A Net in Time

Curriculum and book reviews, faith, homeschooling and more!

history

Reading, Comprehension, and Science

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We did a great deal of reading today.
We read a new book, called “bad kitty gets a bath”.  This is just a fun book.  I got it to encourage the boy child in his interest for reading. he can read the simple words of kitty, bath, cat, hate etc.  Today we finished it, and then later in they day I spotted him looking through it very carefully.

It’s just a fun read for a child.  It also has a remarkable number of good scientific facts in it as well.  Always a bonus.

We continued reading The ultimate guide to wildlife in North America.  We’ll read a page most every day.  Today we learned about the star-nosed mole.  The picture in the book didn’t show eyes on it so we looked up whether they had eyes and they do indeed! 

In the fall when we went to the creation seminar in Kitchener we had picked up this book called “the lamb” by John R. Cross. It’s the story of the bible for children – with comprehension questions. 10 easy lessons. We are up to Lesson Three in the book.  It’s a good read.
Today we went to kids Art where we did the The Craziest Art Lesson Ever!
This is what we came up with:

Start your crazy art project by drawing a picture of a
giant lizard with a shirt on its head. Make your drawing with three
crayons and a black feltpen. Then crumple your drawing paper into a ball
the size of a camera lense and stomp on it with your feet for one
hundred minutes. Now your drawing is well crushed, so unfold it quickly
and spread it out on the worktable. Tape down the edges with melted
chocolate . Mix up a big batch of paint in a ziploc using two cups of
water and a spoonful of sandwich . Spread lots of this yellow paint onto
your drawing with a wrench and let it dry for a hour . Hang your
beautiful work of art in the living room until it is discovered by
Children’s Museum . Suddenly you will be a famous artist, become a
regular guest on Knight Rider and make lots of money painting portraits
of Captain Pichard surrounded by lemmings . 

This was a hoot and immediately the lad wanted to do it again. 🙂  so here we go….

 Start your crazy art project by drawing a picture of a
giant Alligator with a pants on its head. Make your drawing with 144
crayons and a green feltpen. Then crumple your drawing paper into a ball
the size of a cd and stomp on it with your feet for 100 minutes. Now
your drawing is well crushed, so unfold it quickly and spread it out on
the worktable. Tape down the edges with mactac . Mix up a big batch of
paint in a jar using two cups of vinegar and a spoonful of aero bar .
Spread lots of this yellow paint onto your drawing with a screwdriver
and let it dry for a a million years . Hang your beautiful work of art
in the green room until it is discovered by Toronto Children’s Museum .
Suddenly you will be a famous artist, become a regular guest on Monk and
make lots of money painting portraits of Adrian Monk surrounded by
lizards .

we had fun discovering new books over at We Give Books. 
Since we’ve been reading in our world history book about knights and castles I picked up a book at mastermind toys the other day about knights!  it’s a sticker book and the lad is having fun reviewing what he’s learning while dressing the knights and telling me what is happening in the book.  today we learned abit about the crusades, I find this a sad time in history so I didn’t get into a lot of detail with this six year old.  But he did learn the basics…the British went to fight against the Arab Muslims over the city of Jerusalem.

And then we headed off to look again at the junior science kit we started yesterday at Gramma’s.  Yesterday we dug up fool’s gold and then did some tests on a variety of rocks to test hardness, and other stuff that I can’t recall at this exact moment.   Today we’ll see about making some crystals and digging a geome (I think).

Today we learned

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Started off our day before breakfast watching Donald in Mathemagic Land.

My voice was finally back enough that I felt confident in reading from World History

We continue to learn about Knights and Castles.  Today the focus was on feast and how the great hall was used in castles.   Tomorrow we’ll learn about dragons so we had a discussion on whether dragons truly existed or not.    One would think with so many stories about them in regards to knights … and we KNOW that knights existed, that there must have been some type of large lizard/dragon as well.

There was fun to be had watching this:

we then played a lego game….it involved cops and robbers and was complicated…

This afternoon we’re off to London to go to Eldon House with K.I.C.K.  🙂

Skating, Spiders and Open Houses

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We did our normal reading
10 minute stories

Today’s story was about sea babies and was somewhat … odd.  that would be a good word.  🙂

World History

We continue to learn about Knights and Castles.

Then off to go skating with a friend.  We had fun, this was followed by lunch and a sword fight interspersed with lego and playing with baby guinea pigs. 🙂

 after our company left we learned a bit more about spiders!

Brown recluse spider and black widow in hand.

we also learned a surprising fact about tarantulas.

We also took some time to play with a robotic bug and learned that it can break out of popsicle houses and that given sufficient time can get out of any maze we were able to build for it.

Later this afternoon we have an open house to go to.   So all in all a busy day.

Bible Study and homeschooling

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Hubby is away taking time for a personal retreat which meant that the lad needed to accompany me to bible study this morning.

He did some math work and then played a game or two on my cell phone during the study.   He was very good about being there.  He worked in his numbers and counting book.  He’s learning to count by twos and fives.

After bible study we hit the dollar stores for items to put in his treasure box.

After lunch he worked on reflex math.

This was followed by a study on Bullying.  I have a whole bunch of materials that I’ve picked up from a variety of sources, much of it on safety issues around the home.   I let the lad pick out what he wanted to learn about and he chose bullying.

