A Net in Time

Curriculum and book reviews, faith, homeschooling and more!

Geography

Review: City Trails: Rome

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It was rather fun looking through City Trails – Rome with my lad recently.  We’ve been studying Ancient History and have been visiting the historical places in Rome.   Therefore, as we walked throughout the pages of City Trails we frequently ran into places or statutes we had seen on our journeys.   

My review of City Trails Rome

But there is more to City Trails Rome than seeing historical building.  We are taken on 19 different trails throughout the city.   We get to taste food (or at least WANT to taste some food).  Stopping by at the Mini Medicine Mound, Touring the wall of water and seeing Trajan’s Column up close.  We saw Coypus swimming by and watch people dive in the River Tiber as we headed off to visit Rome’s zoo.    

It’s always a fun day visiting Rome. 🙂  Especially while wearing the city’s colours of red and yellow.   So grab up this book and visit the City Trails of Rome.  Stop in at the markets, the toy shops and the restaurants…. feast your belly as well as your mind!  🙂   The Map provided on the opening flap of this tome leads you the various trails followed throughout the book.   Visit, have fun. 

My thoughts.

Unlike City Trails Tokyo, I found City Trails Rome to be laden with a lot of the historical monuments/buildings rather than the more modern buildings/attractions.  This isn’t bad as many people go to visit Rome for those attractions.  I just expected after the brightness  and current day buildings of Tokyo to see some of more of the modern buildings as well.   I have to admit, I would love to poke my head in at Bartolucci and Al Sogno.  Those toy shops look to be delightful to walk though, and visiting the main market!  Markets are always fun microscapes of a larger area eh?    This book would be excellent as a go along when studying Rome, or if you were planning a trip there and wanted to see what your children would be most interested in seeing. 

City Trails: Rome
     Secrets, Stories and Other Cool Stuff
Moira Butterfield
Lonely Planet Kids   104 pages, 8-12 years. 
Board cover with flap, geography 
Series: City Trails 
Reviewed for: Raincoast Books. 

Where to purchase? Amazon Link.

I recently reviewed another in this series: Tokyo.    This book would go along very well with Drive Thru History as it just gives another way to see historical places. 🙂

Review: City Trails – Tokyo

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City Trails is a series of books from Lonely Planet Kids that leads the reader through different cities around the world.  Today we are looking at Tokyo.  In it we will learn the secrets, stories and other cool stuff found in this magnificent city. 

My review of the book city trails tokyo, seeing tokyo in ways unexpected.

In the beginning of the book we get the table of contents, along with a map showing the points of interest.  We get to watch a fish feeding, learn about earthquakes, visit Robot world, see the cars of the future and go to the theatre.   All the major points of interest are highlighted to give you a well rounded view of the city.

In the process of visiting these points of interest we are also introduced to Japanese culture (such as it’s polite to talk quietly in public and one doesn’t express feelings of emotion in public). The fun of the kite festivals and so much more. 

Sample pages from City Trails - tokyoAs you can see, the pages are in full colour, with a mixture of photos and drawings. The image of the Robot Park made me want to go visit it.  Would be fun to see it you know?  The reader is taken down into the fabric district, the traditional food streets, and all the places dedicated to animals.  

What I thought:

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, it showed me parts of Tokyo I hadn’t even considered.  Who would think of a museum dedicated to parasites?  Or learning what traditional Japanese underwear was?   It was just filled with interesting tidbits about the city and the Japanese culture.  Just a fun book.  Made me want to go visit Tokyo so I could see all these sights for myself.. perhaps one day. 🙂  This would be a great book to hand to an upper elementary to middle school student if you are doing a country study, or wanting to visit Japan.  They could easily pick a few items out that they wanted to know more about. 

cover of book City Trails Tokyo 
City Trails: Tokyo
Anna Claybourne
Lonely Planet Kids
104 pages, 8-12 years.
Board cover with flap, geography
Series: City Trails
Reviewed for: Raincoast Books. 

Where to purchase?   Amazon Link.

