A Net in Time

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Fanfare, Royalty, Combat… A King’s Delight

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Recently my family was treated to the King’s package at Medieval Times.   My son brought along a friend as we took the time for the royal fanfare courtesy of Medieval Times.  This is our review.  🙂

 Medieval Times graciously offered us the King’s Package.   This comes with: 

 Gramma, son, friend of son, myself and my husband attended.   We made sure we got there in plenty of time so that we could see and hear all they had to offer in the preshow arena.   When one is in the greeting area, you are surrounded by various shields and crests.

You are handed a card, which will signify your hat colour, and part of the Royal Package you get to have your picture taken with the king.

Your hat colour also signifies your table colour and whereabouts you will be seated.   Being at green table three means we were sitting ring side, closest to the action, with the knight who.. as it turned out.. was the King’s Champion of the day.

Before we actually got into the show though, they have an area set up with shops and people wandering around dressed in period clothing.   The boys were able to meet the King’s Falconer where they learned she was hooded, not because she wouldn’t stay with him, but because there were a couple of service dogs roaming around and she was not fond of dogs at all.

And there were shops.  All manned by people dressed in period clothing.  There was a bar set up in the middle of the floor and town crier who called out birthday greetings, and announced which tables would get to go in next. 

 The lad was mightily tempted to by a sword for himself and his friend but found them simply out of his price range.   Eventually the temptation subsided as we found ourselves going into our sitting area.  And here we all are.  🙂   Ready for an evening of food and fun.

 And it was GOOD food.  Soup, bread, chicken, corn, potato, limitless drinks (pop etc).   The only thing I didn’t like was the tea post meal which was MUCH too strong for my taste.

Before the main show there were smaller shows, the falcon flew and caught her lure, the horses strutted their stuff.. Gramma just LOVED this part.

Then the main show began with the knights performing their skills.   I have to tell you this.. there were a group of eight year old boys celebrating a birthday.. and my.. they hooted and hollered and had SO MUCH fun.   YEAH!!!!   Green Knight YOU ROCK!     And booing and hissing when the bad guy appeared.   “YOU SUCK!!!   YOU ARE THE BAD MAN!!!!”    They were so totally into the show it added that extra bit of enjoyment to the show.   Though I have to admit, the mom with them looked a bit shell shocked!  🙂

The show was a lot of fun, even though we had seen it last year, the joy and the wonder and the fun were still there for my lad with plans for next year!   MOM!!!   Do you think next year I should wear my knights costume?    Wouldn’t that be fun?

I said “Sure Lad, but let’s see if they invite us back next year too!”

Here are some pics of the fun we had.

And action.   Men were called upon.  Will you defend the honour of the realm?   Fight to protect the throne and the Princess?   Jousting, combat, sparks flew as weapons hit.

Currently we are listening to a series of books called “The Ranger’s Apprentice”. (Excellent series by the by.. get your boys to listen to it.. your girls too!)  🙂   It is set during this time period, when we saw the flail at work against the sword, it brought to life the danger one of the characters was in when he was faced up against the flail.  The reach it gives to the person bearing it and the thud it made against a shield.   Made it all more real you know?   Even though we know the show is carefully choreographed so no one gets hurt, it still brings the thrill and the danger immediately to bear.

And so, the kingdom was protected.
And all was good in the land.
By the end of the show my son’s friend said “I am so tired, but I am so glad that I came.”

Did you know that you too can go to see Medieval Times?
You can.  
The prices in Canada are as follows:
You can pick up these additional packages: 
Did you know that Medieval Times, Toronto received an award last year?

If you want to have a great meal (using your fingers), great service and excellent entertainment, do check Medieval Times.   It is well worth your time to attend.     HAVE FUN!  

variety in homeschooling

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dominoes and physics. this led of course to our own experiments, and learning about energy. 🙂
The lad worked on math reflex while I got the dishes all caught up.
then we laughed at some pandas

then since the lad was having a difficult day (tonsils are swollen and sore again) we decided to pursue a passion.
we studied spiders by playing around on the web.
we learned that they have three sub-orders

Then we looked a whole ton of pictures and selected a few to find out where they come from giving us a chance to use our mapping skills.  

 We watched some you tube videos.

this is one with a bunch of pictures of mygalomorphs.

 

and then we headed off to do some reading.  🙂   Always good to read.  

“Mommy!   Can we learn about a snake today?” was the plea.

“Sure” I replied.. so we learned about the ring-necked snake. 

 See here for the source.

We started off our story reading from 50 magical stories.  The story today was called The half-chick.   It was a funny story and “explains” why chickens are used as weather vanes.  It just made us laugh.



From there we moved on to Classical animal stories”   The Death of Gellert was a very sad story that immediately had my son thinking up a different ending to it.

From our world history book we have started to learn about the different types of weapons people have used throughout history.   Today we learned about how weapons can be made from stone.. especially from Flint which is a hard stone that is easily chipped away at to make a pointed stone.  

