Today we talked about water.
We can not live without water. Even animals and plants need water.
Our souls (the inside of us) needs water too. Living Water.
We talked about water and how it is a liquid and can also be a solid and a gas too.

The kids played with water and ice cubes. I think they were busy for about an hour sitting at the table pouring water from a measuring cup into a bowl and scooping more water up with little medicine cups and dumping ice cubes in the water (and eating them) and watching them melt.

                                      

It was perfect. We talked about how when Frosty melted he became a liquid and when he was a snowman he was a solid!

I have been using pennies for graphing and other counting projects. My conscience was getting to me cause we all know how dirty coins can be are. So today's lesson was cleaning coins! They had so much fun! We simply followed the directions on Wikihow. They are simple instructions but if you know chemistry there are some no-no's... like mixing different coins together. Who knew?

All we did was:
* pour about 1/2 cup of vinegar and 1 tsp of salt into a glass bowl
* drop in the pennies
* and watch them transform from dingy to glistening!

The process only took a couple of minutes.

I gave the kids old toothbrushes and when the coins came out of the vinegar solution I had them *shine* them up a little more. Then we washed them in soapy water.

My oldest didn't want to stop playing with the toothbrush so I told him he could shine up the kitchen floor. That lasted about 3 mins ; > )
Voila! Now we have clean counters!... and a clean spot in the kitchen floor.

Here a few things we have been up to at 'school' lately.

Large motor activity while learning to count by two's.

This started out as learning about perpendicular lines and planes (from out RightStart Math) But it ended up as building bridges. Fun for a moment. A little frustrating for a 4 and 2 year old.

I think this counts as school. Vocab? Reading?

Walking on homemade stilts made from baby formula canisters. We have are now on unit 4 of My Father's World Kindergarten. We are starting the Apple unit now.

Being spring we are noticing lots of water fountains lately. While we were at English Gardens, we got the idea that we could try to build our very own water fall!

So that is what we did today! They spent hours reconstructing it until the water fell just right. Well, I think it will be an on going project. It really is all about the process, not the finished product!