Yes you heard it right.. the ALL Canadian sale. Written by Canadians for Canadians. is that too cool or what! :)
You'll be able to go here on August 3 to get great Canadian Content.
A Net In Time Schooling |
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Guess what coming this week folks? Yes you heard it right.. the ALL Canadian sale. Written by Canadians for Canadians. is that too cool or what! :) And guess what.. one of the products I made is in the sale! YEAH!!!! Me.. in a sale, can you believe it!!!! :)
You'll be able to go here on August 3 to get great Canadian Content. With my Sweetheart away this week, and needing to go to Guelph the other day to sell some rabbits, my son and I thought we would make a day of it and see some of the Guelph sites. We chose McCrae House and the river that ran nearby it. www.greatwar.co.uk/poems/john-mccrae-in-flanders-fields-inspiration.htmJohn McCrae was a Guelph Resident and he was responsible for writing a poem that many people are very familiar with. He was a young artillery officer and military doctor and one of the young men under his command died in the Battle of Ypres. Depending on who you believe, this young man's death was the inspiration for the poem, or it could have been the poppies growing, or it could have just been boredom speaking. :) Either way, his poem lives on. In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields. The house was beautiful and the grounds were so well kept. It was too bad it was so hot out, it would have been lovely to sit out there for a while and watch my lad look for spiders among the hedges. Inside the museum we came upon this lovely map. It was SO pretty.. I'm not sure that's the right word for it. But it caught our eyes and we stood in front of it for quite a while looking it over really well. "Mom, why does it have all these place names?" "Why doesn't it look like our map at home?" "Is it a real map or a fake one?".. he then started checking it over, my attention-to-detail lad, and noticed that the creases in the map weren't real creases and realized it was a replica.
John McCrae was part of the army, so we learned what the mess kit looked like. We discovered and talked about how a man can have a close relationship with his horse and dog..."but mom, he really needed to have a cat!" It was not a big museum and once we got past the map, we saw everything they had rather quickly. There were other things to see, but these were the highlights for us. If you ever have a chance to visit Guelph, take a peek inside! On a nice day, bring a picnic lunch and enjoy the serene grounds. $5 per person to get in, open Tues-Sun. When we were done, we headed across the street to sit in the shade of some trees by the river. The lad chased a young robin, and was stunned by the sight of a tree growing through a cement block. He noted how it bent out the concrete. It seemed a strong vigorous tree. The goslings we saw were farther along then ours at home. It was very restful sitting here, watching the water, listening to the sounds of people in the distance, "mom, would be even better if there was a big row of trees over there, then we wouldn't see the buildings, it would be even nicer then". And it would have been, but it was still nice.
We then headed off to the Civic Museum, which I will post about another time. :) It has been our delight to again review for Essential Skills Advantage. We have had the pleasure of reviewing The Complete Home Learning Suite is an online program designed for students in Grades K-6 to focus on reading, spelling, language arts, geography and science. My son and I have reviewed Essential Skills Advantage (ESA) before, and always find it a useful program for doing some learning and testing of subjects we often don't really concern ourselves about. Imagine my delight when I learned that ESA now has geography classes as well AND they have a whole section on Canada!!! My son was much intrigued and spent his entire time with the complete home learning suite in this area. So just what is Essential Skills Advantage (ESA)? ESA is a supplementary program for grades K-6 with over 14,000 lessons. It is an online learning opportunity that reinforces skills taught, and helps student discover skills they have yet to possess. In other words.. it's asks questions LOTS of questions, and through those questions children learn what they do and do not know. It's not a bad system, I like it as points out areas that may need more attention paid to them, or in the case of my lad... helps him learn some pivotal facts about Canada. Facts that until now have seemed unimportant to learn. Science is K-3, Geography grades 4-6, Reading, Language/Grammar and Math are for grades K-6. I have to admit, that my son chose what he wanted to do with this program. He was very focused on "MOM! They have information on Canada!!!" And what does a homeschool parent do when their child is excited about something? They let them run with it. :) Under Canadian Geography you will find these categories 1. Provinces and Territories 2. Provincial and Territorial Capitals 3. Other Major Cities 4. Bodies of Water 5. Physical Regions 6. Biomes 7. Time Zones 8. Natural Landmarks 9. Human Landmarks If you want to know what the unit is about, you can press on unit description. The units move forward as you complete each lesson. I find that you can't really move forward well unless you have answered the question correctly. Two different noises indicate whether you are correct or not. All you need to do is answer the question, and the next in the series will pop up if you are correct. If you answer incorrectly you get one more chance to get it correct and then it moves on to the next question. I appreciate this aspect as it means your student need to think before they blithely check an answer. My son always liked seeing this screen. It would mean the end of the unit he was currently studying... what student doesn't like to see the end to learning and questions eh? :) He was occasionally disappointed if he got a poorer grade, but I was surprised! Not doing well on one segment proven to be an incentive to do better next time. See? Check out the great improvement! So.. what do we think of ESA?