 

 

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.

Velveteen Rabbit, Cleaning and Reading

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The day started off with having breakfast before I did the bunny chores.   We had banana pancakes with syrup.    This gave the lad a chance to do reflex math while I toiled outside.  🙂    I came into the sounds of The Velveteen Rabbit playing.  🙂   When we went to the library yesterday we borrowed a copy of this book, so he’s been reminded of how much he enjoys this book/show.  🙂

Our plans for the day include working on our spider unit study, cleaning the living and dining rooms, and tidying up toys on the main floor of the house.

We’ll probably fit in our normal reading as well.

Today we learned about ground hogs (also known as woodchucks)  in the Ultimate Guide to wildlife in North America. 

Learning what they are called woodchucks led to the question of what does it mean to chuck wood mommy?   So I answered that and then he laughed at how they can climb trees to escape from their enemies.   The lad is well acquainted with woodchucks since we camped last summer at a place with a whole lot of woodchucks and he had fun chasing them from burrow to burrow.


Then off to read from “the Lamb”. Today we did chapter Eight.

Then we read from our world history book.   We are learning about pirates. We read three pages today, more than usual, but it was just very very interesting.



We learned about one guy who got his head cut off since he took two trips to find El Dorado and was unsuccessful and another guy who sailed around the world and about privateers.

We did one page out of the Dress the pirates.  The page we did fit in with the privateers.

We did two pages in this book.  We had only planned to do one but then looking ahead the lad found a page with a cat and a couple of naughty looking rats so OF COURSE we had to do that page as well!  🙂

We have started to go through this book called “the big book of questions and answers about Jesus.”

We did lesson three today.   it was on how Jesus was both God and man completely and it’s difficult to understand but means that Jesus was everything we are but so very much more PLUS he never ever did anything bad.
I need to post a pic of our blow up globe.  I LOVE IT.  It’s so immensely portable.  🙂  I love  that I can spin it in my hands and there is no weight but air.   It was also affordable.  🙂    But I digress.   We used our globe when we talked about pirates today.  One pirate sailed around the world collecting treasures.   We were able to trace his steps and the lad’s best guess was that it would have taken him at least 100 hours if not maybe more to do all that travelling.     He thought it interesting that pirates, if they worked for a king or queen were called privateers.

We have started an new art project.
We’ve taken a book called Imagine a Place

I got this book out for the pictures, I thought they would spawn conversation, but as I looked through it I got to thinking …wow.. what an interesting book.  I should be able to use this to work with the lad on imagining different things and just seeing how we can imagine different things perhaps even differently from the artist.

It was a great activity for us.    There are fourteen “imagine a place’s” in this book so we’ll be able to use it over the next three weeks as a regular activity to do. 

here’s what we came up with.

these are the words offered us:

Imagine a place…
where you bend and sway
leap and land,
right where a story begins.

 Mine was a long grass with insects leaping and landing.  The grass is being blown by the wind so is bending and swaying, the sky is turning dark and still the grass bends and sways and is filled with colours…just waiting for children to come running through it pell mell on the way home before the rains come.

   The lad’s dictation   ” there’s an island in the middle of the ocean, the waves are always crashing across the island. there are some lizards that can walk on water.   and for them to walk on the water means they have flaps on their feet that make bubbles and they require to be light, to make bubbles and also speed.   and nothing else.”

 This is the picture that we looked at after we finished our own drawings.  We found this picture quite interesting…how the rocks and children leaping from stone to stone turned into a castle/town that people could peer down into.   

and then we watched the Velveteen Rabbit again.  I like it, it’s a well done story. 🙂

I neglected to add that we played two games today.
Jenga (good for motor control, logic and just fun)
Catopoly – math skills, following rules, being a good sport and such like.

Reading, copywork and fun

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Today overall was a good homeschool day.
we did a lot of reading today, and some art, and played ‘rats’.

After doing morning devotions we started off our day reading about muskrats in the Ultimate Guide to wildlife in North America. 
the lad was quite surprised that they are more closely related to lemmings (one of his favourite creatures) than they are to beavers.

Then off to read from “the Lamb”. Today we did chapter six.

Then we read from our world history book.   We are learning about pirates. 


Today it was about the corsairs who were pirates of the Mediterranean Seas, and they mostly wanted to capture people to be slaves or to sell for ransom.

The lad had fun when we finished our knights section in doing a sticker book on them, so he asked if I could pretty please find a sticker book on Pirates.   I said I’d look around and see what I could come up with and voila!   two sticker books.   They have a different focus so it seemed right to do so.

this first one is from the same series as the knights one.  Dress the pirates.  See the differences in their outfits from area and time.    We’ll do one or two pages at a time in this book as we learn about different pirates.


