Curriculum and book reviews, faith, homeschooling and more!
I’ve recently started a review of Notebookingpages.com. It will eventually be posted on my other site, but I had this infographic sent to me and thought it was interesting enough to share. Have to admit, hadn’t thought about having my lad use different colours pens or pencils to help cement the learning in a different way. Food for thought eh?
So our week,
Started a new schedule with my lad, making every day as much the same as I could to forestall those endless questions of “what do I have to do today mom?”
If I make our days the same, it has a calming affect on my lad… AS MUCH AS I HATE IT. I like having things different, but I need to do what’s better for my lad right?
Highlights of my week.
WhiskerSong had five babies born.
I did a co-op class this week on Earthquakes.
Earthquakes are rather cool, and I never knew before this class that they were at different levels, or that they could measure S and N waves.
Canadian Homeschoolers is doing a link up this month on doing Conference Chats. I did a post on Animals Help Us Learn.
Homeschool Copywork has been a success in our household. I wrote up my review of it.
It’s been a surprise to me how much my lad is enjoying this copywork program.
He gets to write on a topic he’s interested in and colour pictures that intrigue him.
Come to the Saviour Now was my hymn of the week. Sometimes I wonder if anyone reads my posts and then I get delighted when someone tells me how they add to their week. 🙂
Let’s think, oh.. I wrote a blog post for Karen (it will be out sometime this month). I also got some seeds planted outside, we’re going to have a few days of quite warm weather so figured getting them gets them a good start. I’ll need to put up frost protection cloth for them though.
I continue to make head way with my rat problem (which personally I am delighted by). I’ve only seen one little one yet that needs to leave the backyard….I really don’t need a wild rat sleeping with my guinea pigs.
OH!!! I went biking today. You have NO IDEA… I was able to get in some exercise and MY FEET DIDN’T HURT. I was so happy about this, able to get out, enjoy the weather without thinking man, I just want to go home because my feet hurt. I just wanted to keep going. 🙂 I’m going to go biking again!!!!! 🙂
Seeing as the project fair is coming up this Friday night I thought ACK!!! We need to get our spider study done!!!!!!!!
that and some cut and paste pictures we could put on file folders and what not. 🙂
I found this dot to dot.
A poem we can use for copywork
Spiderlings hatch from eggs.
Each one has eight tiny legs.
A spider has more eyes than you.
Most have eight, you have two.
A spider has two body parts.
Across its web it quickly darts.
From a spiders spinnerets
Sticky spider silky jets.
Spiders feel the frantic tugs,
Of their favorite food: its bugs!
we hit upon the idea of making a funnel web using lego. We looked up images of a funnel web and made one. The lad is not too sure about the results of our work though so it might not come along to the project fair. Since that was in issue, we used our brains and came up with this rather cool depiction.
when we finished making these things we did some cutting and pasting with lap book materials to make some spider pages. We need to do some fine tuning on them yet though.
we are hoping over the course of the week to make more webs and to show different ways that spiders can live. We also hope to catch a few spiders.
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.
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.
We started our day as normal reading from
10 minute stories
World History
in the world history book we have started learning about mummies. Today we learned about Otzi the Iceman from Italy.
The lad and I have been working on learning what some land forms are.
I made up this copywork sheet for him, which comes from this site. We reviewed what we did yesterday what what the different land forms are. Did some matching. We looked on the world map we had to see if we could find real examples of things like a bay, cape, and so forth.
We also did some math. Not a whole lot, just a wee bit since it is Tuesday. 🙂
Then out for a walk to do some art. The plan for the walk was to go to the benches by the nursing home and find something we could draw for 5 minutes tops. We talked about line and shading today.
this is what we came up with
the lad
me
Did some work with head of the class as well. And the lad played adventure world on facebook. He has to problem solve his way through a variety of puzzles and complete tasks.
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.
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.
