Milky Way

The recent trouble with Blogger has involved the system spontaneously posting incomplete entries (I am sure I hit some odd combo of keys without knowing it) AND it not allowing me to edit.

Thus, my blog sucks.

So, when you finish reading this, just scroll to the post below.

Gee whiz.

Lesson today involved the solar system. I focused on just a few key notes:

1. Our solar system in located on an arm of the galaxy the Milky Way.

2. The Sun is the "center" of our solar system and the planets revolve around the sun. Earth takes 365 days which makes a year. Jupiter (for comparison) takes 11+ years.

3. Earth rotates on its axis which takes 24 hours, thus day and night (we discussed this at length, because our lesson was born from Alya's inquiry this morning as to why the sun came up again, which, we have discussed ad nauseum, but, a little hands on demonstrations with our solar system model surely helped).

Sure, we discussed other things, but we kept it simple because most of the lesson was the kids rotating and revolving the planets and getting a feel for what happens in space.

The kids practiced some writing today (rest assured this is injected into every lesson) and worked some educational puzzles. We are doing a lot of tracing and mazes and fun things to work on holding the pencil properly AND writing in general.

We finished up with one of their library books, which, mentions that Great Wall. I love when I can find a way to tie something that seems unrelated into our lesson. I adore the picture of Ben having his snack between hands on time and writing time.

We wrapped the morning with some superhero play and the two are watching their post lunch cartoons while I post.

Later!