A Net in Time

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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.

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.

George Washington – DNG – A review

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ICE CREAM!! This was a favourite food of George Washington. “It’s not as good as a sprinkle sandwich though, is it mommy? Though it is pretty good isn’t it?”


This is a unit study that has been produced by Unit Studies by Amanda Bennett..

The lad and I did this unit study over the course of three days. We took a day to read a couple of books about George Washington, then a day to do day one and two, and then another day to do days 3-5.

We discovered how difficult it is to find books on George Washington. This despite the fact that Amanda Bennett lists several in the unit study, we couldn’t find a single one! Part of that’s living in small town Ontario, but we couldn’t find but the two in the London (and that’s NOT small town Ontario), neither of them was in her list of suggested reading. We enjoyed the one book on George, it was written in a fairly engaging story style. It had some pictures as well so the boy could see some of how it was back in the day of George Washington.

I know that he enjoyed some of the study on George and that he learned something because suddenly Bunny Town (a make believe world that all that is good in the world occurs there) had a “bunny washington” in it. 🙂 Made me smile. Here’s a lad having ‘Bunny Washington’ explain that cutting down trees will make your dad angry, and that sometimes you have to help people even if you want to do something else (aka George wanted to be a farmer, but instead because president of the USA).

Amanda Bennett unit studies are laid out in such away that it makes it very easy to do the study. They have lap book elements and fully printable pages for notebooking, drawing and such like. The graphics are child-friendly. If you want to go off on rabbit trails, it is easy enough to do. If you want to skip certain sections, you can do that too. 🙂 We skipped ALL the stuff that had to do with American government or that I thought too difficult to do with a wiggly five year old. ALL I wanted to do was touch on the basics, and that’s what I was easily enabled to do.

Day 1: Who Was George Washington?
Day 2: People and Places in George Washington’s Life
Day 3: The Accomplishments of George Washington
Day 4: Lessons to Learn From George Washington
Day 5: Remembering George Washington

One thing I like is that I can copy the questions into my own word program and instead of printing out five pages of material, I can print out two. Save on the printer ink. I can pick and choose what pages I want to copy in their original format as well.

I was given a copy of this unit study for my honest review.

The blog tour is over here. Go there to read some excellent reviews.

Download N Go is having a number of specials on right now. Go here to learn more about them please. 🙂

Fun 4 Mom Giveaway

The Winner will receive his/her choice of either a $75 Amazon gift card or a Be Mine Spa and Chocolate Valentine’s Gift Basket from Amazon.com with an approximate retail value of $99.95.

To enter the Contest send your full name and mailing address to contestentries @ unitstudy.com with a subject line reading “Fun 4 Mom Entry” no later than 11:59 p.m. (EST), February 13, 2011. The contest rules can be found here. A winner will be chosen on February 14, 2011.

George Washington – DNG

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Today we worked on the last three days of the George Washington Study. I made a worksheet over at ESL Writing Wizard on Mark 10:45 to go along with the study.

We did days three-five. George Washington is a unit study from Amanda Bennett’s Unit Studies.

I have to admit, we really picked and chose what we wanted to do. 🙂 We, as Canadians, teaching a five year old, really aren’t too worried about learning constitutional stuff about the United States. It was FUN learning that Washington’s favourite food was ice cream, so we rewarded ourselves when all done doing our work with having a bowl of ice cream. We talked about what it means to serve. George Washington spent his life serving people in one form or another. Jesus calls us to live a life of service as well. So it was good to see this and think about how we can serve God and others in how we live our lives and the choices that we make.

After we enjoyed our icecream we watched some TV (about the megastructure they built in Dubai) and then we enjoyed this you tube video

Though Justin quite determinedly said “I don’t DANCE, I GROOVE!” 🙂

What we Learned today – January 27, 2011

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George Washington unit study from Amanda Bennett’s Unit Studies.

We did parts of day one and day two. We learned his favourite subject, the story of the cherry tree, where he was born and much more. Lots of drawing and gluing today. 🙂

We also learned that Virginia has a state fish! We thought that was funny. 🙂

Later on we played with Lego. Then the lad chose to work on building a cat trap… an invention out of his own head. When he was done that we listened to three books from this site, and then listened and answered questions about two different books. MightyBooksJr looks to be an interesting site and I am happy that a fellow homeschooler directed me to it.

Our exercise for the day was tobogganing at the Pinery and our first attempt at skating. 🙂

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. 🙂

Magnificant Moon – Day One

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Today I worked on Magnificant Moon with the lad. Some of what we learned was kinda interesting, some of it well…wasn’t, at least to a boy child age 5.

One of the questions asked as “would you like to go to the moon?” and his very prompt response was “NO!”
“how come” I asked.
“Cause I”m interested in cats and bunnies, not the moon!”.

We learned about Neil Armstrong and his interest in planes when he was a lad. We learned that the moon is dust and rocks (Boring said a boy child). And considering what his interests are…do you blame him? 🙂

He found the rocket video interesting, so I pursued that a bit. interesting to see how a two stage rocket works. I found this as well as this (a PDF) which outlined a study one could do using a film. It was useful as a question generator.

We did find this experiment on making a two stage rocket using balloons that the lad wants to try. You need a long balloon, a paper cup and a round balloon. We’re going to add a long piece of heavy string and a straw, because we want to direct it’s flight up the stairs. 🙂 You cut the bottom out of the paper cup, put it around the long balloon small end toward balloon tip and blow it up. DO NOT TIE OFF. Hold the balloon end against the cup so the air can’t escape, then put the round balloon between the balloon and the cup and blow it up. Once it is sufficient size to hold the first balloon tight release that end, then blow up a bit more. Should show the effects of a two stage rocket. We need to find the long balloon yet…but otherwise we’re set to do it. Hopefully will get pics to share.

Oh… I used this copywork sheet generator to make some copy work for the lad. I made it a bit too long for a five year old, but otherwise I was pleased with my efforts. You need to print from the site, the work does not copy over well…even as a save image file.

He had fun discovering and then singing “J is for Justin and for Jupiter” over and over again when learning that Jupiter has 63 moons. That was one thing that simply astounded him… 63 moons!!!! It’s good to see a lad being amazed at something that God himself created. 🙂