Other books that teach about geographical areas:

Following the Great Wall. 
Rocky Mountain Explorer.
Mission to Pluto.

Review: Bizarre Space – a Kid’s Guide to our Strange, Unusual Universe

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Bizarre Space is a great book for children who are interested in our strange and usual universe.   Jenn Dlugos and Charlie Hatton have done a marvellous job in creating a child friendly book to intrigue and educate children about space. Bizarre Space A kids guide ot our strange unusual universe

My son is not what you would call a fast reader, over the course of two weeks I was surprised that he finished it So quickly and came back to me with a glowing report.   Those happy reports are always a good thing you know?

What do you get?

Six sections: The Innies, The Outies, Comets & Asteroids and such, super-duper stars, Life’s better in the Milky Way, and Your Universe and You. Each of these sections has five subsections. Within those sections you will find humour, trivia questions, information, real life images, people who work in the field, diagrams and all sorts of fascinating facts.   If you have questions about space…this book will at least answer some of them, and if you are like my son… will inspire more.

The Lad’s Thoughts:

“I like the book, the language is easy to understand, I liked the images.  I like learning about space.  This was a good book to read.  If you like learning about space you should read this book.”

My Thoughts:

I really like the set up for this book, how it move out into space in a spiral pattern.  The trivia questions get a person thinking, and then searching for the answer to see if you got it right. They weren’t easy guess them questions, but one’s to help you think about the topic being presented.  My son thoroughly enjoyed reading it and has set him on a course of wanting to read more non-fiction books like this one. 

Bizarre Space: A kid's Guide to our 
    strange, unusual universe. 
Jenn Dlugos and Charlie Hatton
Prufrock Press Inc.
300 pages, middle school, non-fiction
Softcover
Reviewed for: Raincoast Books.
Where to find: Amazon Link.

 

Review: Drive Thru History Adventures

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I have long wished over my years with the Homeschool Review Crew that I could review Drive Thru History but never had the opportunity to do so.  FINALLY our moment arrived (YAY)! We could study Ancient History with Drive Thru History Adventures.  Dave Stott’s well done program has my son so enthused that he will even watch an episode on Saturdays if we’ve missed a day throughout the week.  It’s a winner in our household, so I invite you to read on, perhaps it will be a winner in yours as well!

Field trips, videos, discussion questions and more. My review of Drive thru History Adventures.

What is Drive Thru History Adventures?

A series of three online courses.  During these courses Dave Stott takes field trips around the world talking history, geography, archaeology, classic art, and Christian worldview.  Right now three courses are available.. Biblical history (18 weeks), American History (12 weeks) and Ancient History  (12 weeks).   Into this conversation he interjects humour and stories. Each video is accompanied by discussion questions (also provided on PDF’s) and readings to extend the lesson.

How did we use it?

We watched two videos per week, normally at lunchtime, on Monday and Wednesday.   We watched as a family and found the video’s very entertaining and educational.  The Mr. Stott’s voice was pleasant to listen to, the images used helpful.  My son enjoyed reading the quotes. 

As my son will often say he doesn’t remember things, on the days between videos we did the worksheets.   Testing his recall and then for things he didn’t remember, we’d look them up in a different format, which would help him recall information from the video.   This gave us an opportunity to extend our knowledge of particular details via youtube videos or various websites.   Always good when one had their curiousity peaked to explore more isn’t it?  

Check out part of the history we learned on Rome.  This was a few lessons back and my son still remembers it. 🙂

 

We looked at the readings provided, and I admittedly found them interesting, but at this point for my grade seven lad, they were a bit beyond his understanding.  The neat thing about PDF’s is they can be stored for use at a later time!  I can see them being of excellent value if he were a highschool student.

OH.. before I forget.  My son was delighted one day to get some mail from Drive Thru History!  He grinned and stashed them in his “I’m keeping this box”.  🙂   It was great to see his surprise. 

How does it work?

It’s easy to work with.  When you login you pick where you want to go.  Curriculum leads you to the lessons.  Resources are the PDF’s and extended information.  Community links to their social media.  Adventures TV (a cool resource I’ll talk on later)

Three programs are available at the moment. I have no clue if any more are planned.  The ones currently on the plan are history courses for bible, American and ancient. 

