A Net in Time

Curriculum and book reviews, faith, homeschooling and more!

What we Learned Today

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.  🙂

Sea Urchins and more

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Today was a good day for homeschooling.

At breakfast we did our normal reading

10 minute stories

Today’s story was about Rip Van Winkle.  This story got an immediate thumbs down from the lad.  Not sure why as I find it an interesting folk tale.

World History

We have started a section on Knights and Castles.

On with the rest of the day…we started later than anticipated, and went past lunch, but we had a good and interesting time.

While Homeschooling today, in the background I had playing various programs from Homeschool RadioShows.   Not saying we listened closely, but every once in a while the lad would ask…is the boy safe mommy?   Is the winter over?  What happened to the ship?

We followed a plan again.
We started off the day talking about how our eyes help us do things.   And then we drew a picture of a globe.  Then I covered the paper up with a box with a hole cut into it and said…”draw the globe”.   It was interesting to see how they came out…definitely not as good as when we could see what we were drawing.  Then we tried with some simpler things…circles. boxes, triangles. and then with other ideas…pencil, bowl, plate.    we made some observations
1. our eyes help us alot
2. if we practice we can get better at drawing without looking
3. not everyone has the same trouble drawing without looking…sometimes the lad could draw something better than mommy with or without looking, and sometimes mommy was better when she couldn’t see.
4. drawing without looking takes longer to do.

We did pages 172, 173-176 in numbers and counting.    One page had him colouring bubbles a different colour depending on where they were in the counting line.   For instance… 1-25 colour blue, 26-50 colour yellow, 51-75 colour red, and 76-100 colour purple.   I thought this would be an easy reinforcing activity for him and was surprised at how much he struggled with it.   Not sure how to build up his confidence in this area.

Word of the day: abbot – a leader of an abbey

Verse of the week: Eph 4:32  Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.

Animal of the day: I had planned to do penguins.  that was thoroughly nixed by the lad.  he wanted to do SEA URCHINS!   So we studied sea urchins.  YEAH!! for the internet.   Pages we found helpful: google images, enchanted learning, and a couple others.   I always find it frustrating when website contradict each other so we basically just generalized.   It was neat to look at this animal… but boy are they spikey!   We found were some different sea urchins lived on the globe and practiced saying the names of the countries.

Did lesson 9 in First language lessons.   This lesson involved looking at a picture and then talking about it.  We figured out common and proper nouns to use with it.

And finished off our work section with pages 7-11 in Daily Smart, then skipped a bunch of pages and did a maze.  this brings us to the addition/subtraction section which will be on par with where he is in Math Reflex.


We played a game. called mousetrap to finish out our day.  🙂

A slow day, yet study accomplished

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At breakfast we did our normal reading

10 minute stories

Today’s story was about A fellow with a really big nose and all that happened with him. It was just an odd story. It did point out the value in not believing all that you are told though.

World History

We have started a section on Knights and Castles. The lad is captivated..and all he wants to do is build a castle for one of his toys. Made schooling a bit of a challenge. 🙂

We then moved on to working with math using reflex. He continues to gain in fluency. While he did this, I got the dishes done. 🙂
Link
We continued work on our spider study

We learned there are three suborders.
We built a spider using a laminated one we had.
We talked about all the different parts to a spider.
We learned about spider eyes, moulting, etc.
We reviewed what we did previously.

The lad played with Lego building something for the castle that was needed.

We then worked on our animal of the day. Leopards. 🙂 We did the snow leopard to be precise.

we watched part of this series of videos.

we laughed at this

Fact that the lad liked: they live up high in the mountains.
Sad fact: they are highly endangered.

Word of the day: abbey – a place where monks and nuns live, work, and pray. Usually connected to a church.

