A Net in Time

Curriculum and book reviews, faith, homeschooling and more!

Transportation

books on transportation

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Here are some of the books we read on transportation which was our over-arching theme for September. We have another three or four that we haven’t read yet.

transportation on land and sea by nigel hawkes.
The one car in this book that can fold up inspired lots of thinking by one boy child. That alone made this a book worth getting out of the library. 🙂


C-Growl the daring little airplane
The Chipmunk. Good to read about this Canadian plane. The book got a bit wordy and repetitive after a while. It would be a good book to use for a geography study someday as the Chipmunk ends up visiting a vast array of countries.


Speed Machines by miranda smith
Interesting book to look through. I can’t say we read it all, but we read about the pictures that intrigued us the most and occasionally used the computer to learn more.


It’s True Pigs Do Fly
A good read. Written in a humourous style, with funny illustrations.
And yes.. pigs do fly (just not always very well).


I want to be a pilot
This is a simple overview of what a pilot does. It gave us good practice counting and learning about place value. It gives a decent overview.


Cars – by heather miller
A basic overview to what a car is. Meant for beginning readers.


Bicycles
From the same series as the Cars book above. This is a simple overview of what bicycles are. Meant for beginning readers.

Today… a good learning day

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Despite the “I can’t do this mommy” .. he did. 🙂 Just needed some encouragement.

Despite the “the letters are all mixed up mommy!”… he managed to sort them out. And yes, the letters are all mixed up as I have “garage sale” numbers so don’t have full sets of lower and upper cases letters so we make do with what we have. 🙂

here I asked him to match the numbers with the words and then spell them out.

He even made up a game afterwards with them where he had to practice his memory. It was interesting watching him work through it.

We finished our timeline of transportation.

I don’t recall where I found the pictures or the timeline.
We added kites, dugout canoes, and walking.
He was even able to tell his dad about the timeline abit too!

We did math. Pages 89-91 out of the complete book of numbers and counting

We did the alphabet. He knew ALL of them today! woot woot!

I will note that he stumbled on d, g, e, f today, but when he saw the picture on the
back of the card he knew them immediately.
This is a HUGE improvement over two weeks ago. 🙂

He also did a lower case alphabet dot to dot out of the My Heavenly Helper book.

We finished “It’s True, Pigs do Fly” book. It was fun. He learned a ton and asked TONS of questions. This book was written in a humourous style with fun captions of pigs doing the various things that inventors were doing throughout the history of aircraft. An enjoyable book. It did not cover every facet of airplane history, but it gave an excellent overview.

He asked if people ever made a car that can fly and we learned the answer to that is YES! It’s called the Skycar.


We did have to take a break at one point to catch these two that escaped from their lawn pen. Silly little boogers. 🙂 Just the two black ones, the broken black was good and stayed put!

Doing more with Transportation

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Car Spelling Song

On the road to Spelling

When teaching it is important to use as many senses as possible. Here is a way to use music to practice spelling words.

“Car, Bus, Van” song (Tune: Jingle Bells)

C-A-R, C-A-R that’s how you spell car

B-U-S, B-U-S that’s how you spell bus

V-A-N, V-A-N that’s how you spell van

Transportation helps us, I hope you understand!

Sing the song several times so they feel successful and can spell the words.

Car Play with Ramps
Help your child set up a ramp and watch the cars go.

1. Which cars go faster?
2. Which cars go further?
3. What happens when you change the angle of the ramp?
4. What happens when you change the surface of the ramp?

I asked questions such as.. if you were going to divide your cars into teams, what teams would they be on? Why? How many do you have that are cars? trucks? how many of blue or orange or ??? We weighed them to see if that would help determine who went the fastest. We guessed how would go the fastest. we experimented with ways to “protect” the boulders.

suggestion by the author: If you take digital pictures you can turn this experience into a book. Have your child help to label the pictures and soon he will be able to read his own book.

Forms of Transportation

we started to make a time line of transportation. I’ll use this link as a idea place. 🙂
We started with walking, and progressed to swimming. 🙂 (yes I know that’s not an official mode of transportation, but YOU try convincing a six year old that it’s not a valid form of getting around?). 🙂

We did a thing with links… figuring out solutions to problems using links and clues given. It was interesting how it all turned out.

others in this series
day one airplanes
planning to do airplanes

actually doing day one airplanes

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Working from our plans this is how our day went.

NOTE: I had a lad with bad tonsils, who can’t hold down food today.

We started out watching the five part series of the wright brothers on YouTube. I chose the animated version as it had short snippets that we could stop and talk about what we learned before watching the next in the series.

here is part two

We learned about their main rival in Alberto Santos-Dumont.

Santos-Dumont he was a rival to the wright brothers to see who would be the first to build an airplane. 🙂 The lad was quite fascinated by him and asked tons of questions so we researched him for a while. (a bit of a rabbit trail that). 🙂

we read through the beginning of flight.

the lad liked this one:

and this one caused lots of questions to be asked as it looks quite different than the others we saw

we spent a great deal of time on the Canadian Wings site. Rather fascinating to watch the changes in how aircraft developed. and the wright brothers museum was quite interesting as well. I read through the encyclopedia on the wright brothers but the lad was getting wiggly at this point. So we closed our computer time by learning all the different TYPES of aircraft and doing our copy work. I am hoping later to find some pictures of different aircraft and making a small lapbook book with the lad.

Question: is there such a thing as a helicopter that is amphibian?

Does anyone know the answer to this question?

Thanks to the gals on facebook I have an answer to that question! YES! they make amphibous helicopters. Here’s the wiki link.

We did our airplane sorting into

Fast planes, medium planes, helicopters and mommy’s planes.

the fast planes are JET engines, the medium planes use propellors, and the helicopters are medium planes too but they are different because they are helicopters. 🙂

he also observed other ways that they are the same and different, good to see him learning and thinking.

and then we made a couple of planes and had a LOT of fun playing battle. 🙂

Transportation – Airplanes

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The lad and I will be starting to learn about transportation tomorrow. It will be our “September theme”. We won’t be looking only at transportation as we will take side trips into things that interest us. But tomorrow.. PLANES!

1. we’ll be building a sleath bomber and a camouflage airplane that we got at The Basics Shop.

2. We’ll be watching the “wright brothers on youtube”.

3. We’ll be learning about the different types of modern aircraft.

see this site Soaring the Skies and Types of Airplanes and how many types are there? DIY. and probably to me the most helpful site.Types of Airplanes.

Airplanes vary greatly in the size, structure, engines, and purpose.

Airship/Balloon, Glider/Sailplane, Powered airplanes, Helicopter/Rotorcraft, Autogyro/Gyroplane, Fixed Wing Bi-planes, Fixed Wing Monoplanes

I used this site to make a copywork sheet. I used these words: Land planes, Seaplanes, Amphibians, Vertical Takeoff and Landing, Short Takeoff and Landing and Space Shuttle. I wasn’t sure if I should do a trace and write, or a copy and write…so I printed off one of each and it’s all good. 🙂

What else will we do?

4. I hope to have him do some counting.

How many planes can you find in your hot wheels collection?

5. Then have him do some sorting of them and explain why he sorted them the way he did.

6. We’ll play battle because one can’t build planes that can be used for battle without actually having a battle! 🙂

and that will be it for a first day of homeschool. Oh… we’ll also do our normal.. we’re back in school so let’s go for a walk about. And if I can figure out how to build a rocket into the mix we’ll do that do, Supercharged Science has one that looks to be fun to do.