It’s just a matter of clicking on the one you want to view.  If you were so inclined you could watch one episode per week of a different course.  We are following along the Ancient History one, biblical history is on our radar.  Each lesson starts with a video that I would chrome cast to the TV.  This made it easy for us to watch the episodes as a family. 

Numerous art work was portrayed as you worked your way down the page after viewing the video.  Each lesson also came with a quote that my son delighted in reading to me.  Sometimes we would talk about what that quote meant.  The lad didn’t always know, but it made for good conversation. 🙂

I have to admit, sometimes we did the lessons backwards.  🙂  Working our way through what the discussion questions might be, reading the summary, looking at the images and everything else in the lesson.  Sometimes my son knew the answers to discussion questions and other times we knew watching the video was the smart thing to do.  🙂   Answers are also provided.

The discussion were listed in the lesson, and were also available on PDF’s.  As I mentioned earlier we would normally watch the video and go through the art work one day and the next my lad would fill out the discussion questions.  Most of the time his recall was great but sometimes we would have to look up the answers. These discussion questions would often disappear the void that is his room so I was lucky to snap pics when I did!  🙂

We also received access to adventures TV.  This requires a separate login.  It is available as a free app on android and apple devices and it is available as tab through your dashboard on the computer.  You do need a subscription to be able to access all the content, but the app itself is free to download. Once you install the app you can sign in with your email and than you receive an email that updates the app so you can use it.  Pretty neat eh?

Adventures TV is a series of videos that vary in length, that are either just fun to watch (like the learning about cheese), interesting to watch/learn from or videos of the lessons (without the PDF’s).  Subject areas include: History (Bible, American, Ancient), Dave’s adventures (various updates), Sideroads (history of groundhog day, coins, cheese etc), Behind the scenes (museum of the bible opening etc) and Dig Deeper (bible reading plans etc).  They are well worth going through and picking what you’d like to know more about.   We haven’t watched a lot of them as my son’s focus is on ancient history.  As he says “we can watch those another time right?  I want to do my history!”  I’m just not going to argue with that logic eh?  🙂

My Concerns:

Sometimes the videos would go through a stretch of being highly pixelated.  It never lasted beyond four minutes running time, but was a distraction when listening.  This bothered the boys more than it did me.  As far as we could tell this was simply a downloading issue.

My Appreciation:

Dave Stott is a highly engaging speaker who has put together a program that not only educates the listener, but entertains.  He’s a funny man who is at sometimes just a goofy geek (so he’d fit well into our family).  You can see his love for history in the way he speaks about it, communicating well the truths of history.   He speaks well of how biblical characters fit into the history of the moment.   I fully expect once we are done watching the ancient history episodes that we will continue going through the other history as well.  My son mentioned that bible history was next on his “I want to do that” list. 

Drive Thru History Adventures.
Dave Stott
On-line subscription (received full year)
Reviewed for Homeschool Review Crew
Pricing: see here.  They are currently offering
    a discount special so don't delay.
In the winter edition of TOS magazine 
 "Drive Thru History Adventures is offering 
20% off for readers of The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine."
see page 19 for that discount.  
I don't know if they can be combined.

Do you want to know more?

100 people from the Homeschool Review Crew looked at Drive through History.  You can find our reviews here. 

These are the programs that we used:

+ Bible History (18 weeks on the Gospels)
+ American History (12 weeks on early American history)
+ Ancient History (12 weeks on early Greece, Rome and Asia Minor)

Facebook: http://facebook.com/drivethruhistory
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/drivethruhistory/,
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drivethruhistory/ Tag: @drivethruhistory

Country Study: Australia

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After doing South Korea it was my son’s turn to decide what country to do next.  He chose to do Australia.   Did you know that Australia is the only country that is also a continent?  I learned on facebook today that not all people know this which TOTALLY shocked me.  🙂

Learning about Australia, her people, culture, places and food.

