Today the Protons explored the primary color blue! After reading “What Color is Your World?”, the chiclren created an oceanic collage out of a variety of blue materials for our mermaid puppet. The children too part in a sensory filled project involving lots of shaving cream, a spattering of food coloring, and a little bit of handy-dandy finger painting to create a truly collaborative and uniquely homeschooled-rendition of a mythical mermaid puppet. Afterwords, the children gathered around to read “A Balloon for Blunderbuss”, by Bob Gillman. We listened to classical music and had a great time.
In the Quarks first Writer’s Workshop, we talked about alphabet letters, where they came from, what they are good for, and how they are used to form unique words both large and small. The children explored the unique combinations of letter sin each of their names and discussed the differences and similarities in each. After reading “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom” interspersed with much laughter, the children worked with a mystery box of alphabet letters, then decorated their own name cards with photos, glitter glue, and collage fun.During Drama, the Quarks began with an exercise by playing the “Name Game.”  Each child came up with a sound or action (or both) to go with their name.  They went around the circle and learned each child’s name and corresponding sound/action and were challenged to repeat back all of the learned names with each addition.  This was followed by a friendly game of “Freeze.”  The children walked, wiggled, jumped and snapped around the room until they heard the word “freeze.”  When they heard freeze, they froze in the first round, then on later rounds high-fived, shook hands, made a shape with their arms or legs, and said their favorite color.  Finally we set up the puppet theatre and played a game with the puppets the children made last week.  Each child acted out the puppet’s character and the class tried to guess what the puppet was.  We had, among other things, a dancer, a dinosaur, a bird, and Mr. Nobody.
The Electrons and Neutrons quietly worked on the cataloguing of their adventures, thoughts, and creative pondering during our “Journal Day”. Once they were through, the Neutrons talked about the relationships between primary and secondary colors, how they compliment one another, and how they can be combined to created wholly new colors of their own creation. They drew self portraits which were pained with tones and shades of single colors, and the children listed various colors they created by mixing colors, tones, and shades.
The Neutrons started Science by labeling the branches of a large tree with the different fields of scientific research and study.  We started by discussing the four major branches of science including Physical Science, Living Science (Biology), Earth Science and Social/Applied Science.  The children then broke down each category into specific areas of science.  Next, we investigated chemistry by creating invisible ink using some common household items to create a chemical reaction.  We sprayed ammonia on paper towels to make our ink reappear and experimented with gases by blowing (carbon dioxide) on the towels to make the ink disappear faster. The Electrons tested various substances to determine whether they were acids or bases using red cabbage juice as an indicator.
During Drama, the Electrons played charades, walked on stilts, and juggled with scarves. During Charades, some of the children thought it would be funny to act out an “inanimate” object, to see if people could guess what they were. One of the more popular guesses was, “Someone who’s been knocked out!!”, as it turns out, it was a loaf of bread! The children all took turns building up their proficiency with the use of stilts. Although the stilts were completely new to some people, everyone was up and walking at lofty heights with a little bit of trial and error. This collaborative effort was impressive to watch, as some of the more experienced “stilt-walkers” were able to share some techniques with the those who were a little less experienced. At the end of drama we attempted to juggle with scarves. This proved to be a difficult task, but one by one we got our scarves around once or twice. Some of the children took the scarves home to practice their skills. We may have some scarf jugglers on our hands soon enough.

Mr. Nobody, Circus Skills & The Invisible Ink