A Net in Time

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Did our Blue Spruce Voting

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Here are the books up for voting this year.

The Blue Spruce™ Award is a provincial primary reading program which brings recently published Canadian children’s picture books to Ontario children ages 4 to 7 in kindergarten through to grade two. For many children, this is their first introduction to the world of books; it is a very exciting time for everyone.

The students will peruse/read 10 nominated Canadian picture books and then vote for their favourite book. They need to have at least perused/read 5 of 10 to be eligible to vote. They also can have these books read to them to be eligible to vote. Based on student voting across the province, the best picture book is then selected and the author/illustrator is honoured with the Blue Spruce™ Award.

The goals of the Blue Spruce™ Award program are:

  • to promote reading for enjoyment and information among primary students
  • to make students aware of quality Canadian picture books including Canadian authors and illustrators
  • to develop the student’s skill in evaluating a picture book based on story, text and pictures
  • to provide opportunities for students to discuss the picture books in an authentic manner

This is the result of our reading and what the lad appreciated (or not).

He liked Thinkamajink the very best — liked this one enough that it inspired stories
followed by in order of liking

C’mere boy
imaginary garden
proud as a peacock
jack the bear
perfect snow

sorta liked: willow whispers

HATED violet. this was a quite adamant “I HATE that book mommy”

Mother’s Day Study continued

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Today we did some work on the Mother’s day unit study done by Unit Studies by Amanda Bennett.. Made this copywork sheet of 1 Samuel 1:27. Today we did day three and four.

We practiced animal husbandry by giving the cats a bath! They very much needed it.

My laugh of the day:
We were researching how the Scots do mother’s day and we saw a picture of cottage pie and my son’s response when I asked if we should celebrate mom’s day like the Scots was “If you tried to serve me that I might accidentally throw up.”

and right after saying that he learned the pencils break if you apply enough pressure. IT WAS AN ACCIDENT MOMMY! I didn’t know it would happen! 🙂

We had fun with the languages page, where we learned to say mother’s day in various languages.

and then we did some science by making some cookies. 🙂 I threatened to leave out the chocolate chip cookies to see what might happen…and that was met with a look of horror! So we didn’t do that. 🙂 had fun none-the-less.

Home School Book Sales

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So last night I went to a baptist church in London that was having a homeschool book sale.

I bought some books that were NOT school book related. Just general Christian fiction that I figured was a good price for the book box and that I could resell at more than what I bought it for at our annual yard sale. 🙂 that way I have MORE money to buy more books right? 🙂 and worst comes to worst…I’ll have enjoyed doing some reading.

Anyways, picked up a pack of manipulatives. They kinda look like this but in lots of different colours. $4.00 I figured why not. 🙂

This morning the lad was quite intrigued by them and wanted to be able to add them to his play city and was sadly disappointed when I said NO… these are for homeschooling ONLY. We do math with them.

Being the lad that he is… he still managed to make a game out them. Only to occasionally be called off his play with them in order to do some math. It was interesting to see a light dawn in his eyes when he realized that.. 10 black bomb birds were still 10 black bomb birds even if they were divided into two groups of 1 + 9, or 5 + 5 and so forth. This is why I got them even though I KNOW that I can use all sorts of stuff around the house as manipulatives for math. I had him do some group division, count how many colours there and so forth as well.

I got a bunch of other books as well. A couple of readings, a three book set of bible dictionary, a small reading program, a science book, a music theory book, some learning type books and a few fiction books. All for less than $50. I was overall pleased with what I got.

Ireland inspired

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Ever since doing the Ireland study the lad’s been somewhat intrigued by castles.

So one day…we built one. 🙂


It has now been added to his city upstairs in his bedroom.

He occasionally asks if we can build another one, and since I can’t remember where I picked this up, all I can say is “I don’t know buddy, we’ll have to see if I can find another one.”

Our Bridges Work

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I went to the Goodwill Book Store in London and picked up a whole whack of books. One of them was this book by Etta Kaner called Bridges.

I started reading through it with the lad while he was digging in his dinosaur egg. We got intrigued…. Being intrigued in our household means let’s experiment and see what happens.

Chapter One is on Beam Bridges.

HAH! Easy enough to experiment with these! And besides…the book clearly lays out the experiments one can do.

We started with Page 7, build a beam bridge. All we needed was two bricks, paper (used cardstock) and plasticine (or some other such modelling clay).

easy enough…set up your bricks. Place a piece of cardstock over it. How many plasticine bricks will it hold? We learned it ALL depends on where you place them. Smack dab in the middle…Three MAX. BUT if you put some on either end before you put them in the middle it will hold more. SEE …..

not anchored

anchored

Then the book said try doubling the paper, and folding the paper in different ways. So we doubled the paper.. it held a bit more than twice as much weight without being anchored (about 8), and when it was anchored we could put all the made bricks (about 15) on top.