We used Proverbs 11:17 for copywork “A man who is kind benefits himself but a man who is cruel hurts himself”.  We talked about what that meant.   We then talked about reasons why someone might not be kind and what our response should be.  In Matthew 4:24 it says “be kind to your enemies, pray for those who persecute you”.   We’ll expand this study to include safety around people and what to do if lost in a crowd and such like.

In our World History book we are learning about knights.  .



So after we did our bullying unit we went outside and had a rousing sword fight. We talked about honour and duels and how to protect themselves.   One of the new things we learned about today was Halberds.  Which is a weapon the swiss men used against calvary.  We each drew pictures of how we would design a halberd if we could but I couldn’t transfer that image to the computer successfully.  I showed the lad on the world map were Switzerland was in relation to Canada.    And I also showed him were France and England were since they fought the 100 year war and much of that had to deal with knights in battle.

We still plan to make cheese today but we came in hungry and tired from our sword work.  

All in all a good day.  🙂

Back to Homeschooling

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“but mommy! I want to play in the snow first! Do we have to homeschool first???”
Me: Yes.
“BUT I DON”T WANT TO!”

So.. we talked and worked things out. I told him how we’re doing things different this year. That mommy is writing out a schedule of what we are doing and we’ll work from the list. When the list is done.. homeschool is done for the day.

We read from our world history book and story book over breakfast

10 minute stories

He liked the story at breakfast and thought it funny how the dad didn’t get what he wanted because the fish helped the girl.

World History

Over the holidays we got into the history of vikings. He’s really enjoying learning about them.

and then I fascinated him with this.

Always good to intrigue a child. 🙂 Found using homeschool freebie of the day.

Then off to do reflex math. I like how they emphasize speed in proficiency and they have excellent customer service. The lad is finding it difficult to maintain the required focus though and there are times when I want to make it easier for him, but that’s just the mommy rescuer part of me. He got up to 8620 feet today…not a bad score. he quit because bathroom breaks were required. 🙂 He got back into it and did better this time round. He did a variety of games and its good to see how he is improving in his math skills. 🙂 He likes ninja stars, balloon race and the egyptian conniption.

We were going to do some exercises from the super science book but we reworked those plans. One lad was PROFOUNDLY disappointed at the thought of doing science and art together. he wanted to do some hands on science. So I wracked my brain trying to figure something out that we’ve studied recently and came up on gems digging kit I got a while back. So we dug up gems. There were supposed to be 8 in the kit.. we got about 13 stones/gems all told. We talked about gems and how they are made, but mostly we dug stones up and had a good time talking and working together.



Sight words: yes, you, are, please. it was quite pleasing to me to see him sounding out the word please. He studied it and worked it out. he did the same for “are”. Very neat!

We did lesson seven out of First Language Lessons, Levels 1&2

We learned about common nouns and proper nouns. 🙂

Word of the day “abandon”. Sentence he came up with “the jail in fable was abandoned once the guards are beaten.”

We did listening skills Pg 3. he had to pay close attention to where each of the drivers had to go to get the answers correct.

The Complete book of Numbers and Counting, pp 164-165.

A dot to dot 1-50 and learning the place values of 50-59. Once he figured out the code for doing place values he said “mommy, this is easy!”.

Our animal of the day was the ermine.
in case you want to know about the picture. Ermines eat insects in some areas of the world. The lad “This brown ermine is hunting in the summer time. He is sneaking up on a centipede who is going home to his family. Then the ermine will gobble all of them up.”

I asked him if he liked working from a list.
the answer was a resounding YES! So a list we’ll continue to do. 🙂

our plans this week

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homeschooling this week will be focusing on cleaning our house, bookwork, and stuff planned.

For instance, gymnastics and swimming are planned events.
We also will be volunteering at the Christmas bureau two days.
and hopefully on Friday visiting friends.

We are doing daily advent readings. We are using this guide.
If interested in getting, click the picture.

We’ll be doing our normal reading.

10 minute stories

He really liked today’s story. It was well written and inspired thought and brought a smile to his face. Giant birds flying! 🙂

World History

We are into Roman history now. We continue to learn about gladiators. Today he learned how gladiators usually fought to the death. his response.. “IF I were there mommy I throw down giant cages down that could catch them so they couldn’t get out and hurt each other mommy.”

Today a good day

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Today was a good day.

Didn’t exactly go homeschooling wise as I thought it might.

On Wednesday mornings I have bible study so hubby dear usually gets the lad busy with book work. but this morning hubby’s brain was fried so that didn’t go over.

Over lunch therefore, we did our normal reading.

10 minute stories

He liked today’s story. I shortened it here and there as it was quite wordy and that NEVER goes over well with the lad. But it was a good story about a firebird, a grey wolf and a boy who had to learn how to listen well.

World History

We are into Roman history now. We are learning about gladiators.

I had gotten the lad onto reflexmath before I headed out to bible study. The lad enjoys this program.

So after I got back from my stuff I got the lad busy with Studyladder. We did math, music, and something else that right now I can’t remember.

This afternoon we played a game with dad. Catopoly
We had a lot of fun playing it. So much nicer playing games with a lad who is willing to follow the rules of the game.

oh..I’m trying to work home-making skills into our week… today it was cleaning the upstairs bathroom. I set the boy at the task of cleaning the bathtub. He did a decent job for a six year old doing a job for the first time. he did an EXCELLENT job of having a bath so he could clean his toys up really really well. 🙂

Then peter rabbit videos were the thing to watch, followed by supper and children’s club at the baptist church. They are learning the fruits of the spirit there. What I know most is how much the lad enjoys attending. 🙂