We will play for a while and then hopefully make some cookies. 🙂 We had planned a walk to the library but we have buckets of cats and dogs falling from the sky and being hit by a falling cat is not our idea of fun. 🙂 Even if a boy child says “can I have one of those falling cats?” 🙂

we made these cookies

Oatmeal chocolate Chip cookies

1 c. butter
1 c. white sugar
1 c. brown sugar
1 c. peanut butter
2 eggs
1/2 tsp. salt
1 & 1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1/4 c. milk
4 cups instant oatmeal
6 oz. chocolate chips

Mix all together well.
Drop by spoonfuls on cookie sheet.
bake 10-12 minutes at 350.

Lemmings and more Oh My!

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At breakfast we did our normal reading

10 minute stories

Today’s story was a chinese folk tale about how Peking became a great city. (involved some bad dragons and a buddhist monk)

World History

Today we learned about viking runes. Only 16 runes in their alphabet. Intriguing. The boy was quite interested in the pictures they drew to remember stories about people who died. And how they thought runes could make people better.

Sight words reviewed: yes, you, are, please.
New Sight words: yellow, run, egg and three. He got a bit overwhelmed with this today. Not sure why.. he found it easier when I put the words into a sentence. that earned me a smile. 🙂

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

We learned more about common nouns and proper nouns. 🙂
He was able to make his own sentence with a proper and common noun.
“Milo chased the kitten into the bathtub. Chase didn’t like that.”

The Complete book of Numbers and Counting, pp 166-170.

We did more on place values, some the same style as last time, but others in a different way. I found it interesting how just changing the style stumped him. Though once he understood the words and how it was done he went through it easily.

Our animal of the day was the Lemming. This simply thrilled the lad. he likes lemmings. 🙂

We watched a variety of lemming videos and even saw one where people captured some wild ones and overnight were able to tame them down enough they could handle them without being bitten…and then released them to the wild after they were done playing with them. We learned they can be kept as pets. We saw one video that made us sad… people cornered a lemming and put it into a defensive mode and then kept teasing it…went on too long and then they let it go and did it again (then I said enough of this, they are being mean). the lad asked “Why did they do that mommy? Why would they make him so mad all the time?” I find that type of behaviour bothersome. tease an animal sure…but don’t be mean about it.

What else did we do.. we did a snow search and find. This is a big floor colouring challenge. Can you find the hidden elements? the lad finds them and colours them, I read the captions to him and colour in some of the rest. For a lad who dislikes colouring pictures other people drew, this works for us. 🙂

The rest of the day was spent playing and cleaning up more of his room. We are DONE except for the additional of craft materials to his big box. By evening I had a child complaining about his tonsils being sore. I am getting rather sick and tired of sore tonsils and sore ears. I want my boy to be healthy all the way through!

January 10, 2012 – what we learned today

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Good time homeschooling today.

I had planned to let the lad do Studyladder and Reflexmath while I got our Spider study ready to do. But it took WAY longer to get everything cut out than I thought it would so… we didn’t do The spider study, it can indeed wait for another day.

On Studyladder the lad practiced counting by 2’s, he did some art, some science – learning about precipitation, and we studied the orchestra. It was kinda funny when we were studying the orchestra. Flutes apparently make him think that there were “bunnies in the house”. He likes the bass sounds in the woodwinds, but dislikes the bass sounds in the brass instruments. I found that quite interesting. In ReflexMath he did well. He worked on his addition and subtraction, he played a new game to practice his math and it was really cool to see him progressively learn more and more. 🙂

I got him started on a new to us program…he didn’t much like it. Fun4theBrain. I don’t know if there are other games but he was wildly unimpressed with this one. Ah, just looking over their site and apparently there are a whole variety of them. So we’ll have to check out some of their other ones.

But that game led us over to another one… animal jam. He had a lot of fun figuring this one out. Is it particularly a learning game? Not really…but he did have to problem solve and that’s always a good thing. 🙂 And he was a good and helpful lad whenever mommy needed help with things today. And that is always appreciated.

At supper we read our normal breakfast books.

10 minute stories

Today’s story was snow white and the seven dwarves. he found it interesting…and wondered why the lady had to be so mean all the time to Snow White.

