A Net in Time

Curriculum and book reviews, faith, homeschooling and more!

Animals

Learning by reading and games.

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We started off our day playing bucking buckaroo a game we picked up at the yard sales on Saturday.
Then we read from a chapter out of black beauty.   The lad asked a TON of questions about what was going on and it was good to talk about standards of care, and how God wants us to take care of the animals around us.
We learned about the common loon in   the ultimate guide to wildlife of North America.    we’ve seen loons before so it was good to learn more about them.  One of the things we learned was there aren’t as many as there used to be since people are destroying their habitats.

we started off with 50 magical stories.  The story today is called The Frog.   It was a story about a mom who wanted her son’s to get the best wife.


in response to the story the lad said “I liked it!”   When asked why he liked it I got the response of “I liked it, mommy, I liked that the good witches were good and they helped the frog”.   And yes, for those concerned .. he knows that we don’t believe in witches, that witches don’t love God and therefore are something we need to be wary of.

Then we finished off  pirates in our world history book.

He finished off both of the  Pirates sticker books.



When I asked if he was pleased with how we did the pirate work and how the books turned out he said yes.  When we talked about the pirates today we learned that there are still pirates today, but the pirates in the past were beaten because the navy built better ships.  Only the young ones (those up to 16 years old) weren’t executed for being bad pirates.

we did another page in the “imagine a place” book


This has been such a fun book to use as a art book.  We read the poem and then draw a picture.  When we are all done with it, then we look at what the artist came up with and discuss it.   Today we needed to imagine  place were music sings where one dances all night on a summer night in a breeze (that wasn’t how the poem went but something like it).   This sparked good conversation about what it means that music can sing, and what it means to dance, and I even needed to demonstrate what a waltz was. 🙂

We learned about bugs today.  We played another game, this one also purchased while yard saling.. called Go, Bugs.  You play it similarly to Go, Fish.  the object of the game is to build a four piece bug.  We didn’t follow the rules since some games are difficult to play with just two people.  But we had fun and we learned about different types of bugs.  

Pirates and learning through reading

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Before I went out to do the bunnies I opened up a freebie from the folks over at Living books Curriculum.    I had signed up a while back for their newsletter which gets me free stuff once a week.  Anyways the freebie today was modern fairy tales, and we read one called the Box of Robbers.  What a fun story to read to a six year old.  he was quite intrigued. 🙂
I took care of the bunnies and we had breakfast and then our homeschooling day began.
We started off our day reading the paper.  There were two interesting stories about genetic research so we talked about how our bodies are made of different genetic material and how scientists can work with it to either change something to hopefully make it better OR to test people to see if their bodies will react to medicine in an atypical manner.   It’s rather fun using the paper to learn from.  🙂
Then we went on to do some reading
we started off with 50 magical stories.  The story today is called the King of the Polar Bears.

in response to the story the lad said “I liked it!”   When asked why he liked it I got the response of “I liked it, mommy, I don’t know why I did, but I just liked it!”. 
Then we read more about pirates in our world history book.

Today we learned about the pirate base in Port Royal and how many pirates used the island of Madagascar as a base of operations.  We learned abit about the cruelty of Henry Avery.  We took a moment to learn a bit more about him.

then onwards to reading about the red squirrel in the ultimate guide to wildlife of North America.

  The red squirrel    this small squirrel is noisy and highly territorial.   we’ve seen them at the Pinery and they are a very talkative squirrel.  They are very quick.

On to chapter nine in “the Lamb”

 
it’s been good so far going through this book. Today I could see the lad thinking…and that’s always a good thing.
He did pages 10-12 in Pirates sticker book.
and pages 6-9 in dressing pirates

yesterday I picked up a pirates megablocks set on sale at Giant Tiger and I promised the lad that once we got finished our pirates work today that we would play pirates for a while.

The set we got is kinda a combination of these two sets…more like the second one than the first…but our characters look like real buccaneers and we have an alligator in our set.  (great for playing peter pan!).  🙂   This gave the lad (after looking through the mega-blocks site) that some of our given to us lego was from the pirates sets of megabloks.   So we played pirates.   Always a good way to review the language the pirates used.

