A Net in Time

Curriculum and book reviews, faith, homeschooling and more!

What we Learned Today

Sight, Sound, Taste, Hear, Touch

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Today the lad and I learned about the five senses.

We cut out pictures of mouths, ears, noses, eyes, and hands.

We talked abit about how fish hear (vibrations in the water), and how people can hear better by cupping their hands over their ears (we had fun with this one whispering up and down the stairs).

We then played with a bunny and a cat for a while and used our five senses to learn different things about them. How bunnies smell like bunnies and cats smell like cats and people smell like people. 🙂 Bunny fur is different than cat fur. Bunnies ears are shaped differently than a cat and so are their eyes. it was VERY interesting to a cat and bunny crazy lad of five.

We then traced out the words for the five senses. Then mommy wrote down different words for each sense that the lad could come up with.

Sight: looking, seeing, pretty, ugly, nice, colour, differences
Taste: tasting a chip, sweet, sour, salty, hot, spicy, yummy, “sometimes good, sometimes not good”
Hear: hear, listening, sounds “too much noise”, “milo comes when he hears you calling Milo come here”.
Smell: Chip eating, yuck, nose, “ew” “mmm” “cats – can smell like cats”
Touch: hands, fingers, somethings don’t mind if you touch them, “helps blind people pay money”.

All in all, a good time learning by a five year old. 🙂

this week and hopping popcorn

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This week has been an interesting one.
Tuesday we cleaned the bookroom and read poems, books, and talked alot about all kinds of different things.
Wednesday we went to Dufflebag Theatre in London. We saw the Three Musketeers. We had a total hoot.
Thursday we did more reading, some book work with numbers and what not.

Friday I was called into work so Dad and son worked on Hopping Popcorn, Day One. The Lad had told me that he wanted dad to do day one of hopping popcorn with him. So I got it ready for them to do. Hopping Popcorn is produced by Amanda Bennett Unit Studies.

I created this copysheet for them. 🙂 I had them use this site to learn the parts of the corn plant. 🙂

They apparently did well doing the lesson, the lad learned that there are 6 kinds of corn, but only ONE kind pops and that corn came from a type of grass.

In evening we went to gymnastics. It has been changed from Monday due to the Family Day holiday. Boy…it certainly was not nearly as busy as it usually is on Mondays.

What we Learned today – January 27, 2011

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George Washington unit study from Amanda Bennett’s Unit Studies.

We did parts of day one and day two. We learned his favourite subject, the story of the cherry tree, where he was born and much more. Lots of drawing and gluing today. 🙂

We also learned that Virginia has a state fish! We thought that was funny. 🙂

Later on we played with Lego. Then the lad chose to work on building a cat trap… an invention out of his own head. When he was done that we listened to three books from this site, and then listened and answered questions about two different books. MightyBooksJr looks to be an interesting site and I am happy that a fellow homeschooler directed me to it.

Our exercise for the day was tobogganing at the Pinery and our first attempt at skating. 🙂

Snow Cats!

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So we managed to get some homeschool done using a book that I have upstairs. We did another 5-6 pages, and I learned something. The lad has a problem with figuring end sounds. He’s getting better, fairly good actually at knowing beginning sounds, and we have fun doing rhymes, but ending sounds, he just needs a fair bit of help yet.

The one thing I don’t like about this book is that it uses a lot of pictures, and things, as we all know…can have a multitude of words given to them that are descriptive, but if you don’t have the right one…the exercise is meaningless. But other than that, it’s a pretty good book. Makes the lad think and doesn’t have endless exercises in a row of all the same type of thing to do.

I’ve added a physical exercise component to our days. Every day we are going to get some type of exercise. We planned to go for a walk today, but when we got outside we noticed the snow…and it’s texture and said hey… Let’s build a snow cat!

there are two cats here even though they are hard to see
a boy lion and a girl lion who was going to have babies

“The boy lion is protecting the girl lion from the wolves that
are hurting her because they don’t want the baby lions to
hurt their baby wolfs”

It turned into quite the adventure. Some foxes ended up joining in with the wolves and they all gathered under Bunny town’s lions gate to talk about it all. And we had to go back there to help them learn to be friendly with the lions because the lion babies wouldn’t hurt the wolfs babies because they wanted the antelopes! 🙂 Our planned half hour walk ended up being a fun hour outside on a nice day playing with the lad. 🙂

Later on he watched some TV while I made supper. He helped count out how many Tortellini’s he was willing to try and helped get out the parmesan cheese.

