Horn Homeschool: Week 9

Wow, I am ridiculously behind on these homeschool posts! In case you're interested, I'll be posting these on a side box from now on so you can find them easily.

For week 9, we skipped a few letters in our alphabet progression and fast-forwarded ahead to F so we could learn about FALL.

Studying fall in October in Ohio accorded itself to some instant visual learning opportunities. Here are the highlights of our funnest fall learning moments:

• Fall Hike. We have a plethora of amazing hiking trails in our community. A national park is almost literally in our backyard and our county park system is seriously impressive. It was a no-brainer to incorporate a leaf-and-acorn-gathering hike into our school week. And we all got some exercise to boot! When we got home we used a tree field guide to identify a few of the most common trees in our area by their leaves.
  
• Leaf Crafts. There are countless leafy fun activities splattered on the internet. It was hard to choose which to do! Of course we did the classic leaf-rubbing because no childhood would be complete without a little leaf-rubbing. We also painted over leaves with watercolors, did an autumn tree paper-tearing craft, laminated a few of our favorite leaves and painted paper-bag cut outs of leaf shapes. The paper bag leaves turned out great and are now decorating the border of our November calendar.
  
• Photosynthesis and leaf color change. Truthfully, I wasn't quite sure I understood why leaves change color in the fall so this part of our study was slightly intimidating. One science-y book I grabbed from the library put all the pieces together well and smacked me upside the head with its common sense. Another DUH moment for teacher-mommy! In the process of making their own food, plants use chloroplasts as the food making factory. Chloroplasts are made of chlorophyll which is GREEN. When fall rolls around, the tree goes into energy-conservation mode and no longer needs to produce any new food. It sort of hibernates. Since it's not making food, the chloroplasts are no longer needed in the leaves. And the leaves themselves are no longer needed. As the chloroplasts "die", the green goes out of the leaves and an identifying color remains. There's a lot more science in that part about the color but I won't go there. Because I don't understand it. I taught the kids a very basic watered down version of photosynthesis using the awesome amazing Here Comes Science cd by They Might Be Giants. There's an entire track devoted to photosynthesis. And you've NOT experienced cuteness until you've heard my darling Clive sing the word photosynthesis.
  
• Seasons Demonstration. We usually have some kind of Bible time during our homeschooling day so in line with our fall studies, we read appropriate Bible stories. (We use the Egermeier Bible Storybook which is unusually complete for a children's Bible and includes strikingly beautiful painted illustrations.) I also set up a demonstration to show Chloe why the seasons occur. I took some yarn and created an oval shaped orbit on the living room floor. Then I stood in the center of the circle and acted out the sun's role while Chloe held our globe and slowly walked in orbit around me. Using a globe makes this demo work easily since globes all have the 23.5 degree tilt of the earth built in. For it's the tilt that makes the seasons happen (details here). Chloe really got into it and I think she mostly understood the concept! She even did a little teaching session later that night to help explain seasons to Clive and daddy.
  
• Autumn Leaf song. Songs and poems are magic teaching tools with my kiddos. I stole this one from our library story time and it was a perfect fit! (Sing to the tune of London Bridge)
  
  Autumn leaves are falling down, falling down, falling down,
  Autumn leaves are falling down, all around us
  
  Red and yellow, orange and brown, orange and brown, orange and brown
  Red and yellow, orange and brown, all around us
  
  Take a rake and rake them up, rake them up, rake them up
  Take a rake and rake them up, all around us
  
  Make a pile and jump right in, jump right in, jump right in
  Make a pile and jump right in, all around us
  
  [We then proceeded to rake up our leaves and jump in the pile. Fall fun-nity AND I got a household task done. Homeschooling = Awesome]