over the information for their notebook pages.  I’ll share that pack with you tomorrow.

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Related Posts You Might Be Interested In:

• Yesterday’s post which included some hands-on activities about the esophagus,  stomach (including making fake vomit! Yuck!), and small intestines.
•  Overview of the Human Body Systems which shared the free worksheet (pictured below) and chart I made for the kids.

• Digestive System: It All Starts in the Mouth (Hands on activities, plus these free pages.)

•  Choking: An Important Lesson for the Kids (Make your own movable epiglottis)

• Human Body: Skeletal System
• Human Body Unit: Heart and Circulatory System Activities
• Human Body Unit: The Human Hand
• Human Body Unit: The Brain
• Human Body Egg-speriment: Protect that Brain!
• Germ Lapbook
• Germ Experiment: Where do Germs Grow in Your House?

Digestive System: Hands-On Activities – Esophagus, Stomach, Small Intestines

Monday, May 6th, 2013

We did a lot of hands-on activities over the course of two or three weeks. I’m going to put them all into one post.

Esophagus Activities:

Does food fall down to the stomach? We proved that muscles helped move the food bolus down to the tummy with this quick upside-down activity.  Everyone took turns standing on their hands, chewing up a cracker and swallowing. We also did this lying on our sides. Yes, the food travels to the stomach, no matter what direction the esophagus is pointing.

As food is swallowed, the muscles in the esophagus contract and relax. This activities with panty hose showed how the food is pushed down with the rhythmical muscle movement.

Stomach Activities:

After food is swallowed, it collects in the stomach where stomach acid and food enzymes mix. Muscles in the stomach wall squeeze the food around to mix it.

Make your own vomit:

The kids were keen to do this quick activity that I saw on Zelda’s wondeful blog, Homeschool Escapade, a couple of years ago. We used the recipe she suggested:

• 1/4 cup water
• 1/4 cup
• 1/2 mashed banana
• 1/2 cup carrot, finely chopped (we were out, so we used a red pepper)
• 1 or two cookies or crackers, crushed (we used 3 so each kid could do their own)
• 1/8 cup vinegar (we were out, so we used lemon juice as our stomach acid)
• 1 tsp baking soda

(Zelda does a lot of hands-on, wonderful activities with her kids, be sure to go check out her blog, Homeschool Escapade.)

Stomach Noises:

As the stomach wall squeeze and mix the food mixture, it makes a lot of noises. We took turns listening to each other’s tummies.  The kids said they could here a lot of noise, but unfortunately without my hearing aid in, I couldn’t hear much (though I’ve certainly heard my own rumble from time to time!!)

Small intestines:

Using panty hose we squeezed some cooked oatmeal down through our “intestines.” We noticed how some small particles, “nutrients,” were able to make their way out of the lining of our “intestines.”

We pulled out our Squishy Human Body and spent time looking over all the internal organs. This product by Smart Lab is really fun. The kids love it and it has held up well.

I have a few more things to share with you about this unit, but I need to bring this post to a close for now. I’ll also share the digestive system packet I made for this portion of our unit with you in the next day or so.

Preschool at Home: Science for 2-5 Year Olds (and Up!)

Friday, May 3rd, 2013

Amazing, Fun Science To Wow the Little Ones!

One of the wonderful things I love about homeschooling is all the hands-on activities you can do with kids.  In the preschool years, I scoured the Internet and various science experiment books to find things that would intrigue and excite the kids… and that they could have a hand in doing.  Most of the things we did were done using household ingredients. 

As you can see from the previous posts in this series, we did do some more traditional preschool activities like learning letter sounds and learning about numbers, but my main goal in the 2-4 year old age range was to keep the kids intrigued and engaged.

So how did I fit science in when I had a newborn, 2 and 4 year old?  Well, I generally planned things out on a Sunday night. Mondays were usually our science experiment days. I usually covered over the tray so the kids couldn’t see what we’d be doing to add spice and excitement to the activity!  These activities really only lasted 10-20 minutes (plus clean up), but seeing the kids so engaged made that extra effort worth it.

Here are a few examples some things we did when my kids were 2 and 4 years old…

One day we talked about liquids. We learned that some liquids are more dense (heavy) than others. We put oil and colored water into a bottle. Then we added honey and watched what happened. 

If you’ve glanced through various Montessori blogs, you’ll see that pouring is wonderful skill to build dexterity, hand strength, fine motor skills… what better practice than to enjoy some science along with it!

Then we wanted to see what would happen when you add milk to oil and water. If you pour slowly and carefully, the milk will form droplets within the oil. You might pour the milk onto a spoon and gently let one drop go at a time or use an eyedropper to squeeze out a drop at a time.  The kids loved the way that looked!

Exploding Volcano: Another very fun activity to do with kids is to make a volcano.

We made a paper mache volcano with a plastic soda bottle as the base.

Paper mache:

• 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 cup  water.
• Stir in 2 cups boiling water.
• Mix. 
• Put newspaper strips in the mixture and glop it onto the plastic bottle.  I think their projects were more charming being slopped on haphazardly!  Once they were dry (it took several days in dry conditions), we painted ours brown.

Then comes the fun part!!  Get your lava ready!

Lava:

• 1/2 cup baking soda into the volcano. 
• In a pitcher mix 1/2 cup water, 1/2 cup vinegar, 1/4 cup dishwashing liquid, red food coloring. 
• Pour the vinegar mixture into the can and watch the lava flow!

 TaDa!

Make Your Own Fossils – The kids made their own fossils several times over the years. The picture below includes some are impressions from LD’s Thunderbird rockets which he was really into at the time (age 4 or so). DD made dinosaur tracks and impressions of a beetle, dragonfly and fly.

The recipe for making fossils is pretty easy:

• 2-3 Tablespoons used coffee grounds
• 2/3 cup salt (a little less)
• 2/3 cup flour
• enough cold coffee to make the mixture dough-like
• Make your impressions and then bake in a low heated oven for a while (an hour on one side, an hour on the other).