Curriculum and book reviews, faith, homeschooling and more!
is currently being celebrated.
Should you like to know more about this go check it out over here.
Great Books Week 2011 is honoring Great Expectations in its 150th anniversary year. It’s a haunting classic, with a host of funny, memorable characters and a thought-provoking plot.
Carnival of Homeschooling is posted.
Today was an excellent day overall.
The lad came out to talk with me while I cared for my rabbits. And then we talked over breakfast, we read
World History
10 minute Stories
We prepared for Renee to come over with her children. We planned to do some science and then go off of a nature walk. When the children arrived they really really wanted to play with some baby bunnies so we headed outside to do that. We had a spot of lunch to eat and then did some art science.
We experimented with wetting down paper and then seeing what happen when we dropped thinned paint on it. And that taught us about diffusion. 🙂
We then sprinkled dry paint over a pan of water and then put dry paper over the powder paint. it was fascinating to watch what adding the paint did to the surface tension of the water.
We varied the length that we let the paper sit in the water to see what that would with how the paper reacted. It was VERY interesting to see what happened. I did neglect to take pictures of some the results from the children but i did get this one.
Looks rather cool eh?
After the children left we watched a thing on Sound that Aurora was doing through Supercharged science. We made a hornet and a harmonica. I was unable to capture of pic of J using the hornet, but here’s the harmonica we made. 🙂
Earlier during the day we made some yellow jacket traps since we got inundated with yellow jackets today. 
Take a pop bottle, cut off the top. Mix up some basic lemonade, invert the top (normally I’d secure it but this one seemed to sit on really well) set it somewhere near the hornets and just wait. If you see a hornet crawling around inside speed up the process by CAREFULLY squirling the liquid around.
as you can see…..highly effective (after 1 hour).
i found this article interesting.
I’ll need to reexplain things to the lad.
this is not the one we caught, just a pic off the internet.
Due to a caught praying mantis, and wondering if we could keep it, this question was raised: What do praying mantis eat?
We found an answer here.
The diet of a praying mantis most often includes various species of insects – including mosquitoes, flies, grasshoppers, beetles, butterflies, moths, spiders, roaches, bees, dragonflies, etc. Other than these insects, some praying mantis species also feed on lizards, frogs, rodents and birds. Almost all the species of mantis feed on insects, but those which can grow up to a length of 10-12 cm are generally the ones who take on birds, rodents and other creatures of their own size.
So, no, we can’t keep it as it will eat our crickets. We released it to our rose of sharon bush.
How can you tell a girl from a boy?
The difference between a male and female praying mantis is that the female is larger and the abdominal is larger than a males abdomanal.
Adult female Mantises are larger than adult males. That’s one way to tell them apart.
I need to show this to the lad. I thought it was very cool.
Felting….today my lad learned to felt at the Art Museum of London. They have a homeschool art program there.
the program he attended was called
Never Felt Better Children will learn the sculptural technique of wet felting, in which crisscrossed layers of wool are dampened with warm soapy water and agitated by rubbing and rolling, and will experiment with felting around a form to make three dimensional pieces.
about 20 children all told. Some of us parents chose to help. Good thing we did or the singleton teacher would not have coped particularly well with that many students.
The lad had a hoot.
He at first didn’t much like his snake, but later he was quite intrigued by it.
He does DISLIKE intensely the mat that he made. “it doesn’t look like anything mommy”. So we may end up throwing it out.
It was a good experience for us. Next time we’ll try to get there a bit earlier so parking isn’t so expensive.
the next one we’ll go to will be on book binding.