Ss is for Sun

My impression of homeschooling thus far: I love it! I certainly don't love every moment of it, but in my 16 class days (we are doing a 100 days chart so yes, i know how many :o) I have really enjoyed it. I love the creativity it inspires, I love the flexibility of it, and most of all, I absolutely love watching my son learn and get excited about learning. It is one of the coolest things ever.

The last 6 days we have been focusing on the letter S and learning all about the sun. Since our second unit is M/m/moon, I decided to tie them both together for a full on outer space theme. It has been so much fun! Elijah was already quite interested in space so it was a good way to kick off school.

Every morning we do our Days of the Week song, go over our calendar, do our 100 days chart, and say the days for yesterday, today, and tomorrow and he sticks on the appropriate day. I let my son decorate the poster board for the days...

We then discuss the weather for the day and he marks it in his chart. Every week I am adding a nursery rhyme to our curriculum. The first 10 days of school was a bit of a review and a unit on creation. He memorized 1,2, Buckle My Shoe and Hickory Dickory Dock during that time. For the sun unit he did Star Light, Star Bright. I think this is one of his favorite things we have done. He loves memorizing them and putting the gold star stickers on when he has it down.

Aside from doing the regular things such as writing and reading and working on math and the alphabet, we have also done a lot of fun extra projects. Here are a few of them.

Awesome solar system puzzle by Melissa & Doug. I recommend buying it.

I got a solar yard lamp from the Dollar Tree. One morning I found a video online about solar energy and after watching it he put the lamp in our yard. That night we went out after dark and he got to see how it worked just using solar energy. 

Lots of stuff about shadows! All about shadows and how you can't get rid of yours. There's a great Reading Rainbow episode about shadows that we got from the library. We traced our own shadows, read about shadows, found funny ones, and left a pair of scissors on construction paper to see how its shadow kept the sun from fading the paper under it. We also made a sun dial and learned all about how people used them to tell time.

One of my favorite things we did was making a sun for our "classroom" (half of my husband's office). We cut open Trader Joe's bags and painted them. I had Elijah put it together then we hung it on the wall together. It reminds me of Eric Carle and makes me so happy! As we read through our books about the sun we kept a list of the facts we thought were the coolest/ most important, such as the fact that it only takes light 8 minutes to travel from the sun to earth, but using today's space shuttles it would take us over 3 YEARS to get there from here. Wild!

We talked about grapes vs. raisins and how they make raisins, then we ate them :o). We put a few grapes outside and every day Elijah charts what they look like as we wait for them to turn to raisins. It is kind of taking forever!

 We have played a lot of Star Wars lego's. Not because of the theme so much as the fact that my son is    
addicted :o)
                                       

Some other things we did with the sun unit were to make sun tea, practiced making S's with chalk and play dough, went on a "things that start with s" scavenger hunt, I had him water color on a white piece of paper, which I had already drawn a sun and stars and the names of them on the paper with white crayon, so it surprised him like invisible ink. 

I am taking a day off between our sun unit and our moon unit to have a day all about space with some of our friends and I am so excited about it! That blog to come soon!