A Net in Time

Curriculum and book reviews, faith, homeschooling and more!

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Friday activities

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Yes, I know I’m posting two days late, ah well. 🙂

Friday was a fix the computer day. It finally decided that having the internet was optional, and was moving dead slow so… Jim “killed it”(my language). I saved everything I could to the external drive and he saved the rest there as well. We mostly have it working again.

Justin and I worked on a Moses activity book and played a game or two. We also practiced some letters. He had to think and memorize. He asked lots of questions about why would God send all those bad things to the Egyptians?

Bible Sticker Activity books : The story of Moses (isbn 0-8423-2017-2) is the booklet that we used. I got it years ago from Focus on the Family I THINK. Hmm… the book came up on Amazon, but without a price so not sure if it’s still available through them or not.

Moon Books

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We borrowed these books for our study of the Magnificent Moon.


The Moon by Paulette Bourgeois. Good book. had experiments in it we want to try.


The Jumbo book of Space. Good book. Also had experiments in it we want to try.


Moons by Vogt. moons from all the planets. Interesting read. Experiments in it to do as well.

Sky by David Allen. Couldn’t find a link to this one anywhere. It was very simple, and not entirely accurate, but not a bad introductory book.


The Moon. David Jefferis. Good book. Gives a nice overview of the earth’s moon.


The Kids book of the night sky. This book had some ancient stories in it of how the moon came to be.


The solar system. simple book, the lad liked the pictures.


SPACE, magic tree house research guide. Two pages in a larger book. All black and white. Brief overview, decently done.


First space encyclopedia. Two colorful pages in this large book. Lad liked the pictures.

Today.. THE MOON!

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The Moon. It’s magnificent, it’s magical, it’s the source of many a poem, but the lad says “There’s no bunnies or cats there!” (ergo in boy language…why bother learning about it).

We skimmed and picked our way through the last four days of Magnificent Moon. Day one is HERE. Since doing this study was NOT a hit with the lad (for the fore-amentioned reason) I thought picking and choosing what we did would be more beneficial to him learning something. This is something that I LOVE about Amanda Bennett’s studies. They are SO easy to pick and choose from. Seriously… if I don’t want to study tides.. I don’t have to and it doesn’t affect the integrity of the rest of the units. If I want to amaze my lad by showing him that the moon is sometimes orange/red or sometimes blue and sometimes it’s hiding…I can do that! It’s all good.

So today we looked at moon colours, we followed moon trees around the USA, we located the different moon landings and had a ton of fun zooming in and out on google maps with those landing sites. We found the “bunny in the moon”, and found out that the moon gets colder than colder and hotter than hot. We had a hoot building our two stage rocket and even more fun learning about eggs and gravity. We watched interesting videos, went to a whack of different websites, and thought hmm… that looks like an interesting experiment… Which I would list here…but my computer is being stupid and I’m borrowing hubby’s so that will have to wait.

our two stage rocket. Take two balloons, one paper cup with no bottom, and voila…a two stage rocket.
Learning about gravity

should mention that I made a point of boiling the eggs first
I have a five year old.
Eggs, water, gravity = mess
therefore boiled them. still had a mess, but not a goopy one! 🙂

Oh… and while the boy was playing trains (which is what he really wanted to do instead of take part in homeschool) I read every single one of the moon books we got out of the library to him. He would stop once in a while and ask questions. We found some of the old stories from different countries funny about how they thought the moon came to be. We know the truth… GOD made the moon and the sun. They mark the seasons, and light the day and night. But “the stories are funny mommy” or “That’s wrong mommy”. I know buddy, but sometimes people don’t want to believe that God can do it all, so they make up stories to explain things in ways that makes sense to them. AND sometimes they don’t know the truth and they have to learn it.

We haven’t finished our painting of the moon craters yet. Need to find the paint first! (what can I say, renovating issues)!