This second one has it’s focus more on the life of a pirate, what the ship was like.   We did two pages in this book…getting ready to sail and life aboard the ship.   This is where the lad learned about rats that live on the ships.. and hence the game of rats we played later. 🙂


We have started to go through this book called “the big book of questions and answers about Jesus.”
I expect we’ll do one page at a time.
Each question is laid out over two pages.  It starts with reading material and introduces the topic and then has activities for the child to do.
Today we learned that Jesus’ name means “the Lord Saves” and it is similar to the name Joshua.   We talked about how Joshua was used of the Lord to save the people, and so Jesus saved the people of God from their sin.   One of the activities asked of us was to read through Exodus 3 and draw a picture of what we read there.   This fit in well with what I had hoped to accomplish today.. that of reading and then drawing a picture of what we got in our minds from it.   So we killed two birds with one stone. 🙂

the picture the lad came up with
 and what I did.  

It was interesting doing this with the lad.. I was going to put smoke above my burning bush but the lad said “but mommy, the bush didn’t burn…and if it didn’t burn there won’t be smoke!”   and it was like.. duh.. you’re right buddy.. there certainly wouldn’t be smoke!  (never EVER thought about that before).  AND I was just about to put boots on my Moses but the lad reminded me that God said TAKE OFF your shoes.   So, once again, the lad reminded me of important details.  🙂   Always good to have that.

I wanted to do some copy work of “I am who I am” but the lad was typical for a Tuesday.. reluctant to do what didn’t really interest him at all.. so I said okay.. what would you like to do for copywork?   “the names of the people I know from Seaquest”.   Okay I can do that.   He named name, I wrote them and we agreed that he’d put the 10 names into alphabetical order.  Since he often does copywork better if I make myself scarce I went to check on the laundry.   I came upstairs to find him in tears and all upset.

Why?  because there is no “E” name and needs for there to be a “e” name.   I don’t get this.

A tear-filled discussion followed…with the end result being that he decided he’d write out each name three times and NOT put them in alphabetical order and he would NOT get a sticker for doing so.  

We normally play a board game of some sort and we alternate who gets to pick the game.  Today we played Topple.   My sister gave this to the lad last year at Christmas I think.  We pull it out to play.

After lunch we played rats.   “cause every pirate needs to watch out for rats nibbling at your toes and stealing your stuff.  AND THEN every pirate knows you have to teach those rats to behave themselves!  🙂   It was good fun for an hour.

Cleaned the bathroom.  Not great…but better.  Toilets and countertops and tub ledges only.  The lad cleaned out all the recyclables.  AND hubby oh.. my dear hubby hung up my birthday present from last year.. a looped shower curtain hanger.  we have more room in the tub (or at least the feeling of more room!).  WOOT WOOT!

Out for a walk around the block.  Home for supper and caring for the bunnies, bedtime reading and whatnot.

A good day overall.  Better than many Tuesdays.  🙂

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.

millipede fun and much more

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today we studied millipedes.

the lad has been in to catching them lately so today I decided we could run with that.

We learned that they lay between 10-300 eggs at one time and they take a few weeks to hatch.

Having learned how to tell the boys from the girls we are pretty sure we have three boys and three girls.   Which would give us anywhere from 30 to 900 babies in one shot.   The lad was kept busy trying to imagine what 900 millipedes would look like.   Rather hard to imagine…and then if they each lived 10 years, we end up with 9000 and then if each of them had babies… WOW!!!  we’d have a million before you could even think about it…and since one of the books we are currently reading is “one Million Dots” the boy was simply amazed.

So by taking the time to pursue a lad’s interests we covered math, English, geography, science…graphing and spelling and using a magnifying glass and what not.

Very fun.  Very captivating for a six year old. 🙂

we let the guinea pigs out today after selling three of the adults we no longer wanted.   Nice to have them out on the grass and not crowded in their winter cages any longer. 🙂

Then we had a HOOT building cardboard equipment for knights and
having battles.   Duct tape, cardboard, sharp knives and regular tape…
all made for excellent fun and research and remembering all that we had
learned in studying knights.   We learned about adding some aluminum
foil to make knives look real.

The lad came up with the armour design himself.
I helped him figure out a holder for his quiver of arrow.  See the bow that he made himself?
Mommy?   What weapon can you make?   What will you be?  you can’t be a knight cause I’m a knight.
Okay.. I’ll be an assassin.  
What does an assassin do?
Oh.. they kill people in all kinds of different ways.
With potions mommy?   
yep.. and knives too.  
OH.. you should make a knife.  
So above you see my knife.
we made cardboard potions to.
The lad made this halberd all by himself.
He needed idea help to make the mace.
I made one too, just to even the score a little. 🙂
Showing me how he’s going to get me with the spear and halberd.
but he’s going to be a walking knight, not one with a horse.
 
and then before supper we had a rousing game of Knights after the assassins!!!!

 Where I unleashed my secret weapon…..a hand spear!

Complete with dad saying “isn’t this a better game to play outside?”  🙂