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Never Felt Better
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.
TOS birthday bash
Right now TOS is in the middle of their birthday bash. You really should go check it out. 🙂
And did you know that TOS is going to be going to an all digital format. they will be having one annual magazine that will be HUGE (like 300 pages), but they will be switching to a monthly digital magazine. If you want to see what their magazine is like, go check out the summer one for free. 🙂
overwhelmed? perhaps not any more
So I’ve been feeling panicky and overwhelmed at the thought of teaching my lad this year. I’m not feeling very organized or planned out or anything.
Hubby dear gave me the idea of planning our next day for 15-20 minutes the night before and I think I’ll be doing that. I’ve been a bit concerned about doing TOO Much planning as I know what I’m like what I get a list I just feel “argh” if I don’t complete everything on it and I can get snippy and snappy and I do not wish to be like that.
Therefore I went to the ministry of education (Ontario) tonight to see just what they expect children to learn in grade one. And though a few things leave me wondering HOW will I teach that? Overall it was like okay….he knows that already, this we already do and he’ll get better at, and OH>>> I can teach that! It overall left me with a feeling of relief. Overtime I will be able to plan out better what we do. EVEN IF at times it is haphazard it will work out in the long run I think.
I am feeling a bit more settled again…knowing that I can teach my son, but I do need to be a bit more organized about how I go about doing it. AS LONG AS…. I remember that we are FIRST a family, and second a homeschooling one. Homeschooling will continue to fit around our need to be a family first, and one that honours God while doing so.
What We Learned Today: Head of the Class
today we did a couple of things.
We continued reading through
We did a fair amount of work on the letter ‘a’ through head of the class. Filling in the missing A, sounding out words, picture matching and what not. I really like that they use a variety of methods to teach the same concept.
We did a bit more research on the house centipede. 🙂
We talked about the difference between living and non-living things using as a basic talking guide the simple schooling e-book Living & Non-Living.
We continued our transportation theme by learning about air pressure and resistance, using a craft from Transportation Thematic Units (Enhanced eBook). We experimented a bit with adding a paper clip to see if that would make a difference in how the helicopter worked.
Both the simple schooling and transportation unit are available from Currclick. One of them currently is free.
question of the day: house centipedes
Mommy… how do house centipedes grow up? How do they make babies?
This was a continuing query over a couple of days.
So we looked up house centipedes and learned they moult and get more legs with each moult. They live up to six years and takes about 2 years to mature.
Girl centipedes are bigger. Boy centipedes have a thicker tail.
The boy centipede puts sperm on the ground which the girl centipede uses to fertilize her eggs but they don’t do this until after they touch antennae with each other.
They are GOOD bugs to have around (as much as they freak me out) because they kill spiders, bedbugs, termites, cockroaches, silverfish and other household pests.
Souces:
ehow and wiki and animal corner.
Tuesday… hard days
So today I had a, what seemed to me, harsh reminder of why Tuesdays should NOT be book work days… the lad is too unfocused and too easily upset as is his mommy. SO no more book work on Tuesdays except maybe a tiny bit.
Instead we will read.
We will draw.
We will do science.
We will simply relax, play a bit, and work a bit, and just let Tuesdays be the quiet relaxing days that we need them to be.
Today we had a mental break-down over the alphabet and doing numbers up to 30. Quite frankly alphabets and counting should NOT be reasons to have harsh words between parent and child on either side. it simply isn’t, ergo my change of focus for Tuesday.
On a positive note… he did really well figuring out the sounds of letters of the alphabet and I started introducing the concept of hard/soft sounds. AND of the 26 alphabet letters….he recognized all but one of them (the dreaded letter K). I was simply thrilled by this and the lad smiled as well. 🙂
We had fun lying back on my bed and reading a poem. It was actually quite funny. We read one poem, and then read another and we looked at each other at the exact same time and smiled… That would make a fun picture we said. So we drew a picture of it. It was interesting how different they turned out from each other. The poem comes of the old Childcraft series. The link is for the 1995 series, but ours is the older one yet.. 1977 I think?
We started reading through a world history book (we will do two pages most every day) and another book with 10 minute stories.
We finished the first book of the people of christian history book tonight at bed time. The lad has enjoyed learning about these people who really lived. It’s been interesting learning some of the Christian history behind us.