Delicious Fractions & Fun Geography Games

We had so many wonderful and fun lessons planned for today that we jut could not wait to get started.  I have found that incorporating any kind of candy into our school day makes it an immediate success!




We started our day by watching a few movies; Travel with Kids to Costa Rica and Popular Mechanics for Kids; Slither and Slime as part of our geography and science lessons for today.

Popular Mechanics for Kids - Slither & Slime and Other Yucky Things

We also read An Earthworm's Life.


But the best part of science was when we made our own slimy creatures by growing a gummy bear!

According to most sites I looked at; when placed in regular water overnight a gummy bear will grow and multiply in size, but one site found that the bear dissolved in water so we'll see what happens tomorrow I guess.

I found this great print- out for the boys to measure and trace the gummy bear before and after that explained the experiment too; I'm not one for worksheets usually but something about this one appealed to me so we used it today.  After just a few hours they excitedly called me over yelling "they're huge!"




For geography we also played a game of The Scrambled States of America.  The boys saw this game arrive in the mail yesterday and have been asking to play it; building anticipation is always a good thing!

They LOVED it.

It was a bit too hard for Evan so he teamed up with me for the first game and then he went to go play while we played two more games.  They had so much fun and it's a quick, easy game to play, as long as you can read.


We read the Hershey's Milk Chocolate Fraction Book and using real Hershey's bars had the kids demonstrate each of the fractions.


The best part was eating the candy bars when we were done!

twelfths
making thirds; then twelfths
We followed up that lesson with a fun fraction game.  I gave each of the older two boys some counters and a few dice.  They rolled the dice, made a fraction, found it on the board, and covered it up.  The one with the most fractions covered at the end wins.

Alec was thrilled when he won by one counter and Ian seemed consoled by the fact that he only lost by one.  I just loved hearing them work together to find each fraction and couldn't help but notice how far they've come in identifying fractions!

Fraction game
Here's mine!
 Evan played with the fraction tiles while they played the game.  All the boys ended up playing with the fraction tiles and geo-boards/ elastics for part of the morning just for fun. 






Geo- boards




I pulled out my book Success With Sight Words and went looking for fun activities and games to play with Evan today.   I'm hoping if the activity fun enough he might not even notice he's learning.


That's why I was thrilled to find Mom to Posh Lil Diva's blog all about fun sight word games! I honestly couldn't decide-- sight word twister, sight word musical chairs, the possibilities were endless!

We finally decided on musical chairs; write sight words on paper/ index cards and lay them in a circle on the floor.  While playing the music the kids walk, hop, crawl, etc. around the circle until the music stops and then they have to read the word closest to them.  In our game no one is ever out and everyone wins.

We played a few rounds until they seemed to get sick of it.

They were giggling, and had so much fun coming up with motions to do each time-- hopping, skipping, galloping, flapping their arms like a bird, crawling like a baby, commando crawling, sniffing like a dog; you name it & they probably tried it.  Evan seemed to pick up on a few of the words but we'll see how much he remembers next time we play. 


  
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