We made a waffle bridge… and WOW!! that just amazed us. We put ALL the plasticine we had on top and it didn’t break! One end crumpled a bit but that we think, was due to mommy’s poor folding job at that end.

and angry black bomb bird could sit underneath quite safely. 🙂

Then we moved on to page 12 as I just wasn’t quite sure how to do the in-between pages and decided thinking on those a bit would be a good thing.

So we tested out different types of columns. Square, Triangle and Rectangle

we started with two DVD’s
we added more.
the triangle really started to quiver and shake

we managed to get one more book on top
and then the square one gave one unfortunately falling
into the circle one.

We went for a walk afterwards and discovered there are columns everywhere…even the trees are columns! We decided that was very smart of God to make the trees grow in the strongest shape. Circular columns were by far the most common column that we found, though most that most porch railings use square columns which didn’t make any sense to the lad. “how will these hold up a person mommy? they are the wrong shape! they are square! they should be circled!”

I had no answer for him….do any of you???

April 13 – What we did today

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Today we did some work on the Mother’s day unit study done by Unit Studies by Amanda Bennett.. We did a copywork sheet on Genesis 3:20. We had the fun of discovering the Go Fish Guys.

We did days one and two. If you want to know more Click here to view more details.

We learned the history of Mom’s day, the lad drew some pictures, did some copywork, saw what the flower of mother’s day was (the carnation), and took in some geography as well. He had a great deal of fun making me a mom’s day card. 🙂 The lad’s response to day one and two of this study “I liked drawing the card for you mommy but I didn’t like the rest of it.”

Then we had lunch and headed off to the library.

We got out a whole bunch of new books and had fun playing trains. We added a twist to the train play today…we took pieces of the toddler puzzles (animal shapes) and had them in the train area. The pigs had a zoo and the angry birds broke down the walls and well…the animals all got out. The pigs rebuilt the zoo and to compensate themselves for having to rebuild started over-charging the animals for their food so the animals all went out and got jobs. It was a fun story that taught concepts as well. 🙂

Out to the park for a walk afterwards. We had a good time walking around the pond. We saw a goose on eggs and two muskrats eating grass and watched them dive into the pond through a hole in the ground. Then we saw a white thing in the water. It made us VERY curious so we tried to get it onto the shore… as we moved it we saw that it was an egg! We tried hard to bring it in but the soil at the side of the pond has a edge to it so we lost it under that edge. 🙁 Made us both disappointed. The lad said “NEXT TIME MOMMY. Let me do it!” So we spent some more time trying to locate more eggs…goose, duck, bird …anything eggs, but no such luck, but a good time had tramping around the pond looking hard for them and scaring up ducks and geese as we went.

Then home to make supper and to relax. A good day overall. 🙂

What we Learned today – April 12, 2011

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me – “Hey Son, what do you think we should have for breakfast this morning?”

the lad – “IRISH PANCAKES!” “you got to remember mommy, I like Irish pancakes”. (this said with a very earnest face)

So this is what we made (i cut the recipe in half)

Here is an easy way to make thin pancakes:

4 oz/ 125g/ 1 cup plain flour
pinch of salt
2 eggs
1/2 pt/ 250ml/ 1 cup milk
1 tbsp melted butter

Put all the ingredients in a blender and blend for about 30 seconds. The batter should then be allowed to stand for 30 minutes in a cool place. Heat a small pan over a medium heat. Grease with a little butter and wipe out with kitchen paper. Fry about 2 tbsp of batter at a time, swirling to cover the base of the pan. Keep them thin and there will be no need to turn. Serve rolled up with sugar. (we roll with cinnamon sugar)

Today we have a simple plan. Have breakfast, break open a dinosaur egg (purchased from dollar store) and talk about dinosaurs, paleontology, archaeology while doing so. Start our review of Mother’s Day for DNG, clean the kitchen, play outside, and see what else we can fit in. 🙂

But for now…BREAKFAST! 🙂

we enjoyed our breakfast and then dug up two dinosaurs.
The lad had dug up this one yesterday at gramma’s: stegosaurus
and today he dug up: Dilophasaurus

and I dug up a Parasaurolophus

Then we had fun letting our imaginary bunnies dig them up as well. One was the digger (archaeologist) and the other was the puzzler (Paleontologist) who put the dinosaurs together.

looked at doing this.

We never did do the mother’s day unit study, but we did do other things… like we read books and did some experiments on bridges. I’ll be posting pictures (go here for those)!