What Does my Son think? "I like that I am learning more about Canada mom". "It's easy to do and it makes me learn things if I want to do well on it." "I still don't remember how to spell some of the names though..." As you know, I have reviewed this program through the TOS crew board, others have also reviewed it, and if you click the image below you can read what others have to say. Social Media Links:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/skillsadvantage/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/SkillsAdvantage @SkillsAdvantage Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/SkillsAdvantage Google +: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+BuyESA/posts LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skillsadvantage Blog: https://learnwithesa.com/blog/ The Virtual Curriculum Fair is still going on. The theme this week is: Exploring Our World: Social Studies and more Science---includes history, geography, world cultures, worldview, biology, botany, geology, etc., etc., etc. Full Definition of social studies
noun plural Definition of social studies
This year for geography we are studying Europe. We started with a course called Drawing around the World: Europe. It was a fairly simple study that my son wasn't keen on doing due to the repetitive nature of the program so we morphed it into something else. We watch videos, we learn some facts, we ask questions, and we make a meal. We make the meals for the most part as fun as we can, inviting friends to come and join us and help create them. It's GOOD to do these things. We've done Finland, Sweden, Georgia, Russia, Iceland and Azerbaijan. Studying Europe is fascinating because each country teaches us something new about the people. For instance in Azerbaijan, a predominately muslim country, they are open to other faiths practicing, while in Georgia they often have toasts when friends and families gather. Different things capture me and my son's attention which is good. sci·ence noun noun: science the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. For science we do a couple of things God's design series by Answers in Genesis. We do at least one lesson a week, we strive for more, but often other things intervene like.. gardening, yard work, feeding the birds at the local provincial park, nature walks, learning about air movement with a fan, or whatever. It's all good. As long as somehow he's learning about the world and how it works from a scientific point of view it's all good. On Fridays we do things a bit differently around here. We learn about Canada. As we engage in our Canadian Studies we are doing art, watching videos. doing some geology (digging up gems/minerals and talking about them), science, math, history and whatever else I can squeeze into a morning. We try to combine as many things as we can on Fridays. Anything we can't work into our Canadian studies we do differently than the rest of the week (and sometimes (oh horrors) skip it completely). :) Newfoundland pt 1 and pt 2. Nova Scotia pt 1 and pt 2. It is by no means a speedy process but we'd rather enjoy the journey eh? :) So that's a bit of a touch on what we do here for social studies and science. It's by no means the end all and be all, but it's a least a glimpse. If you would like a glimpse of what others do as well, check out the links below (when I get them added!). :) Yvie @ Gypsy Road - Bringing It to Life! History, Geography, & Science
Jen Altman @ Chestnut Grove Academy - Virtual Curriculum Fair 2016: Exploring Our World, How We Do Social Studies and Life/Earth Science
Laura @ Day by Day in Our World - Learning About the World Around Us
Chareen @ Every Bed of Roses - Social Studies a Science of Relations
Lisa @ GoldenGrasses - Exploring & Discovering Around the World
Annette @ A Net In Time - Science and Culture Around the World and at Home
Kym @ Homeschool Coffee Break - Exploring History and Geography
Laura @ Four Little Penguins - Going Around the World at Our Kitchen Table
Joelle @ Homeschooling for His Glory - Our Tackling of the Social Studies and Science
Kristen @ Sunrise to Sunset - Encouraging Curiosity about the World
My lad and I continue reading through a variety of books at night. Currently we are reading about temperate forests, a novel (just finished Weekends with Max and his Dad), my boy's read out-loud book (Currently learning about zebras), Mammals and a book on railroads. Sometimes we read about items that spur on our interest. Tonight we had to look up what the oldest trees were and discovered that most old trees are from the conifer family. The oldest being over 5,000 years old, this news stunned my my lad. We have also recently learned about Caracals and the 8th wonder of the world (built in Canada.. a railroad bridge). Both of these items intrigued us, so I told the lad I'd research them a bit and see what else we can learn. First up, the Caracal. For those of you who don't know, a caracal is a type of wild cat. Check out the sheer beauty of these cats. Caracals are a wild cat living in Africa and Asia. They eat a variety of local game such as Hyraxes, medium-sized antelope and deer, birds of all sizes, rodents, and reptiles. In our mammals book we learned that they eat A LOT of birds, to the extent of killing ostriches. It is a very versatile and agile hunter and the size of the animal does not deter it from using it as a food source. It prefers to live in dry woodland and savannah. Even though it has ear tufts like the lynx, the caracal is most closely related to the serval and the African golden cat. Other than it's facial markings, the Caracal is a reddish brown cat with no other markings. The agility of these cats has had them trained by nobility to be personal hunting animals. You can see the caracal's agility in the video below. Next we move along to a bridge in Canada. Once known as the Eighth Wonder of the World the Victoria Tubular Bridge was built in 1859 over the St. Lawrence River at Montreal. In it's day the bridge was considered an engineering marvel. It's an industrial bridge, not designed to be pretty in any way. As such, it is still in use today... still providing safety for rail cars trundling over the river. Originally designed for rail traffic, it confounded all the skeptics … and there were many of them in 1850 who doubted that a structure this size could be successfully built..... Whatever the cost, this city surrounded by water had to be linked to the vast U.S. market. The Grand Trunk Railway launched a gigantic construction project, and the celebrated engineer Robert Stephenson drew up the plans for a tubular structure made of riveted iron plates.
