Clay Academy: China, Weeks 25 and 26

I have to say, I was glad to see our China travels come to a close. The subject matter itself was fine and had the potential to be really fun, but it was just a tough couple of weeks for us. I had more cake orders than normal, Annlee had her oral surgery, our science was just a hodge podge of various things, and it just seemed like I was in a funk the whole time. I told myself that we just had to get through it and then we could move on and it would be better. (We are now one week into our Japan studies and it's been TONS better! Everyone has recovered from their surgeries, bad attitudes, etc., lol)
So, China! We made Chinese paper lanterns and hung them in the dining room for decoration. Here is Annlee showing hers off the day after her surgery, bless her heart.

We had made stamps because China was where the printing press first originated. We used those stamps to decorate our lanterns.

We built our own version of the Great Wall of China. This was a lot of fun! The girls love any kind of craft and they were anticipating doing this one for days leading up to it! Of course, now that we've built it, I'm kinda wondering where to keep it...

We added to our languages of Asia worksheet. The girls love taking turns looking up the official country languages online.

We read The Story of Ping and did quite a few activities to go along with the book. I had found a site online with all this all prepared so I just had to print it off. They did graphing exercises, word searches, and this story sequencing activity.

I looked up online to find out how to write each of their names in Chinese and they copied them for their lapbooks.

We learned all about Chinese New Year thanks to a friend of ours who is a public school teacher and has been sharing her extra Scholastic booklets with us! This one fit in perfectly with our lessons! Thank you Renee!

We read a book about tangrams, a shape puzzle that originated in China. We made our own and they practiced making various animals as I read. Please excuse the dirty table in the picture with Maryella. That was from our salt experiments that I'll get to in a bit.

We studied how to eat with chopsticks and practiced picking up mini marshmallows. The girls thought this was awesome!

And naturally, practicing with chopsticks led up to our Chinese meal at home! This is the part I had been looking forward too! Mmm, Chinese food!

Everyone used chopsticks to the best of their abilities, lol!

Maryella requested mooncakes for dessert. She had learned about those from watching Kai-lan on tv. Jeff asked and they said that mooncakes are a fall treat, but they had other things that were very similar. Maryella was satisfied and LOVED them! Can you tell?

Here are our lapbooks we made for China. We just couldn't make everything fit the way we wanted to so that chopstick booklet is sort of hanging our in the middle. It works though.

I usually have them draw pictures of various facts we learn about the countries we study. I love seeing how these turn out! Here are Kaylin's to include in her lapbook.

As I said earlier, our science was sort of all over the place for these weeks. During the second week though, we began a 3 week study on oceans. Most of that will be a part of the next post from Japan, but we did do a few fun experiments with salt water during this week.
We saw how an egg will sink in tap water but floats after adding (A LOT) of salt.

We also started an experiment making salt crystals. We were able to watch the water evaporate over the course of a couple weeks and the salt left crystals on the string. Here are the first couple of days. It didn't take long to see some action!

You'll have to wait until the next post to see the final results! It was pretty cool!

St. Patrick's Day fell during this time, but it was on a Sunday. I hated to make them do any "real" work, so instead they did some color pages, word search, and crossword puzzles while they ate some gold (chocolate) coins and listened to me read the history of the day.

Maryella is still enjoying a variety of reading spots. Her pick for this week seemed to be spralled out across the dining room table. I am seriously willing to try almost anything to get her to enjoy reading. Ugh!