Science Monday...and more.

I had both my niece and nephew today. Catherine and my nephew, Kyle usually head straight for the Gamecube, XBox or computers when he's up so I had to fit in some activities around that. I think it was about 11 am when I finally herded Catherine out to the kitchen for a few pages of Singapore Math. Sort of a waste sine she couldn't really concentrate anyway.

She did want to do some science though. First thing we did was a very basic worksheet from Learning Page (worksheet 1). It's probably primary level but I printed it off thinking Kyle (who's in Primary) might want to join in. He didn't so Catherine and I did them anyway. The sheet was just a short explanation of senses then a tracing exercise of the names of the sense and then a match-up to the proper organ. I used the answers I gave to mark Catherine's and she got every match-up wrong. Sheesh. She didn't know the skin was what we used to smell or the eyes were the organ of touch. And for some reason she was laughing at me too.

The nerve.

Then I brought out some really neat sheets from here. Scroll down a bit and click on, 'Lesson plans for teaching about the nature of science'. Modify your search to '3-5', 'any topic', and 'teach about nature'. Click for 'Tennis shoe detectives' then 'go to this lesson now'. Whew! Read the lesson and right-click the pictures to save to your desktop for printing. Basically, you and your child look at a series of pictures that depict a scene with tracks. For one scene you'll first put down a third of the picture, examine the tracks and make some inferrences based on what you see. You lay down the second piece of the scene, make some more observations and maybe revise your ideas. By the third you can make a rather detailed guess at what's gone on. It's observation, hypothesis, revision. Lots of fun.

After the extended family went home we made a Norse Gods family tree. It was much smaller and took a lot less time then the greek one, thank goodness. Final result...