A Net in Time

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Israel, Day Two

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This video is a bit long, but I like it better as an overview of Bethlehem than the one provided to us. 🙂

Did you know that salt isn’t always white? (yeah, I didn’t know that either, neither did the boy child). Here’s more info on salt.

We learned about the dugong (sea cow or siren of the sea), about Bethlehem, the dead sea. We had fun doing an experiment with salt (that’s my favourite part mommy), and did some drawing. A good study time this afternoon.

This study is part of Unit Studies by Amanda Bennett. called Expedition Israel. This is part of the Expedition Series, this is where you can find all the titles in that series.

This morning we had gone to bible study/story hour.

Playing and Doing Homeschool

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Our Tuesday generally consist of play, homeschool, play, homeschool and so forth. I normally throw in doing dishes, laundry, and so forth.

We mix it up with some computer time, science time, art work etc. It’s usually a very enjoyable day.

Today we did two lessons in Reading Kingdom. Reading Kingdom uses a whole word approach, I tend to be more of phonetics person, but I see no harm in learning a different way. I figure a varied approach is not always a bad thing. There are good and bad points to each way of learning how to read. We are currently doing a trial period to see how it goes.

We then did two lessons from Head of the Class. This is their kindergarten page. One where I wanted him to do a simple exercise but had to look at the first letter in order to figure out what colour he had to do. For a younger child I would have read the word, but I wanted the lad to sound it out and then make his decision. He did fairly well. It’s called Colours. Then I was wanting to do something kinda artsy cause well.. he’s that type of child. So I saw this one called Stitch and Sew. I expected it to be the normal yarn/shoelace around a pattern…but it was actual needle and thread sewing. The boy was QUITE pleased with himself and showed off his art work to dad. “I did it myself daddy”. I helped for the first bit and around the tricky bits, and we didn’t do the heart as shown in the video..we did a cat. The lad was quite very pleased with himself, and I have to admit, I was quite pleased as well. We talked about the parts of a needle, the thread, I tied in the bible verse about the camel going through the eye of the needle and so forth.

Then we played for a while. ended up going for a walk instead of reading and then cleaning the kitchen. on our walk we met the dirties, They make you act like dirt until
someone uses a machine to make you human again.
Here is the lad being dirt.

The lad also wanted to do his make a pizza program as well. and then we watched the spy next door and played doctor at the same time with a bunch of sick stuffies. 🙂 Always an interesting day in the life here. 🙂

just before bed he had fun making leaf creations. He made all sorts of interesting creatures, learning to resize, rotate and just exercise his creative intelligence.

Review: expedition Israel

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Unit Studies by Amanda Bennett. has given us a new study called Expedition Israels. This is part of the Expedition Series, this is where you can find all the titles in that series.

You know, I expected my lad to enjoy this study as much as he did Expedition Ireland, but it wasn’t as much of a hit. not sure why…other than the Canaan Dog on the first day…hmm… Perhaps that’s what caused him to not want to go further with it, or maybe it was just that we had a crazy busy week and he needed downtime (playtime more than he needed book/computer work). I suspect the latter more than the former. So bear that in mind as I do this review. 🙂

We completed one day.. Day One. We got Day Two done!

This is how the days are laid out for Study
Day 1: Where on Earth Is Israel?
Day 2: Some of the Special Places in Israel
Day 3: A Bit of History
Day 4: Cool Things to Know About Israel
Day 5: Fun and Games in Israel

I have to admit, we did have some good learning go on with Day One.
We read books, had fun finding Israel on a map and we even looked up different ways to get there from where we live… by boat and by plane. AND even going by plane/boat and driving by vehicle. So it was quite interesting. I have plans to do at least one, perhaps two more days this upcoming week. To my son’s chagrin the animal of the day was a dog.. “I DON”T LIKE DOGS MOMMY!” But we did have fun learning if we could pick up said dog… we decided it would be easy for mommy, but not so easy (but still doable) for a five year old as long it was a smaller one and didn’t move.

Just so what do you get with a DownloadN’Go study published by Amanda Bennett Unit Studies? You get a pack with everything well laid out for you. You get child friendly graphics, Vocabulary, lapbook activities, note booking activities, tons of videos to watch and actually SEE what you are talking/learning about, a variety of different types of activities so you aren’t doing the same thing over and over again. They are quite interesting to do.

These lesson cover all sorts of subject areas: history, geography, science, math, english, arts, religion and more. They are well done studies and I enjoy doing them.