Anyways, Australia has often fascinated us so it was rather neat to spend some time learning about this country.   My son did a report on it.  We learned that Australia had a gold rush and started as a penal colony.   He learned a few other things as well but his report has gone the way of the dodo bird when we wiped my old laptop clean for him to use.   He also did up a map of Australia, figuring out the important cities and landmarks (like the Great Barrier Reef and Ayers Rock).

We Watched:

As always we watched a fair number of videos because videos show us things that we can’t always appreciate reading a book (and frankly my boy is a video oriented lad).

This video gave us a good introduction to Australia and gave us information to consider and look further into.

 

Did you know that the official name of Australia is the Commonwealth of Australia. This was news to us as well, but then again, Canada is called the Dominion of Canada (but we don’t say that eh?)

We went on to learn more about Ayer’s Rock, also known as Uluru. 

 

We watched a couple longer videos on the Great Barrier Reef, but thought a shorter one linked on the blog would be more suitable. 🙂

We checked out tourist destinations as well, because in many ways we are tourists…just doing it via videos rather than a long plane trip.  🙂

Saw some of their wildlife, and learned about their climate. We tend not to like background music for our videos, but we couldn’t escape it on this video. We found this site on animal conservancy interesting.

I could go on and on about all we learned… but I need to leave room for you to explore this interesting land on your own too eh? 🙂

Oh! I mustn’t forget. We did some art! Just some simple dot art. It was kinda fun though.  We learned all about it here.  As well as through Geography Through Art.

We Cooked:

Oh.. and we cooked (don’t we always?)  🙂  And oh my goodness we made good food.  The only thing we don’t mind not making again was the ribs as they were good but nothing better than what we’ve made before.  The spinach damper was excellent and worked well dipped in spaghetti sauce!  The rosemary butter was excellent and I’ll be making that again when I have biscuits on the table. The lamb rolls were easy enough to make and I hope to make them when I have guests sometime.  They were excellent fodder! 

We made aussie ribs, spinach damper, lamb rolls, and…. 

My son made cherry pavlova on his own.   Very sweet, tasted great, especially when frozen.  We all initially had a slice and then decided it would be better a bit colder.  🙂  I admittedly did help my lad with the meringue as it needed to be done ahead of time and he was busy writing a report. 

We had planned to make this pasta dish but decided we actually had enough with what we had made already.

If you would like to study Australia, you might find these free unit studies helpful as well.

Momma of many blessings.
Trillium Montessori.
AngelicScalliwags.
Creekside Learning.
Pinay Homeschooler.

Country Study: South Korea

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It was my husband’s turn to pick what country we studied about two months back and he chose to do South Korea.   It was fun picking out recipes together and spending a week learning about South Korea. 

A study we did on the country of South Korea with a link up for recipes.

We watched a lot of videos, did some reading of websites, and made food.  LOTS of food, we’ll get to that later though. 🙂  One of the interesting tidbits we learned about was the demilitarized zone. This is an area between North and South Korea where people aren’t allowed.  It is host to a wide variety of animals.  We spent some time learning more about the DMZ and the animals there.  This video is a brief glimpse.

 

We watched quite a few videos on Korea, including these ones on 10 things you might not know, and introduction to Korea.  We listened to some language lessons. 

My lad’s interest in archery and Karate led us down those paths in studying the sports of Korea.  We started with the Korea historical bow that Gakgung. 

 
We looked into their form of martial arts, learning about Korean taekwondo and Judo. We were surprised to learn that in Korea they have schools with a sports theme.  This is one of the reasons Korea produces some of the top competitors in Judo. 

Son found out what their flag looked like and some general details and filled out his sheet which… I haven’t the foggiest where he stored it.   But it was done.  In case you are curious, South Korea’s flag looks like this and is filled with symbolism.  The background is white, one of their traditional colours, it represent peace and purity.  The circle in the middle comes from the um-yang (like the yin-yang in China) and represents balance.  The red half positive, the blue half negative.  The Trigrams in the corners represent movement and harmony.  There are four to represent four separate elements: heaven, sun, moon and earth. 