This overall is what we studied.
Day 1: What Exactly Is a Moon?
Day 2: Getting to Know the Moon
Day 3: The Story of the Moon
Day 4: Science Secrets of the Moon
Day 5: Cool Things About the Moon

These unit studies come ready to use. Copy and paste into your word processing program OR just print as is. It’s all good. Colouring, drawing, writing, thinking, laughing, it’s all part of this study. Enjoy it! For despite the lack of bunnies or cats…we had some good learning going on today. 🙂

Here’s the link to the post on the books we used for this study.

And to think… you can do this too. Just go here and get it! 🙂

First of all, the Cabin Fever Fun Pack, which includes Magnificent Moon, Winter Wonders, Expedition Canada, and Popcorn is currently on sale, and will be through 1/31/11 for $20 (regularly $28). The link for this product is: http://unitstudy.com/Cabin_Fever_Fun_Pack.html

Guess what… we are going a giveaway! The contest will run from 1/24-28/11, with the drawing at 9pm on 1/28. We will be giving away 2 standard Moon Maps from National Geographic, valued at $16.99 each. The link to the maps is: http://www.natgeomaps.com/moon.
Here’s the link to the giveaway.

Just so you know, I got a free copy of this study so that I could give you my honest opinion of it. 🙂

Last Night’s Experiment – Capillary Action

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Last night we added food colouring in 8 different bottles: yellow, blue, green, red, orange, purple, light green, and blue green.

We added celery to each bottle.

We let them sit overnight.

This morning we took a good look at each of them.

This is our results in Justin’s words.
blue-green – the leaves have colours in them mommy!
yellow – oh…it did nothing
orange – this one has nothing either mommy.
blue – it has blue dots on the top!
green -oh rabbit nuggets…this one has nothing mommy!
red – this one has dots mommy! See them!?!?!
purple – has dots on it mommy, but they are differenter then the water!
light green – nothing mommy

I hope you can see how the blue worked really one on this one.

I would like to try this experiment again using white carnations, see if that makes any difference in what happens.

Who Am I?

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Today the lad and I worked on finishing a model train house. He had to listen, follow instructions, and then set things up. He needed to practice some good hand eye coordination and he had to help his mommy figure out how some things got put together. It was a good brain exercise for him. Afterwards we had fun playing with our HO model train.

In the afternoon we focused on a lesson plan on Who Am I? I made out this copy work sheet Who Made You?
We also took weights and measurements and did some drawing. I used lesson one of this kindergarten curriculum book.

Snow Cats!

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So we managed to get some homeschool done using a book that I have upstairs. We did another 5-6 pages, and I learned something. The lad has a problem with figuring end sounds. He’s getting better, fairly good actually at knowing beginning sounds, and we have fun doing rhymes, but ending sounds, he just needs a fair bit of help yet.

The one thing I don’t like about this book is that it uses a lot of pictures, and things, as we all know…can have a multitude of words given to them that are descriptive, but if you don’t have the right one…the exercise is meaningless. But other than that, it’s a pretty good book. Makes the lad think and doesn’t have endless exercises in a row of all the same type of thing to do.

I’ve added a physical exercise component to our days. Every day we are going to get some type of exercise. We planned to go for a walk today, but when we got outside we noticed the snow…and it’s texture and said hey… Let’s build a snow cat!

there are two cats here even though they are hard to see
a boy lion and a girl lion who was going to have babies

“The boy lion is protecting the girl lion from the wolves that
are hurting her because they don’t want the baby lions to
hurt their baby wolfs”

It turned into quite the adventure. Some foxes ended up joining in with the wolves and they all gathered under Bunny town’s lions gate to talk about it all. And we had to go back there to help them learn to be friendly with the lions because the lion babies wouldn’t hurt the wolfs babies because they wanted the antelopes! 🙂 Our planned half hour walk ended up being a fun hour outside on a nice day playing with the lad. 🙂

Later on he watched some TV while I made supper. He helped count out how many Tortellini’s he was willing to try and helped get out the parmesan cheese.

After supper we worked on building the model building for our railroad. We hardly got anything done on it, but the glue has to set and dry and the pieces aren’t numbered like they are supposed to be so we have to do picture matching to make it work.