Sixth Month. First Week. First Day.

Holy heck. Six months of home schooling! Half a year! Crazy. I'm kind of having a blast though, so no complaints here.

In Math today, Babe started learning how to tell time. She can somewhat already do this, but today we sat and actually learned about each hand of the clock and the numbers, etc. Apparently in Kindergarten all she needs to know is how to tell the hour, so today we worked on that. She understood this with ease, and did the worksheet in a flash. Then I practiced with her using the analog clock teaching tool and she got every hour correct.

We moved on to Reading Comprehension where Babe added her first book to her Reading Log for February, "All to Build a Snowman" by Samuel Tang. Such a cute book. It even made Babe laugh out loud! I love when that happens. She summarized this very well and then we read the article at the end of the page about what to do in different types of weather.

We moved on to our first discussion of the month on...presidents! I briefly introduced Babe to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Barack Obama, telling her that these three men were and are presidents of our country. Then I got out a quarter and a penny and showed her each of the men on the coins.

"Is Barack Obama on any money?"

haha Cute. I told her that we pretty much have all of our money covered with other presidents.

Then I showed her a picture of all the presidents we have had, and had her point to Washington, Lincoln, and Obama. She was able to recognize each one! Then she counted each one. 44. I didn't even know that. So after our brief discussion, we headed outside to play and record today's weather.

I had Babe write three sentences about the weather. I told her to use two adjectives to describe the weather, what she was going to do in the weather, and the temperature by reading a thermometer.

"Today it is windy and sunny. I will jump rope. It is 82 degrees."

Perfect. Then we had playtime.

During playtime, she stood on her shadows from last week and I had her tell me what time it was (since we color coded each shadow and recorded the time with specific colors).

"It's 11 o'clock! My shadow now is on the orange shadow!"

Again, perfect.

Then I drew a big clock on the driveway, but left out the hands. I gave her red and blue pieces of chalk and had her draw in the hands to say 11:00. She did! I was very impressed! Then I let her really go play.

After lunch, Babe did her Science lesson on where rain comes from. The sky was looking pretty gross so I quickly helped her make a rain gauge with a paper cup. We ran outside and put it on the ground before there rain started.

We got back in and I set up a little experiment. She already knows that clouds are made out of water and that "the sun soaks up all the water and brings the water into the sky" but I figured a visual would help her better understand it.

I had her cut out a sun from yellow construction paper and I taped it to the microwave about the stove. I then told her I was going to pretend that a pot of water was a pool. I filled it with about a half inch of water and put the stove on high. Then I told Babe that when it gets really hot outside, the sun soaks up all the water (I left out the word "evaporate" to use in a future lesson). When the water in the pot started to boil, the steam started to come up and I asked Babe what that was.

"Smoke! It's hot!"

"Do you think it's water?"

"I don't think it is but I know it is."

hahahaha Wow. I totally understand her thinking though.

I showed Babe the lid to the pot and how dry it was. Then I held the pot lid over the pot, but didn't cover it. After about a minute, I showed Babe the lid.

"It's wet! It is water! I knew it was water."

I told her this is exactly what happens to the water in pools, lakes, rivers, and beaches. That the sun soaks it up when it's hot out, and that water goes into the sky and makes clouds. Then when the clouds are so full of water, they break and it rains.

I asked her what she thought would happen to the "pool" if all the water soaked up into the sky.

"Then there'd be no pool!"

It didn't take long before the half-inch of water evaporated, so I showed her the very dry pot. She was fascinated. She really liked that activity.

After the experiment, she wanted to go outside in the rain and check on her rain gauge.

Before we left for dance, I had her grab the gauge and tell me how much it rained.

She added a new sentence to today's weather report.

"It rained .5 inches."

And with that, our day was done (after Checkpoints and online Math games). It's supposed to rain some more this week so we will keep the gauge out and record the rainfall. Maybe if it rained more than two days, we will make a graph on Friday.