We made some amazing food which we ate while chatting and listening to Korean music. 🙂 I will freely admit we didn’t play it long and we did shut it off after a while as .. well.. it’s not our style and we found it a tad distracting.

What food did we make?   YUMMY FOOD!!!  oh my goodness.. just so yummy.

Hotteok:

These were pancakes with a brown sugar filling.  Very yummy.   Took some fiddling to get them to work well and we had some leftover filling when we shouldn’t have.  But I didn’t know how to stuff them as full as what we should have.  A lad kinda gave up too.  🙂

Bulgogi:

Hubby LOVES this dish so just had to make some.  He and the lad thoroughly enjoyed it.

Kimchi:

Admittedly we didn’t make it, but hubby bought some and enjoyed it.  The lad thought it was fairly good too.  I didn’t have any since cabbage and I don’t get along.

Red bean something or other.  This was harder to make than I thought it would be and my first try burned.  But once we got it made and cooked it was really good.  But I can’t find my recipe anymore.  🙁  sorry.  It involved making a red bean paste.

Honey Butter Fried Chicken. 

Honestly, if this chicken took less time to make, I would make it all the time.  It was very very good.

We attempted to make a rice drink that they do.  Um.. we failed or it just wasn’t our thing, I really don’t know.  It needed to ferment and something else, and the drink tasted okay but I couldn’t do the rice in it and hubby sniffed it and said “nope”.   The lad tried a bit of it and seconded dad’s opinion.  🙂   I gave it good go… but sometimes things just don’t work as they should.

Stay Tuned.  Recipe Linky is Below!

Anyways, that’s our walk through South Korea, I hope you enjoyed your journey.   Just reminding you if you want a more traditional approach to studying countries, to check out SchoolhouseTeachers.com.  They have some wonderfully indepth country studies for you to embark upon. Valetines Sale is: February 12-16, 2018
Here are the Coupon Codes: LOVE18 – $99 for Annual Membership subscription + 6.8 Oz. Dark Chocolate Bar (U.S. customers only) + Winter Print Issue of The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine and LOVEMONTHLY18 – $10.95 per month. 

OH!   I also wanted to mention how much we’ve been enjoying the Olympic Games today… watching curling and moguls.   Did you know my friend Lori put together a wonderful Olympics study?   I KNOW how awesome is that!  So grab up your middle schoolers and have some fun with the Olympics.   Find it right here!

What else…oh.. some unit studies you might find helpful in learning about South Korea.

Knowledge quest.   Confessions of a homeschooler.  CIA.  Half-a-hundred acre.  



Review: Dinosaur Atlas

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Imagine that you could travel around the world seeing history unfold…. welcome to the Dinosaur Atlas.  A wonderful book of unfolding pages and lift that flaps to delight and inform.   This is seriously a great book for the dinosaur lovers among us, it is so packed with information.

The Dinosaur Atlas comes with facts to amaze you, fold-out maps, lift the flaps curiousities and life-size fossils.  Lonely Planet Kids worked to make this an informative book to delight as you walk your way through the pages.  In the middle of the book we are treated to a photograph containing the actual size jaws of a Anhanguera which lived in Brazil.

Each of the pages folds out to present even more information, and the pages are printed on a heavy stock paper… thte quality of board paper.   Sometimes they included lift the flap pages.  Regardless of how the information is presented, you’ll be surprised at the sheer amount you learn… like did you know there were dinosaurs who shrank due to living on a small island?  Or that there were dinosaurs that had scales and feathers?  Or even that dinosaurs have been discovered in Madagascar?  I KNOW.. tons of information, some of the facts caught me off guard, others were like old friends reminding me of their presence.

Maps contained through the book told the story of where these dinosaurs came from.   Dinosaurs have been found on every continent… even Antarctica!

Though many of the drawing were illustrations, some photos are included as well.  Dinosaurs and all the information surrounding them are brought to life.

d Dinosaur Atlas

Reviewed for: Raincoast Books.

ON Amazon.