Here’s a pic so you can see:
Once again, Expedition Israel is well worth your time to check out. This lesson contains the following: a geographic feature of the day, animal of the day, food of the day, a daily hero of Israel, Biblical events, and a Hebrew word of the day. We are planning this coming week to have the grandparents up for an Israeli meal. Should be fun to do that. 🙂

I do need to mention that I was given a copy of this study so that I could give you my honest review of it. To visit more reviews on Expedition Israel, please follow the thumbnails below.

Art work and a story

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Justin’s story behind this painting.

two bunnies are running and they are going over the speed limit.
and the police are going over the speed limit too.
Do you know why?

Because there are bad space aliens coming after them from Mars and Jupiter. From Every planet except from earth.

The rock is in front of the sun turning it black.

There are guns shooting through the air at the bunnies.
The bus is trying to get past the bunnies and their car.
The bullets are going in every direction..even after the car!

THEN>>>> do you know how many bullets the alien has in his space gun? A trillion million of them. And he is going to keep shooting them.

the thing that shoots the bullets controls itself. And the space alien can’t stop it until it runs all out of bullets.

There is just one space alien but he has different coloured bullets because sometimes he visits planets and takes stuff off their planets to make his bullets. So some are red and yellow and blue ones.. and they all control themselves. One side shoots yellow and red, and the other side shoots ALL blue. AND he’s even now shooting some bullets toward the sun!!!!

and the driver of the bus is one of the angry birds and he’s talking “oh oh…the sun’s going to burn out one of these days”. And he’s going over the speed limit because he doesn’t want to shot by the bad alien.

Off the picture are some bunnies who have landed their rocket and their rocket is on a meteorite and they forgot their coordinates back to earth. The astronaut(who is the space alien) wants the meteorite to go boom because he wants the bunnies to fall back to earth and fall on a building with a flame thingey on it so that he can take over the world.

— can you catch glimpses of things that have been studied or watched lately? 🙂 We’ve studied the solar system, watched cats and dogs the movie, played angry birds, Been studying traffic signs and learning about speed limits, … isn’t it fascinating to listen to how it all plays out in a little boys head? 🙂

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we did some work out of backyard discoveries.

we spent some time at Head of the Class.

and we did some finger painting…. see the story and picture above, the rest of the pictures we did are below.


justin’s sea.

my butterfly

More fun and learning was done with the pizza program. he makes pizzas that he thinks bunnies will like, mice will like and that just maybe cats will like. He thinks and tries hard and then has a pizza party with everyone (all his stuffies). he’s learned now how to make pictures using pizza toppings. He’s doing some really good work. I should scan one in for you all to see. 🙂

We did some learning here as well. 🙂

At supper we had a hoot learning some artistic stuff. We went through a couple library books and got out his new art set and had some fun drawing pictures and making stories. It was a good way to spend time together over food. 🙂

Israel and having fun tracing shapes

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Today for breakfast we read through two books we got out on Israel.

A is for Abraham by Richard Michelson.

In this book we learned about the Sh’ma that Jewish children learn. We decided that learning it would not be a bad thing. So I made a copywork sheet of it for the lad to copy and we’ll be learning it over the next week.

We also read “Count your way through Israel” by Jim Haskins.


the lad asked lots of questions with this book and did some counting.
he was quite intrigued by the fact that the people of Israel have made the desert productive
AND they brought the leopard/jaguar back!

The basis of our study will be the DownloadNGo unit study created by Unit Studies by Amanda Bennett. It is called Expedition Israel.

While I prepared the study my son had fun tracing out shapes from some templates that I recently picked up from the dollar store. Just another way to increase his awareness of different ways that people can be artists. 🙂 Fun and learning.

we enjoyed this site when studying Israel.

We had fun trying to see if we could lift up a Canaan dog. The result : yes…but it would be really really hard if you are a five year old boy weighing in a 52 lbs (and only a small dog at that). 🙂

We read a couple more books during lunch about Israel.

Israel by Kristin Thoennes


This was a very informative book.
Lots of pictures and text that fit well with it.

Cooking the Israeli Way


This book just intrigues us as to what to make for our Israeli dinner next week.
Though when shown a picture of a felafal the lad went “ew”. 🙂
So perhaps we won’t make that. 🙂

After lunch it was time to clean house, play the keyboard (working on learning ‘rejoice rejoice’), and play computer games. Today it was doing a memory game, a cat discovery game and building a pizza. When that was done we went for a walk on this lovely sunny day.