Hester Happenings

We started learning about other planets this past week. First up-Mercury. We watched these two videos to start our study. The first one is a song and the second is an informational video.  The Bible verse we are focusing on for the next couple of week is: Psalm 19:1- The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of his hands. The kids first colored a picture of Mercury- you can find it here . The next day we did the first craft. We painted Mercury with all the craters. First I cut out circles on black construction paper and used brown and white paint. The kids used a toothbrush to 'fling' paint onto their Mercury cut-outs.   For a science experiment we created Mercury out of salt dough. The recipe we used was: 1 cup of flour 1/4 cup of salt 1 tsp. oil (we used vegetable) 1/4 cup of water Once the dough was made, we created small flat Mercuries. The kids collected rocks outside and threw them at their Mercury to create craters. After our M...

After we learned about the sun, we moved to learning about the moon. We watched this video by Story Bots. We then read from the National Geographic book about the moon. We read that the moon does not shine by itself, it reflects the light from the sun. So we went into the bathroom, turned off the light, and used flashlights to reflect light off of the mirror.  Next we read a poem about the moon and colored a picture. Next we discussed the craters on the moon and how they were formed when meteorites and asteroids hit the moon. Naomi and Isaiah collected rocks from outside while I prepped the 'moon'. I put a good layer of flour in the bottom of a baking pan. We put the pan on the floor and the kids dropped a rocks onto the surface of the moon. We took the rocks out of the flour and noticed that we had made craters. Here is where I got this idea.  For phonics we focused on the 'oo' pattern. Isaiah colored pictures and matched the words. Naomi worked on writing words with t...

We started our study of Space with the Sun. We first read Genesis 1:14-19 and talked about how God created the Sun and the Moon. We then watched this very cute video made by Story Bots. If you haven't seen this show on Netflix, I highly recommend it! I ordered this book off of Amazon and we read the portions about the sun together. Next we read a poem about the sun and they colored a picture of the sun. For Math, we sorted pictures of the Sun, Moon, and Earth. Naomi and Isaiah took turns counting how many of each object we had. Isaiah continued counting, while Naomi started to add. How many Suns and Moons are there? How many Moons and Earths are there? Very cute activity that you can find here .  For phonics Naomi and I played this game to practice CVC words. We each drew 5 cards and tried to find a place to put them that made an actual word. We were able to play this game a couple of times! I was very surprised at how much fun Naomi had playing this! When we were finished playing...

Hi everyone! It's been a very long time since I last posted on here...5 years to be exact! I thought it would be fun to pick back up the family blog so those near and far can keep up with us a little better.  A couple of weeks ago I decided that I wanted to continue some sort of learning through the summer with the kids. I just wanted to keep some normalcy with our schedule and to keep Naomi practicing the skills she learned in Kindergarten. I asked both of the kids what they would like to learn during 'mommy school' and the ideas ranged from unicorns to trucks. After a couple of discussions the kids decided on space and dinosaurs. Shockingly enough, I honestly had nothing to do with their topics! I really wanted them to pick something they were interested in without any input from me. Since the last unit I taught for school was space, I think Naomi was intrigued by that!  The first thing I did was plan and get supplies. I got both Naomi and Isaiah a composition noteboo...