After supper we worked on building the model building for our railroad. We hardly got anything done on it, but the glue has to set and dry and the pieces aren’t numbered like they are supposed to be so we have to do picture matching to make it work.

Library Day

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Today we had plans to get lots done, but everyone got up late today so that didn’t quite work out.

So we managed to get some homeschool done using a book that I have upstairs. The lad learned about reading book titles, how to take care of them, and did some letter recognition work. He did some good thinking today, and some, at times, easy work. “I know how to do this mommy, I’m good at circling”. He also is starting to see that some words not only sound the same, but they are spelled the same as well. 🙂

We went out for lunch to subway as I needed to go there anyways to pick up my pay stubs and what not. Had a bit of a visit with the girls. 🙂

Then off to independent to pick up a couple of items and then over to the library where we picked out moon books, some reading books, and played with the train table.

Over to Dollerama to get some experiment supplies and got sidetracked by a couple other things. 🙂

Did laundry throughout the day. Talked with the boy a fair bit and played some.

At home we had a “grub it meal”…as in we found food, we ate it. Nothing fancy by any means.

Tomorrow is another day indeed. 🙂

What we Learned today – January 5, 2011

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We used this book today in our homeschooling. We’d done part of it before so today we finished it off. It was a good book to do, some easy parts, some not so easy parts. Some I made more challenging by changing it up a bit. It was particularly enjoyable to write a rebus story together, using the stickers they provided and a child’s imagination. It covered phonics, reading, and math.

A real sense of accomplishment when he was done working through it. The toughest part for him was figuring out the ending sound of words so we worked on that for a bit. He learned to laugh at himself when he made a silly mistake.

We also worked on the directionals of horizontal, vertical and diagonal. We used popsicle sticks to make designs using these directions. I figured it was good for him to start figuring some of this out.

What we Learned today – January 4, 2011

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Today we worked through a book on sorting, seasons, bigger than, less than, the same, and rhyming. The lad had fun “x-ing” out any pigs he came across. “why don’t you like pigs J? “they are too noisy mommy”.

It was an easy book, but at times the lad had to think. It’s good to see that he knows some of this stuff, and good to see him think.

We also did our “forms of beauty” lesson from a kindergarten curriculum that I have. This consisted of taking four pieces of coloured paper and arranging them in a balanced pattern. He also experimented with taking two pieces of paper and making them balance out. he thought a pause sign was a very nice form of beauty, as was a plus and an “x”. 🙂 I made a somewhat bigger one myself simply because it’s fun to do.

Afterwards the lad made solar panels from our paper cutouts to make solar panels on Rabbit and Tagu’s house (a large cardboard box). Yellow and black construction paper made the best looking solar panels.

Later on it was time for some boat play. We used that time to just have fun and to make some observations about our boats. The boats we were using were styrofoam meat trays, individual salad bowls from McD’s, and pudding cups. After doing some experiments we learned that stryrofoam meat trays make the best boats, but the Salad bowls seal nicely so when the bunnies from Mars get their machine working and they lift the boats up, when it starts to rain, the boats that are sealed fall nicely into the water without spilling out all the bunny town rabbits out.

boats in the water

the bunnies from MARS have come

Did you know boats WON”T float if a bad egg sticks a needle in them?

the judge of the boats

We did some experiments with the pudding cups as well, using water and friction and the breathe power of a five year old.

I found this experiment interesting, and unexpected. I did not expect the two cups to hold the water in. I was sure it would leak out. BUT it did not. It only leaked out if the lad blew hard right at where the two cups joined up. The power of what… friction?? He played around with this for quite a while. And then he of course made a “bunnytown game” where he had to pour water from one cup into the other while not spilling any of it. He won apparently, while I somehow managed to lose.