A Net in Time

Curriculum and book reviews, faith, homeschooling and more!

Nature

Helping a friend, learning with friends

By Leave a Comment

Yesterday the lad and I went over to visit a friend. We spend most of the day there. Life has been a challenge for this friend lately so it was good to spend some time to assist in bringing some sanity to life again. 🙂 
I had told her that I needed to do some schooling with the lad, and I’ve be enlisting the aid of her children.
We did a drawing from “imagine a day” and then we put some daises into coloured water.   The pics don’t show the results well, but I hope you can see some of the tinges that were occurring by the time we had to go home.
After we finished our schooling time the children played and my friend and I were able to chat a bit.
She lives on a farm so I was able to pick some grass for my rabbits and on the way home a ladybug found it’s way out of the grasses I had picked much to my son’s delight.  it was captured and is currently munching on aphids in a bug jar.

It was a good schooling and living day.  🙂

Black Holes and Gardening and whatever

By Leave a Comment

Today we started off our homeschooling day by looking up black holes.  This site was sent to us by clickschooling.
This is the write up sent to us by diane flynn keith

Age Range: 9 and up (approximately, with parental supervision; non-readers will need assistance)

The Space Telescope Science Institute offers this terrific website that allows you to engage
in a multi-media, in-depth inquiry into the astronomy and physics of
black holes through animations and interactive experiments. Explore light, gravity, and the scale of our universe.

When
you get to the site, watch a brief, narrated animation that provides
information on how black holes are formed. Then, begin your virtual
journey to a black hole through three interactive modules that include:

*Finding the Invisible
— Loc
ate and identify various objects in the universe such as a binary star,
the Cygnus galaxy, the Andromeda spiral galaxy, the sun, the moon, the
Milky Way, a quasar, a red giant, Saturn, the crab nebula and more. As
each object comes into view, read more about it on the sidebar and by
clicking on the “Learn More” button.   

*The Voyage
— Learn about scales and distances by taking a virtual trip to a black
hole. Find out about the objects you pass on your trip through space.
Measure your speed and distance traveled. Get explanations of the
concepts of lightspeed and lightyear. When you reach your destination,
mouse over the black hole to learn about its features.

*Up Close and Personal
— Orbit a black hole and learn all about it. Try some interactive
experiments and answer related questions. Get the latest scoop from
notable scientists.

You can also explore the “Black Hole Encyclopedia” and “Glossary” to learn even more.

We found it be quite interesting.  I can’t say my six year old understood everything, but he was able to pull information out of this site to go with other things he’s learned about black holes.  It was quite interesting and answered some of his questions.   We did not read through the whole site but I imagine it will be one that we come back to.
We then went out to finish the gardening that we started yesterday.
The lad wants to have his own garden this year so He’s going to share daddy’s “pepper” garden.  Daddy likes hot peppers and I like bell peppers and having them in their own “bed” means they don’t get crowded out by other plants so it should work well for the lad to have his carrots, lettuce and corn in the same bed (at least we hope so).  🙂

Practical homeshooling and it’s results

By Leave a Comment

We learned about gardening….from a very practical standpoint.
We learned that maple tree saplings need to be removed from gardens.
We learned how to trim a bush so it doesn’t go over the doorstep.
We learned about killing ant hills that are too close to the house.
We learned about watering plants when you transplant them.
We learned about using maple branches as a fan and that giving them to bunnies is perhaps NOT a good idea (said bunnies will say LUNCH!).
We had fun going to the store and finding presents for daddy when he goes away next week.
We had fun handling chickies and baby ducks at the feed store.
I was very proud of my helpful boy child and his ability to prune a bush by himself, and pleased to honour his request to not throw out those particular branches until he was ALL done with them.
I was pleased with his willingness to help and to learn.
I was filled with joy at his ability to chat with complete strangers even as I wish he was chatting about something OTHER THAN mommy’s thing for chickens. 🙂

My lad was pleased at his own efforts.
He was disappointed we couldn’t find any black bugs.
He was angry at bunnies making lunch of his maple leaf fan.
He was happy he was able to do good work with mommy.
He was uncertain about using poison to keep ants out of our house…but happy he was able to help daddy find where the ant hills were.

It was a good day.  🙂

impromptu learning

By 1 Comment

one of the reasons I choose to homeschool is I simply enjoy having my boy around.  🙂   I like sharing his excitement in what he learns.
Yesterday while I was out doing some gardening I kept being interrupted by “mommy, come see this!”   So I’d trundle over to see what the lad had learned, done, accomplished, discovered and such forth.  Mind, I’d interrupt his play with “lad, can you come help me with….” and he’d come and help.  So turn about is fair play.
He was busy with a tub he’s put together that is half water, and part sand and dirt.   He worked quite hard at dividing it up so that water stayed on one side, and the dirt on another.
First he discovered what a water table is. 
he dug down into various parts of his dirt section and learned that in most areas the dirt was damp but there was no water, but the closer he got to the water the more water there would be in the bottom of his hole.
Second he learned that doodle bugs (pill bugs) can float on a boat!     This made for marvellous story telling and laughter as we guessed what the pill bug thought of it all.
Then came the experiments with the pill bugs themselves.  
If he made an island would they stay on it?
Can they swim?
What happens if you roll them into a ball and drop them in?
What happens if they land on their backs?
We discovered they can swim for short sections of time.
They float really well.
They can not climb when they are in the water.
The big ones are smarter than the little ones, and the middle sized ones just bolt without looking and land up in the water ALL THE TIME (the little ones moved more slowly and the big ones tested things out first).   It was actually quite interesting watching the big ones.  They’d move to various parts of the island and lean WAY down and take a good look at the water, and then come back up and trundle to a different section and test it out to.   BUT once they fell in, they would do it all the time so I”m not sure what was up with that.
The small ones and big ones stayed on the island the longest, and only the small ones would stay on the boat for any length of time.
 this picture came from this site.

no pill bugs were harmed in these experiments.  🙂

Learning by reading and games.

