Stormy March

Today we began a two week unit focused around spring and Easter. Somehow, I ended up with a copy of a wonderful, out of print children's book called "The Story of Easter for Children" by Beverly Rae Wiersum. It begins by describing spring and the coming of new life, and then it ties spring and all of the Easter symbols into a beautiful description of how Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus and his gift of new life. So, we are going to use the book as a starting point to discuss the coming of spring, Easter eggs and new life, and, most importantly, Jesus' death and resurrection. If we have time, we'll also look at some of the other Easter symbols.

Because of our rainy, stormy weather today, I decided to focus today's lessons around rain and the water cycle. I found some wonderful ideas at http://first-school.ws/activities/science/drippy.htm, including links to a story about "Drippy the raindrop" and several good coloring pages at Kidzone.

We started by reading the Easter story, and then talking about spring rains washing the snow away. Then, we looked at the story of Drippy and discussed the water cycle. Hannah learned the word "rain," and practiced writing it several times. She also drew a picture of rain on the paper.

To illustrate the concept of the water cycle, we used one of the suggested activities at First School, soaking cotton-ball clouds with water and watching them "rain" into a bowl. The kids loved doing it again and again!

Then, I continued the illustration using the wonderful Kidzone worksheets. I boiled water in a teapot to show the four stages: evaporation, condensation (on the lid), precipitation and collection (water dripping from the lid and falling back into the teapot). Then, the kids colored the corresponding worksheet pages. They seemed so excited, and even Ben understood at a two-year-old level. He kept telling me over and over that water is "old" because it keeps going up and down, instead of being newly created water.


Hannah was very proud of her finished work. Her fine motor skills (writing and coloring) are improving every day!