Snakes

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yesterday was Easter.

WE have a tradition in our house whereby I find some small toys and some candies and put them in eggs and hide them about the house. 

This year I found some snakes (three of them) and put them into eggs. One Six year old was thoroughly delighted. 

This of course has led to tons of questions about snakes.

He’s learned about milking poisonous snakes.
 

He has asked how long it takes for snakes to replenished their venom. And discovered that it takes up to 24 hours for it to be replenished for most snakes, but some snakes it can take longer. 
He’s learned how green snakes camouflage themselves in .. green grass. 🙂 And how other snakes can do the same thing.

Homeschooling today

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After doing morning devotions we started off our day reading about beavers in the Ultimate Guide to wildlife in North America. 
We learned that beavers are about as heavy and as long as the lad is. So I asked the lad .. what would you do if a beaver as big as you wanted to say hi? “i’d run away mommy!”… here.. you be the beaver. So I chattered my teeth at him and he ran away screaming. 🙂 We also learned that beavers have a flap behind their teeth and they can hold their breathe for 15 minutes. “mommy.. how long can people hold their breathe under water?” So we looked it up and found two references to long breath holding. 19 min 21 seconds and 16 min 13 seconds. 
Then off to read from “the Lamb”. Today we did chaper five. 
Today we learned about the importance of trusting God even if we don’t know all the answers. 🙂
World history.  PIRATES!


we learned about the vikings and how they scared people with their battle axes.  The image below is the most like the one pictured in the book. 

Then off to do some book work. 
we used the following books today.

First grade fundamentals: we focused on reading stories and answering questions.

 

Numbers and counting: we practiced ordinals.   Took a little bit of reminders, but then it was like a light went off and it was OH!   First, second, third and he happily kept on counting until he got confused in the mid-thirties.  He has the basics so it’s all good. 

 

Daily Smart:  He practiced making equations from sentences.  This was a bit of a “ARGH” to him at first.    He likes to have all language and speech used exactly the same for all things, so having take away used instead of minus, or was given instead of Plus is a bit confounding for him.


This afternoon he learned abit about radiographs as I had to go in for an x-ray.  he wanted to come to and when he wasn’t allowed asked tons of questions why not.  Another guest of the radiology department cheerfully answered his questions when I didn’t know the answers.

A varied day

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Today we started off our day by checking out a site that homeschool freebie of the day directed us to.  It’s called Make Belief Comix.   This site has a variety of pages done up with clip art and make believe statements.  We had fun going through about 10 of them.  🙂

This led to the lad’s question of the day “how much water is in the oceean”.   The answer was found here.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey,
there are over 1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers (332,519,000 cubic
miles) of water on the planet. A cubic kilometer is the volume of a
cube measuring one kilometer on each side. Almost all of this vast
volume of water is in the ocean.
That’s 36,614,237,300,000,000,000,000 gallons of milk!

World History

  

We continued reading about Knights and Castles. Learning today about how they practiced.

I asked the lad on Tuesday what animal he would like to study today and he said “spiders”.  My response was okay..we can continue in our study and then he said “NO!   Can we study FLIES instead?”     I said “what?  you don’t like your spider study”?   his response…”no mommy, I like it but I want to draw the flies too”!   So… my little template that I did up on studying an animal of the day with it’s drawing aspect really appeals to him…That’s cool!  🙂   I’ll need to figure out how to take a pic of it so I can link it for you.

So here I am sitting down trying to figure out flies to study and did you know there are TONS of different flies in the world?

We learned that

Flies, insects in the order Diptera, from your basic house fly to mosquitoes and gnats, are defined by having two wings.

and

 Here are some other things you should know about flies and fly control:

  • Depending on the species, the life expectancy of a fly is eight days to two months, or in some cases, up to a year.
  • Flies belong to the Order Diptera, meaning two wings. There are 16,000 species of flies in North America.
  • Flies plague every part of the world except the polar ice caps.
  • One pair of flies can produce more than 1 million offspring in as little as six to eight weeks.
  • As many as 33 million microorganisms may flourish in a single fly’s gut, while a half-billion more swarm over its body and legs.
  • Flies spread diseases readily because they move quickly from rotting, disease-laden garbage to exposed human foods and utensils.
  • Because they only have two wings, flies land often and therefore can deposit thousands of bacteria each time they land.
  • U.S. Department of Agriculture sources reveal that flies contaminate or destroy $10 billion worth of agricultural products.
  • For every fly seen, there are an estimated 19 more hidden from view. This means humans don’t even see most of the flies present at an infestation.

