Favorite school projects so far this year?

[NanceXToo]

Have your kids done any fun/interesting projects that they've really enjoyed or been excited about this year?

 

We've just completed our 3rd official week of school for the year, but so far for 5th grade:

 

My daughter is absolutely LOVING Environmental Science. So far she's made a really cool mural of a forest, using different media (colored pencils, construction paper cutouts, craft leaves, magazine cutouts, even some cotton like material to glue onto a magazine rabbit's tail) and she included living and non-living things, then later went back and added in some human activities. She had fun with that.

 

We also buried a bunch of things in our yard yesterday after reading about decomposers. In 3 weeks, we're to uncover them and see if and how they've changed. Things like: An orange peel, an apple core, a quarter, a piece of styrofoam, a plastic baggie, a plastic spoon, and a piece of lettuce.

 

For social studies, she's made a wooden sailboat, made her own compass, made a diorama of Jamestown and a paper bag Pocahontas puppet. She's also been tracking her shadow stick (measuring the length of a stick's shadow once a week at the same time of day, after six weeks she's got to chart the differences).

 

Those have been her favorite things so far.

 

Next week we'll be making and trying "hardtack" (social studies) and making a simple "worm bin" (science). (Ick)! :)

 

She tells me that science is her favorite subject, followed by reading, and then math (she loves math and looks forward to it now that we've started using TT)! But I think she's been enjoying most of social studies, too- even though OM assigns a fair amount of writing assignments for social studies this year (kind of an integrated social studies/language arts curriculum). My daughter is actually MUCH better this year, though, I've noticed, about doing writing assignments independently. So that's a very good thing!

 

I do love how many hands on kind of things she gets to do in OM even in these "middle school" years! And the writing assignments are usually interesting and she gets a choice of things to write about.

 

So, what are the favorites in your house so far?