Flowers and Chocolate

I decided last night that I would save blogging both Wednesday's and Thursday's activities for today. The majority of our Easter and Spring activities are centered around Bible and Science and so two days easily combined into one post.

On Wednesday our theme was "seeds/flowers"    

Our Bible verse was Romans 8:21
       That the creation itself will be set free from it's slavery to corruption ( sin) into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

We first read the verse together and then I asked the kids what they thought the verse meant. I was surprised that they were able to figure out the meaning so easily after just reading the verse but we used the illustration I made for our theme anyway. I began by reviewing how a seed grows using a few simple pictures I drew the night before. I then showed them another set of pictures. The first of the second set was a flower pot with a cut out view of 3 seeds which I wrote their initials in.I asked them to imagine they were the seeds, the flower pot the Earth. They could imagine that the dirt was sin. The second pot was a picture with the same but in addition I included the spout of a watering can and instead of drops of water I drew hearts with crosses into the middle to symbolizing Jesus pouring his love out for us on the cross. The last picture was of 3 stick figures with flower petal outfits symbolizing that when Christ poured out his love for us we were able to break free from our sin and become beautiful creations, pleasing to God because of Christ. We also discussed how we try not to sin, not because we are afraid to be punished but because Jesus' act was one of love and we are showing love for him when we do what we know is right.

A picture of the drawings I did to explain the verse. You could also work this to fit the parable of the sower/seed

Fromm there we moved on to science where we continued our focus on the scientific method. Being that the focus was seeds/flowers we did an experiment with wildflowers. We are trying to find out which type of water will be best for growing our flowers; tap, a sugar water solution, a salt water solution, or a vinegar water solution. I gave the kids 4 small flower pots each to begin with, we labeled them and each child then painted theirs. We watered accordingly. We will be monitoring them for the next few weeks. 

All of the supplies we used this week were from things we already had but the few things I did purchase were all dollar store purchases( like the sugar and salt) and were used for more than one experiment this week.

Additional Latin word for Wednesday was Flos meaning flower.

Today. Thursday!

I can not tell you how excited the kids were for today to come because they knew that Thursdays activities somehow included chocolate Easter bunnies.

So I happened to find this amazing bible lesson using chocolate Easter bunnies this weekend when I was getting our work ready for the week. You can find it here:   http://lois-graham.com/bible-lessons-from-a-chocolate-rabbit/

It compares our spirituality as Christians to that of  a hollow or solid chocolate rabbit. I did change a little bit of the wording when I went over it with the kids but it was great. The kids were able to cut into their rabbits at the end of the lesson to find out if they had solid or hollow rabbits. 

In science we did two experiments. In the first experiment we compared how fast we could melt a piece of chocolate in our mouth using 3 methods. The first was to just let the chocolate sit in their mouth, the second- to swish it back and forth, and the third to actually suck on the chocolate. It was not difficult to predict which one would win but the idea was to get them using the scientific method format and write it out. 

Just to show that this is again the same document, I have just changed the title, image, and supply list and updated it for our lesson.

Science is fun!

For our second experiment we tested which four environmental factors/ locations would create the white speckles you see on chocolate -  a sign that the sugar and fat have separated.  You can find out more about how to do these experiments  and more on   http://www.ehow.com/info_7973926_chocolate-science-projects.html

and also http://www.sciencekids.co.nz/experiments/chocolate.html

You can check out the 3 minute video we watched on the science of chocolate here:

http://www.sciencekids.co.nz/videos/chemistry/chocolate.html

Our Latin word of the day was cuniculus which is a rabbit

So that was the end of our week. We do not school on Fridays but I hope you will hop on back next week when we will be learning about Passover and a few other goodies.