52x2/2013, everyday life, freebies, home free

President’s Week {aka 8/52/2013}

Presidents' Week Trays
We had lots of fun with presidents’ week, and it gave us an opportunity to work on our coin skills, since they happen to feature many of them.

Branches of the US Government.The kids made a tree featuring the three branches of our government and sorted who’s involved in and the responsibilities of each branch.

While we were talking about our country, I thought it was a great time to introduce the nesting geography blocks I made up.
nestinggeographyblocks

They started out life as these. I spray painted them and drew up silhouettes on my computer and used my vinyl cutter to make the geography decals.
Geography Nesting Blocks

Molly played with them for hours on end all week, building and stacking and nesting.
Nesting Geography

While we are on the topic of building, we learned about simple structures and Molly decided to demonstrate a load bearing post and lintel construction that she came up with.
Post and Lintel

Followed by some excellent presidential poetry. {disclaimer: Thomas doesn’t think that the president is a snake or an egg, they are just words that he thought of that started with those letters and that he could spell on his own. ;)}
Presidential Poetry

I made up these US Currency Nomenclature Cards to help the kids conceptualize some features of our coins. They actually had a great time working these together, which was unexpected and lovely. {psst, download them for yourself below!}
US Currency Nomenclature Cards
Screen Shot 2013-02-17 at 8.12.31 PM
US Currency Nomenclature Cards

We also conducted the “Many Penny Experiments“. We discussed what solution would make a penny look the newest. I even threw in ketchup, which they thought was hyesterical, which also turned out to work smashingly well. 😉
The Many Penny Experiments.

We baked cupcakes and sang happy birthday to George Washington on Friday. He would have been 281 years old.
Singing Happy Birthday and blowing out the candles.
8/52/Portrait - Happy Birthday, Mr. President!
Happy Birthday, Mr. President. {We are not only home free, but we are full of surprises with our reigniting candles.}

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