World History

Over the holidays we got into the history of vikings. He’s really enjoying learning about them, today it was about viking gods. “mommy, why did they have to make a pretend god with cats pulling the cart?” I told him I had no clue. “mommy, why did they have to kill people and animals for their pretend gods?” I don’t know buddy, people do funny as in sad/bad things when they don’t really know who God is.

I got him out in the yard for some exercise. The plan was that he would go for a walk with his dad while I did up the dishes and made supper but… daddy got distracted by the vehicles so he went out in the backyard instead.

He wanted to work on the snow sculptures but that proved problematic. The snow was soft. So the making of a cat was out, this proven a challenge. What could he do instead? So he went with his old standby, when all else fails…make a skyscraper! 🙂

Tonight before bed I read him the standard books – a poem from a reader, a bible story, a story of a missionary, and his current two favourite books. He likes me to tell him a story from my head at night and sometimes I don’t have a story so I use cheats. Sometimes I have him pick four pages from a stack of “make a story” pages I have. But tonight I did something new…which totally intrigued him.

Grandma gave me money for Christmas this year. I used it at Scholar’s Choice. I bought a game of perplexous, Rory’s StoryCubes and a travel hide/seek game called waterworld. With my $5 off member coupon, the fact that they had a 20% off sale, and my christmas money I managed to only spend $3. 🙂 WOOT WOOT!

Anyways, Rory’s Storycubes. Shaped like dice. They have 9 in a box, each dice has a picture drawn on each side. You pick a few, roll them out and then tell a story. (at least that’s how I used them tonight). The lad was quite intrigued by this and asked MOMMY! Can I tell YOU a story?

Sure buddy go ahead. His pictures were a fish, lightening, and a skyscraper. His story as told via my memory.

Once there was a fish in a lake, he liked living there. There was a skyscraper a bit away from the lake. Then there was lightening! The fish was scared as he didn’t want it to hurt him. So he hid. The lightening was really loud and it made the sky scraper lean away from it. It leaned and it leaned and then it fell down on the fish! (make fish struggling noises). The fish managed to get away (and that’s is all I remember because something odd happened in the story and I totally lost my concentration).

Not overall bad for a six year old on the spur of the moment eh? 🙂

Anyways, the lad’s favourite books at the moment.

Chester. This book by Melanie Watt. Makes him laugh. Chester is one funny, but disobedient cat. Melanie ends up on the wrong side of the line. Chester well…he learns a lesson by the end of the book. 🙂

Fox Hunt. This is a very cute book. I’ve looked for more by the author but can’t seem to locate any locally. Will have to keep my eyes pealed at library sales and garage sales. Fun, enjoyable book. Watch out fox.. Hiram on the prowl.. but Festus and Mercury might best you yet!

Sometimes things don’t go as planned

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So I had planned to do a study on Policemen today with the lad.
But.. I slept in, sleeping in sets everything way back.

By the time the bunny lady left (sold a bunny this morning) it was late.

SO.. we revised our plans and we did an interactive study on Avalanches produced by Simple Schooling. This was part of a freebie she gave out over the Christmas holidays. This avalanche tutorial was included. I can’t give you a direct link to the study as I couldn’t locate it and the subscriber exclusive I want to honour that. So if you want to get freebies next year, get on the list and you can get them next year, or rather this year as it’s now the new year. 🙂

Time now to have lunch!

After lunch we’ll do the experiments mentioned in this video. 🙂

We did the surface cohesion one (first one) in the video. Tried it three different ways.
one – the way they said to do it.
two – with oil…that was a bust…the oil stuck to the bread tag.
three – with laundry detergent (powdered) – worked but not as quickly.

Was quite interesting to the lad. 🙂

And then hopefully sell a chalkboard and then get out of the house for a walk about and potentially a visit with a church member. UPDATE: Sold the chalkboard (a little one) for $10 which is good since I got it for free. And then watched some slow motion videos. Some things are quite interesting when you slow them down…and other things are just downright boring!

Out for a walk with the lad. Stopped into visit with a lady from church, just a short spontaneous visit. 🙂 The lad, on his own choice, played reflex math today.