School Starts Tomorrow: Weather Tracking

Tomorrow is our first day back to school. We do lessons maybe a little bit different than some others do. Mondays and Fridays are for reading, art, music, sign language, exam day, catch up, review, and DJ does his blog writing. Tuesdays are Science plus Math, Language Arts, Handwriting, and Spelling. Wednesday is History plus the others, and Thursday is Health plus the others. I do it this way so that we are not doing Science, History and Health every single day. It is just too much, and I don't think they retain as much information. We have a chock full year planned, and I hope I didn't plan for too much.

Since tomorrow is Tuesday that means it is Science day, and we will be jumping right in with weather tracking. We have a reading exercise with questions, and then a simple experiment. If you would like to do the weather tracking experiment it is simple enough. First talk about the season you are currently in, and predict what you think the weather will be like for the next 21 days. Write down your thoughts for future reference. For the next 21 days record in a notebook the following data: temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed, amount of precipitation, and amount of clouds visible. This is the collection part of your experiment. After 21 days analyze your data, and compare it to what you thought the weather would be like. Then make a conclusion as to whether your predicted correctly, and what the actual facts of the weather tracking shows. This is not a difficult experiment and takes only a few minutes out of each day. Try it, and tell me if you liked it.

Below are two short videos, one that explains how a thermometer works and the other explains barometric pressure, and its relation to temperature. The Weather Channel also has a great website geared directly towards children learning weather. There is also Weather Wiz Kids. We are also starting week one of our Reuse and Recycle lesson. It is a four week class. Tomorrow we will be reusing milk jugs to make bird feeders and a bird house. If we don't get to it tomorrow it will be done on Friday.

Lesson Plans For Tuesday September 7, 2010:

DJ:
Reading Comprehension
Science: Week 1 Reuse and Recycle, weather tracking, read pages 4-9 of Weather book.
Math: Addition, subtraction, plane figures, fractions
Language Arts: Common nouns
Writing: Main ideas and details in pictures
Handwriting


Caitlin:
Science: Week one of Recycle and Reuse, weather tracking
Printing Practice
Site Words: List one
Math: Addition
Language Arts: Beginning sounds, short O, blends-bl
Matching by size and shape: Worksheet
Calendar and clock work: This is a repeating daily activity for Caitlin.