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...