types of flies

  • bee fly
  • black fly
  • blow fly
  • bot fly
  • cheese skipper
  • crane fly
  • flesh fly
  • fruit fly
  • gadfly
  • gall midge
  • gnat
  • hessian fly
  • horse fly
  • house fly
  • maggot
  • mediterranean fruit fly
  • midge
  • mosquito
  • robber fly
  • sand fly
  • screwworm
  • tsetse
so we learned a few things about flies, and then moved on to learning about fire safety…we’ve finished that unit now.
Then played a game of mousetrap which involved setting up the board, following instructions, learning how to be a good sport and of course, having fun.  🙂
this day worked out well for us.

Today’s Homeschooling

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 The lad and I have been working through various safety issues.

We’ve done fire safety, chemical safety, kitchen safety, and something else.  Today we’re doing animal safety.  We talked about safety around dogs, cats, wild animals.   The lad asked about “poisonous spiders and Poisonous snakes”.   So we talked about the rattlesnake which is the only poisonous snake in Ontario and how to be safe around them.  We did a variety of puzzles, learned the words yes/no, and counted.

I’m also starting to go through our bible materials box and today we have “the golden rule”.
I printed out this copywork sheet.    And went through a variety of pictures and we talked about what you should do in a given situation.  Sharing, caring, helping, and such like.   We’ll pick a package at least once a week and work on it.  🙂

We did a language lesson from First language lessons.   We learned about fables, and took the opportunity to do some art at the same time. 🙂   Drawing pictures of lions and mice and answering questions about how the story went.   It was interesting how this story tied in with learning about the golden rule.

we took the time to look up in 123 Draw how to draw a lion.  It was decided that mommy would learn to draw a lion and the lad would draw out the story (see above) complete with a few embellishments. 🙂  The hunters of course had to figure out HOW to net the lion and it was fairly complicated but they managed it.

 

Time for fun with smarties. 🙂  these are a favourite chocolate confection.

 

This was followed by playing chess with smarties.

 

We did a number of things with smarties first though.  We learned about consumer packaging.  How they can’t put less in the box than they say.. we learned that our smartie box calls for 50 g but we had 55 g.  So we practiced doing less than and greater than signs, we counted out how many of each colour there was and did less than/greater than signs.  Then played checkers.  it was a good thing that we have enough of two colours to play it well.  The lad beat me.

count by 2’s, 5’s and 10’s. that was the theme of the day in our numbers and counting book.


I did something different for our animal of the day.  I pulled out my temperate zone books and gave the lad a choice.  He chose deserts.  And of the animal pages in the book he was intrigued by the fringe-toed sand lizard.  We looked it up and found them to be quite an interesting little animal.  They can swim in sand like a fish does in water!  Complete with nostrils that seal and jaws that can clamp shut to keep the sand out.   Quite fascinating the creatures that God creates.

Well.. I was going to show you a foot, but apparently it’s a copyright violation to show it to you.  So I’d suggest you go check out this site and check it out for yourself.  🙂  They have these are special scales that help the lizard move in the sand.

We had a hoot playing checkers using goldfish crackers.
We play modified checkers in that we have no forced jump and we only jump once, even if we can jump two or three times.  This makes it easier for the lad to grasp for some reason.  Over time we’ll start playing by the rules, but for now this is easier, and yet harder.  🙂  I was the smiling goldfish, he was the no smile ones.

When we finished with our bookwork the lad asked if I could hook him up with some thinking computer games, and I said most certainly. Not sure yet where I’ll put him but I’ll find something for him to play online. Cheers! 🙂

We had fun getting trounced at Playing History.   We played  a battle in England between the Vikings and the English and well.. as is true to life, we got trounced. 🙂   and then he did some logic games over at CoolMath4Kids.

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)!