Category:

Today was better...learning, exercise and fun

4/4/2013

we have graduated from CMJ1 and have moved onto CMJ2. (this in adventus)

Today was a MUCH easier day than yesterday.

We did our adventus, looked through an offer from Educents ....regarding Samson's Classroom (we did the demo and that worked well for our reading, phonics, and sight words). Looks like it will be a good fit for the lad and progressive so that will help I think. With my coupon turns it into a $20 purchase for the year.   So that makes it worthwhile to me.

Did a little bit of review of what we learned yesterday with Great Empires.   Did our Target the Question....good practice today for rounding up to 10 and figuring out how

I wanted to do some math with the lad but he was VERY much not interested in doing A+Tutorsoft today so I said okay... we can do math from our upstairs book.... We worked on Area and Perimeter today. That lead to fun ...oh my.. we had FUN with this.   Doing the work was boring (said the lad) but learning what it actually met... My son is into angry birds so putting into angry bird speak.....The bad piggies set up their area that they want to hide in. The birds are wanting to breach their perimeter in order to get into the area that the pigs are hiding in.

using geometric shapes to build bad piggies.

the helmeted pigs have chosen an area to defend and have marked off their perimeter...can headband pig outsmart them???

Later on we went for a walk, on our walk we looked for places that it would be easy to set up a defense area. One of our balloon pigs came along for the walk as well and she kept on pointing out....see...I could hide there and see where I could form a perimeter?? SEE??? (she was VERY talkative). :) It's just very nice to have fun and learn at the same time. Sometime I'll have to set up a capture the flag game with the lad. :) It will be just another way to help reinforce how math concepts work in real life situations. :)

Tough days

4/4/2013

Mom... I don't want to.
Mom... do I have to?
Mom.. can we play?

This today was the constant refrain.

And I have to admit....for a while I just plumb gave up. Let's play Skylander bud... it's a new game, let's give a thorough going over...but then doing our "COOPERATIVE PLAY" he started the MOM... DON"T DO THAT stuff so I kinda said enough of this. I don't need this attitude stuff even while playing a game.

SO... we picked up our Astronomy lapbook from AJTL, We looked at what they had for us to do and the lad said...but mom... didn't we have to look at the planets some more? (Ah HA!!! I said to myself...I sorta have his interest.... let's work with that). So we hunted up the small planets that we had, and the dowelling that i bought and ....we made our planetary system. Is it accurate? NO...but will it do? yes... and it did make for conversation about the planets. We used the image here to helps us figure out which planets were which.

I have to admit to being a bit amazed today. I often feel like I'm not a particularly good homeschooling parent as I'm not organized or well planned.   I'm just very relaxed (too relaxed at times I think). BUT anyways, we do lots of reading and talking about subjects.    The lad frequently mentioned "mom, do you remember we read about the earth and how many would fit inside the sun". "Mom, do you remember that...." that was a frequent sentence starter. Makes me think we are doing something right. :)

Okay what else did we do.

OH.. I started "great empires", that comes from Homeschool in the woods.   I went through the list of the histories we could look at and Vikings appealed to the lad since they came to Canada.

We read through the three pages of text and talked about it. The lad needed to focus on things with the globe and trace out patterns of how the Vikings moved around. We learned of Vikings becoming Christians and how they influenced change in the cultures surrounding them.   Quite fascinating.

And then the lad was DONE. No more, I couldn't keep him focused on anything. I want to play, I want to.... (do anything other than focus). So off we went to clean the kitchen fridge out. In the process the lad invented a milking cow. :) Made me laugh. He took a balloon, attached it to a water filled bottle. Made a small hole in the bottom and proceeded to milk it. "Mom! you have to practice this. It's good to know how to milk a cow cause what if sometime we have no more milk in the stores?"   ... So i too needed to milk a cow (even though I have milked LOTS of cows in my childhood). :)

We got the fridge clean (the lad's responsibility was to get the door clean) and then set out to make a new treat. Roasted Honey Cinnamon Chickpeas. We found the recipe here.

First came skinning the peas.

Adding cinnamon and oil to them.
Roasting then at 400 for 40 minutes.
Then putting some honey on them and roasting for another 7 minutes.

And yes....they were yummy! :)

NOTE: the lad did 90% of the work in getting these ready. I helped with skinning the peas and getting things in and out of the oven. The pretty much did the rest. The link above has a video that he watched to learn what to do.
An EXCELLENT first (or fourth) recipe for a child to learn to do on his own.

Continuing to Learn about the Universe and Solar System

3/25/2013

Our journey through the Solar System took us to making a diorama this morning.

We found a cereal box (no shoe box handy) and then commenced to talk about what we needed to show off the universe to other people.

Stars, comets, asteroids, black holes, space ships, angry birds (of course! they are in space don't you know?).

The lad had a hoot doing this and was able to recall many facts.

He also came up with some good questions.

1. can a big black hole suck up a small black hole (NO)
2. why isn't pluto a planet? (it's considered a dwarf planet as it is NOT the biggest object in it's immediately surrounding orbit).
3. I've drawn a blank on the other question he asked and he can't remember either so.... suffice it to say it was good, but it was also quickly answered.

Looking at Gravity

3/25/2013

a quick look at what gravity is

Links to sites we looked at

What is gravity?

Difference between an asteroid and a meteor.

Outer Space

3/20/2013

after the bust of trying to do the Knights and Castles lapbook for the lad (as is) we decided to try the outer space one instead. This seems a better fit for us (which is what I had originally thought). This is a lapbook done by A journery through learning.

We had no complaints, even for doing copywork. But we did do more than the product asked for.

When reading through the creation lesson it had vocab words underlined so I just asked the lad...what does this mean, what about that?

Then I asked...do you know the sign language for day? no.. they have that mom? Yes, indeed, so I showed him. This led to him asking what the sign would be for night. We found that over at the American Sign Language site.

This pic comes from www.answers.com (click on the image to go direct to site)

Then we came across page two that showed how the world gets bigger and bigger. The world revolves around the sun, which is part of the milky way galaxy which is just one of several galaxies which is part of the whole universe.

the lad didn't understand what a galaxy was so we looked it up

gal·ax·y /ˈgaləksē/Noun

A system of millions or billions of stars, together with gas and dust, held together by gravitational attraction.
The galaxy of which the solar system is a part; the Milky Way.

With the next question being: where is the sun in the milky way? So we looked that up as well. :)

Mom, where is the sun in the milky way?

Rather cool eh? All the things one can learn.

we had fun looking for images of the universe, the earth and the milky way galaxy. We talked about the differences in the images and WHY they might be different. We had quite the discussion on how they could have pictures of the whole universe because that would be really hard to do as "BUT MOM, we are PART of the universe so how can we get out of it to take a picture??" (do you have an answer to that one?)

Imaginative Play, Knight and Castles

3/18/2013

My son enjoys playing the game CUT THE ROPE on our android tablet. He really needs to think in order to accomplish the different levels. He enjoys the game so much he decided to make a physical copy of it so he can play it with his gramma.

We also did some work on Knights and Castles by A Journey through Learning.
This is what we've done so far.

I have to admit to struggling with this study. I dislike when people obviously flavour the study telling people that "I find it difficult to tell you about .....". I don't quite understand it. If you choose to write about a time period, then be factual, don't put your dislike into it in a personal way. Just not quite what I expected I suppose. We'll see how the study continues.

This study is a LAPBOOK and is meant to be done as lapbook. The lad and I both dislike taping file folders and refolding them, so we do lapbooks using cardstock and then three ring binder them. Makes the flipping around easier and if we want to add to the study later, inserting sheets is really easy to do. :)