it’s over at No fighting, no biting this week.
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Transportation – Airplanes
The lad and I will be starting to learn about transportation tomorrow. It will be our “September theme”. We won’t be looking only at transportation as we will take side trips into things that interest us. But tomorrow.. PLANES!
1. we’ll be building a sleath bomber and a camouflage airplane that we got at The Basics Shop.
2. We’ll be watching the “wright brothers on youtube”.
3. We’ll be learning about the different types of modern aircraft.
see this site Soaring the Skies and Types of Airplanes and how many types are there? DIY. and probably to me the most helpful site.Types of Airplanes.
Airplanes vary greatly in the size, structure, engines, and purpose.
Airship/Balloon, Glider/Sailplane, Powered airplanes, Helicopter/Rotorcraft, Autogyro/Gyroplane, Fixed Wing Bi-planes, Fixed Wing Monoplanes
I used this site to make a copywork sheet. I used these words: Land planes, Seaplanes, Amphibians, Vertical Takeoff and Landing, Short Takeoff and Landing and Space Shuttle. I wasn’t sure if I should do a trace and write, or a copy and write…so I printed off one of each and it’s all good. 🙂
What else will we do?
4. I hope to have him do some counting.
How many planes can you find in your hot wheels collection?
5. Then have him do some sorting of them and explain why he sorted them the way he did.
6. We’ll play battle because one can’t build planes that can be used for battle without actually having a battle! 🙂
and that will be it for a first day of homeschool. Oh… we’ll also do our normal.. we’re back in school so let’s go for a walk about. And if I can figure out how to build a rocket into the mix we’ll do that do, Supercharged Science has one that looks to be fun to do.
Toads
Toads are the subject of fascination for a boy child lately.
We went to the Pinery yesterday for lunch and a bit of a walk about. At lunch we sat near a pit in the ground. It had several young toads in it. the lad caught six in total. one escaped due to my ineptitude. Two were released for being too big.
The remaining three were put into a larger bottle and carried with us on our walk.
Somehow on out trip home the bottle got on a tilt or lay flat and two of the three escaped. We recaptured one of them.
Those two discovered the “joys” of a new home. 🙂
hard at work setting things up
The end result.
One relatively content toad.
Tonight they were joined by one much bigger toad captured on a “toad” walk with gramma. Tomorrow morning the lad will totally reorganize the aquarium, but as long the toads are healthy it’s all good. Boys are meant to play with small critters aren’t they?
These tears I hate: Tears when a boy learns something in a very hard way.
Since these toads are tiny I put a little apple cider vinegar in a container to attract fruit flies. The flies came, the little toads were happy. The lad thought GREAT! I’ll dip the toad in the vinegar to help bring flies right to the toad. We then all learned that toads plus apple cider vinegar equals a very quickly dead toad (so dead his tongue came out). Many tears from my soft-hearted son. Much sadness from his mommy at this hard lesson to learn…hard for all. We don’t want to kill the toads…we want to learn from them and see what works to keep them healthy and happy.
Organization of my school year
the carnival of homeschooling has a theme for this week of
all about logistics: the organizing of your day, week, and year in terms of homeschooling, extracurricular activities, and everything else that you fit into your life.
The basic plan that I use with homeschooling is to so as much of it for free as I can. So we do a much on the computer as we can, or using books that I’ve picked up from here and there, as well as quite a bit of oral work. I assume that over time I’ll to do more paperwork, but for now he’s six and if I can ask him in his head what 1 + 6 is and get seven for a verbal answer it’s all good. We’ll be going to the library more often this year I hope, like every other week or so. I plan to use extensively a variety of links that I’ve listed over here as well as utilizing the work of this site.
So for the past two weeks I’ve been working on organizing my schooling. I only have one student so that makes it easier for me.
Monday is hubby’s day off so we don’t do a whole lot that day. In the mornings before we leave we’ll be doing some math and then in the evening he has gymnastics.
For the rest of the week there will be some things that we do daily.
like Read for 1/2 hour, do chores, and go out for at least 1/2 hour of exercise.
Tuesday will be our science day also with some book work.
Wednesday we’ll do some more math but our focus will be on Art.
Thursday we’ll work on unit studies that we get from Amanda Bennett (we do reviewing for them). And it will also be our Field Trip day.
Friday we’ll work on whatever we want to do as well as look at geography, history of the various topics we’ll be using as a base for study.
I LOVE doing things around a base of study.
September: Transportation
October: Continents of the World
November: Canada
December: Christmas, extra Science
January: Snow, winter
February: Character Studies
March: Pioneers
April: Construction
May: Insects
June: Rocks, Archaelogy etc
Within all of this we’ll do history, English, spelling, memory work, Geography and what not.
Now like anything the best laid plans can be lead astray or changed, but.. we’ll work on things and see how it goes.
question of the day: how long do yellow jacket’s live?
We have a yellow jacket living in our house. He buzzed us while doing the dishes.
He got away.
My lad who is somewhat concerned about getting stung asked “how long do yellow jacket’s live?” I said.. I have no clue, shall we look it up?
We learned that MOST of them only live for the summer BUT the queen hibernates over the winter and she is the one who chooses where the next years colony will live.
Source: backyard Brigade and other internet sources that confirmed what Backyard said. 🙂
Finally… we know what it is :)
My thanks to homeschool freebie of the day for linking to this site! we were finally able to identify the caterpillars that keep dying on us!
unlike the sycamore and hickory tussock moths, this one is the pale tussock moth. and these guys eat oak, birch, lime and hop leaves.
Other sites they linked to today were BugGuide and What’s that Bug.
Carnival of homeschooling is posted
you can find it here.
there are some good reads over there. 🙂