By Leave a Comment

We started off our day playing bucking buckaroo a game we picked up at the yard sales on Saturday.
Then we read from a chapter out of black beauty.   The lad asked a TON of questions about what was going on and it was good to talk about standards of care, and how God wants us to take care of the animals around us.
We learned about the common loon in   the ultimate guide to wildlife of North America.    we’ve seen loons before so it was good to learn more about them.  One of the things we learned was there aren’t as many as there used to be since people are destroying their habitats.

we started off with 50 magical stories.  The story today is called The Frog.   It was a story about a mom who wanted her son’s to get the best wife.


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 liked that the good witches were good and they helped the frog”.   And yes, for those concerned .. he knows that we don’t believe in witches, that witches don’t love God and therefore are something we need to be wary of.

Then we finished off  pirates in our world history book.

He finished off both of the  Pirates sticker books.



When I asked if he was pleased with how we did the pirate work and how the books turned out he said yes.  When we talked about the pirates today we learned that there are still pirates today, but the pirates in the past were beaten because the navy built better ships.  Only the young ones (those up to 16 years old) weren’t executed for being bad pirates.

we did another page in the “imagine a place” book


This has been such a fun book to use as a art book.  We read the poem and then draw a picture.  When we are all done with it, then we look at what the artist came up with and discuss it.   Today we needed to imagine  place were music sings where one dances all night on a summer night in a breeze (that wasn’t how the poem went but something like it).   This sparked good conversation about what it means that music can sing, and what it means to dance, and I even needed to demonstrate what a waltz was. 🙂

We learned about bugs today.  We played another game, this one also purchased while yard saling.. called Go, Bugs.  You play it similarly to Go, Fish.  the object of the game is to build a four piece bug.  We didn’t follow the rules since some games are difficult to play with just two people.  But we had fun and we learned about different types of bugs.  

Science, math, and more…

By Leave a Comment

Tonight we looked up, but didn’t find, our monarch numbered NAW 325
looked him up in the database but didn’t locate  him on there.  
Had a decent day today. 
the lad worked on reflex math this morning.   We did an experiment using gummi bears and various liquidy things, and also made ice cream cookies.  🙂
 doing tests with gummi bears.   We immersed them in splenda water, plain water, milk, lemonade, sugar water, salt water, lemon juice, vinegar, olive oil, cranberry juice, jam and corn syrup.   We watched them throughout the day.  The lad was quite intrigued by the vinegar washing out the colour, the corn syrup one seeming to slow disappear, the salt one getting smaller, most of the others grew but with various side affects.   We will pull them out tomorrow and see what changes we observe.
On to the ice cream sandwiches.  First we made chocolate chip cookies.  No, we didn’t make them from scratch…cookie dough was on sale!  🙂
 These are good mommy!
 Don’t they look good?
Mmmm… they ARE Good.  🙂

Part of the afternoon was spent in catching two moths and one spider.  The spider was a teeny tiny one we found in the rhubarb patch.

OOH OOH.. and before I forget.  Our robin who is nesting outside the upstairs bathroom window has TWO eggs in her nest now!  🙂

Learning over time

By Leave a Comment

Yesterday we did reading and housecleaning.  We read all our normal books.  Played pirates.  Learned what some valuable things are now-a-days that pirates might want to steal so we’ve been having pirates stealing art!

Today we spent time on Studyladder.       We worked on sight words, blending, using descriptive language, and what not.  In the afternoon we went for a walk at the dam.  We took a different trail than normal and we spent time looking under stones and deadfall to see what type of insects we could find.  

We seemed to be plum out of luck in finding anything other than the ordinary ants, earthworms, small black spiders and pill bugs UNTIL we stopped to look at a sign and there we saw an interesting bug which obliged us by staying still long enough to be captured in our insect catcher. 🙂   We want to show the lad who is teaching the bug class during HOPE days tomorrow.

What else?   

OOH.. we had a LOT of fun watching some water spiders

They were sculling back and forth on a stream we came across.  It was the lad who first saw how interesting their shadows were.   The lad had fun experimenting with what he could do to make them come out and play and what would make them go and hide. 

We saw a variety of interesting small flowers coming out to bloom.  Trilliums and dog tooth violets, then these funky little yellow ones that made me think of violas but they weren’t, and these white and purple ones that grew together in the same patch.  Haven’t a clue what they are called but they inspired comment.  

On an interesting side-note.  Two things have merged in my son’s playtime lately.
One. we read the newspaper together at breakfast.    We talk about the news, we sometimes learn from the news (aka the other day we read two different articles that had to do with genetics and research), and of course we read the comics.
Two. Lego city has a website with games on it.  one of those games is a chance to create your own comic strip using lego characters.  This totally captured his imagination and he had SO much fun with it.

The merger:  OH My but the lad is having fun creating tiny newspapers WITH comics strips.  The angry birds are busy doing funny things in their stories, and the borrowers (a movie we’ve watched recently) are busy telling a story too.   These are multi-day comic strips.   He has news articles and ads and all sorts of things in them.  They are tiny as the lego characters must carry them around, and they are rolled up just as the newspapers are rolled up.  🙂  Every once in a while I get the question of “Mommy.. do you think they would write about this in the newspaper?”   My standard answer is “Sure, why not?  They write about all sorts of things.”