Cloudy Day

TURN THE PAGE: In one of my email inboxes I received a cute calendar project from the folks at Scout Creative. It was a monster mash up calendar with options for different head, bodies and arms - perfect for the kids to mix and match.

These things are NOT easy to put together - so many tiny tabs and precision cuts. But they're pretty darn cute when all is said and done.

GREY BLANKET:Dawn brought what looked to be a sunny day. Fortunately, we got outside early and I mowed while the kids and Kirby played in the yard. But by late morning the clouds were rolling in and come noontime, we even had some rain. That reminded me, I'd picked up a book about clouds at the library, so we busted it out and got busy.

It was super short and simple science book - simply titled "Clouds" (by Marion Dane Bauer with illustrations by John Wallace). In this primary book, there were never more than two sentences per page. But sometimes simple translates into easier to remember, and that was the case with this book. In fact, before we read it, I flipped through every page and asked the kids questions about what I saw on each page. Like, on page 8 it asked, "Can you walk in a cloud?" CJ immediately said 'no,' in a tone that let me know he though it was a silly question. Annabelle thought about it for a moment before thinking to say, 'fog.' I also asked them to name types of clouds and though we've studied it before, they both drew a blank. And so, we read the book. Afterward, I asked them the same questions I had before reading, and they got them all right this time. Much better.

While we were reading, the sky had heavy gray blanket of stratus clouds. By late afternoon, we found a mixed bag overhead. CJ and Annabelle had no trouble potting cirrus, cumulous and stratus clouds in the Seattle sky. (And they even remembered that cirrus clouds are made of ice crystals, hence their white, wispy appearance.) At one point, they both spotted a cirrus cloud that they thought looked like a number four.To augment our cloud study, we hopped to BrainPop and watched their video about clouds. It was basically a review of what we'd just read. The kids took a BrainPOP quiz about clouds (they scored 90 percent). Frankly, I thought that was pretty good considering a fair number of questions on the test weren't covered by the video.

While on BrainPOP we discover they've added a "Gameup" section where, as one might presume, there are educational game to be played. We were pretty happy to discover that, of course. As it turns out these games are necessarily native to BrainPOP - we recognized a couple of them from other sites - but it's nice to have them collected at BrainPOP.

We started with a game called "Dig It" from Calculation Nation. It dealt with fractions, which is perfect since that's what their current math assignments are about. And speaking of math ...

MATH = PAIN: Today while completing their assignments, the kids both started complaining about their hands hurting. I thought that was sooooo laaaaaaame and told them so. I finally stopped what I was doing and walked across to the island where they were painstakingly coloring in 2 out of 5 parts, or 7 out of 9 parts and so on. CJ, especially, was doing a painstakingly perfect job of it. I told them to knock that stuff right off. "This isn't a coloring exercise, it's about math!" I reminded them. And then I showed them how to make Xs or cross hatches or anything other than the blackout approach. Much better.