Painting the Periodic Table of Elements!

Wonderful Wednesday was the continuation of our Periodic Table of Elements board we are making.  We began working on this large project last week.  Today, the kids painted their periodic table according to the color scheme of Basher's The Periodic Table: Elements with Style! book.  We hope to finish up the final PTE boards next Wednesday!  They are going to look so cool when they are done!
Our dress up this week was regarding our history sentence about immigrants flocking to America.  We went a little politically incorrect by dressing up as an Italian mobster.  I couldn't resist!  We had some great fun with this costume.  Sarah wore it for the whole day - to the grocery, the Church and Bible study.  It was quite a hit everywhere we went.  She said she wanted to keep it on to encourage people to use their imaginations.  We had the kids each tell what their heritage was, and what generation immigrated to America in their family.  I loved this theme and the opportunity it gave to talk about heritage, family, stereotypes and history.

Our own melting pot of costumed immigrants began their day by reviewing our memory work, and having fun singing along to the timeline as they did their hand motions.  We always begin the timeline at the first week and go all the way through to the current week - it's a great way to review and practice our hand motions each week together.  The timeline is one of the hardest pieces of memory work to Memory Master (along with the math) -so it's good to review it in it's entirety over and over again.   

We began by reviewing what we've learned about atoms, molecules and the Periodic Table of Elements.  I used some additional analogies that I found in the Fizz, Bubble & Flash!: Element Explorations & Atom Adventures for Hands-On Science Fun! (Williamson Kids Can!) book.  I loved their analogy of the Orchestra and it's families/sections and the PTE layout - it's a great classical tie together of the Orchestra and our Science.  They also had a neat analogy regarding floors in a house and the electron shells.  I shared them both with our group.  There are some great experiments we will be also doing in the coming weeks.  It's a super little book that I highly recommend for elementary aged kids!  

Next we headed to our boards that they assembled the previous week (pre-painted white with kilz) and the kids mixed their own versions of the PTE rows' colors to match our Basher key.  They came out really good and each is slightly different.

While some of the kids finished painting, all the other kiddos headed over to play the Quick Six elements game together and then it was time for our immigrant themed snack!  Today was Indian Chai Tea and Sev mamra and some Italian olives!  

The day ended with a rocket review game!

All in all, it was a Wonderful Wednesday!  We hope yours was Wonderful too!