Wowed by Water

We were gone for several days, so that's why you maybe noticed a lack in blog posts here. We returned home late Monday night, and yesterday was spent catching up on all those things one has to catch up when she has been away from the house for an extended period of time. But we're now back to our regularly scheduled events and we just finished up our unit on W: Water.

Here are a few highlights from our lessons:

We first talked about how "Jesus gives my spirit living water to drink" and I did my best to explain what that means. We read the story from John 4:6-14 in which Jesus tells a woman that He has living water to give her. It's not an easy concept for a 5 year old and an almost 3 year old, but I think they came away with a basic understanding of what that meant.

We learned about water as a liquid and how it doesn't matter what container it is in, it will always change its shape to match the container's shape.

We also learned about water as a solid and a gas. We did a variety of experiments to demonstrate these properties.
Not pictured: we took two ice cubes, placed one in a bowl in the refrigerator and the other one we placed in a bowl out in the sunshine. We first observed how the solid water maintained its shape in the bowl, unlike the liquid state. We then observed how long it took for each ice cube to become liquid.

For our water-as-a-gas demonstration, we watched how water evaporates when it boils. We watched all of the water evaporate out of our pan and discussed how it became water vapor in the air.

Each day we charted other items that fit into the categories of "Liquid", "Solid", and "Gas".

A final property of water that we discussed was the ability for some things to dissolve in water. I demonstrated this by showing how salt, when mixed into water, seems to disappear. Oil, on the other hand, when poured into water, remains separate no matter how much you try to stir it up.

I also decided to do a basic study on the Earth's water cycle. I know the vocabulary for this is a bit large for a kindergartner's brain, and my husband even remarked how he thought it was great that I was teaching our 5 year old words like "evaporation" and "condensation", but I was surprised at how well Madison actually went along with it. She was practicing her new word, "condensation" all day yesterday!
The kids colored pages and made them into a book, and we also did a couple experiments to go along with it (see above for the evaporation experiment).
(The pages for the water cycle book came from http://www.kidzone.ws/water/index.html)

To demonstrate condensation, I heated up some water and poured into a clear water bottle. I then covered the bottle opening with an ice cube. We could really see the condensation forming on the inside of the bottle. Now, according to a book I had, we were also supposed to see "fog" inside the bottle, but I just couldn't seem to get that to work for us. We tried the experiment several times, altering it slightly each time, and we could never get the fog effect. Not a big deal though, we just moved on.

This is a great nonfiction book that is packed with information about water and bath time. It had many water experiments and activities to try, one being the "fog attempt", described above.

We read "Make Way for Ducklings" by Robert McCloskey and talked about why water is important to animals like ducks. We also did a Math worksheet called "How Many Ducks in the Pond?"
(worksheet from http://www.tlsbooks.com/ducksinpond2.pdf)

We read "Little Walrus Warning" by Carol Young and made our foam letter "w" into a walrus.
(idea from http://totallytots.blogspot.com/2010/05/now-i-know-my-abcs-w-is-for-walrus.html)