Fridays are a day to celebrate being Canadian, to follow our hearts when it comes to our schooling, so sometimes our math gets done and sometimes... we explore the world. As I type this my son is having fun with a fan, string and paper. Observing air movement while having fun. It's all good. He just asked "MOM! Can this be our science today???" I told him I would think about it. :)
Before he did that though we spent time reading books (currently going through four books) and continuing our Nova Scotia studies. We also like to do art on Fridays, and if we can find a way to combine the two so much the better. I originally wanted to do an abstract art but my lad simply couldn't wrap his head around that. So we switched to pastels. I gave my son a choice he could draw free hand or use a colouring sheet... He chose the colouring sheet. He did a good job eh? Took us a bit of time to determine the angle it was taken from... pretty sure from the water side. He had fun experimenting with the pastels. It was our first go with them.
I chose to work on a free hand style of Peggy's Cove.
Query.. How DOES on draw white so you can see it against a white background???? I chose to outline with black so it was visible but that's not really true to life. It came out kinda looking like a silo but I have no clue about how to draw edges with white and doing black lines just seemed wrong... So it is what it is eh? :)
As we coloured and talked we watched a variety of videos. From learning about the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, to how to shuck a scallop... did you know that parts of a scallop are poisonous??? This video was so interesting for my lad he actually STOPPED talking to watch it...and almost forgot to do his art as well. He thought it funny that Canada's oldest recognized flag became Canada's youngest flag. :)
Today my son did our introductory work for Nova Scotia. I found this page from Crayola and printed it off and used it as the basis of some study. As you can see on the page it talked about Canada's provincial flower. We learned more about the Mayflower here. and then had a chance to see a real one via video. We were amazed by the huge proboscis on the bee fly. The Osprey in the provincial Bird. The Osprey is a fish eating bird. Therefore they are generally found around water... streams, lakes, oceans etc. The gripping pads on their feet help them hang onto their fish after they dive 9-30 metres into the water after them. it's rather neat... if osprey have to carry a large fish for quite some distance they will orient the fish so that it has the least wind resistance. :) Cool how God built that intelligence into them. Bald eagles will share the same habitat with them, being larger they will often force an osprey to drop it's fish and take it for it's own meal. Osprey have a black stripe extending from their eye to their back, and it's one of the ways you can distinguish it from the bald eagle. They have a staggered nesting season, which means in times of poverty the older bigger offspring eat while the smaller ones will starve. My son really liked what happened in this video. We filled in our Canada map showing where Nova Scotia was located and it's capital. We also learned the history of the flag. The crest being from old Scottish roots. It is the St. Andrews cross in the reverse colours with the Scottish coat of arms. Nova Scotia stands for "New Scotland". For a brief period of time they used a different flag/coat of arms issued by Queen Victoria, but it was not well received, so the old flag and coat of arms was again put to use. We learned a bit more about the history of Nova Scotia as we coloured our pages. Isn't Youtube a neat way to expand our horizons? :) So that was our introduction to Nova Scotia. Gives me a week to find a craft to do next week as we expand our knowledge base. :)
Rev. Robert Addison was the second commissioned missionary to Canada, he was appointed to Niagara-on-the-Lake. He spent his first winter in Quebec Where he bought a book of poems by James Thomson with one of those poems being called Winter), to help him cope with his first winter in Canada. He arrived at his post in 1792. However it all worked out, it worked out. :)
Before becoming a minister Addison worked as a tutor. He helped young men prepare for their education. Between his work and his need to visit his wife he had no way to advance himself. He turned his thoughts to the Colonial Church and sought to go and minister there. We are not sure if his wife passed away and he left his two surviving children with an aunt. OR if he travelled with the aunt and his children while his wife remained behind pregnant with their last child. The details are a bit fuzzy. He had great plans for his time in Upper Canada. By the time he passed away he realized some of them. The work was hard. He had a circuit of 150 miles to cover, people minister to, battles to work around and so forth. He said "My Mission, is very laborious; I must either neglect my duty, or make a circuit several times in the year of more than 150 miles through a wild country;" and he adds, that he had performed his duty "with humble and conscientious assiduity, and had struggled with very narrow circumstances." (source) He enjoyed his work among the Indians, baptizing several of them. He ended up on house arrest after the War of 1812. He made regular Chaplain type service to different divisions of the army. Continued to minister to the Indians. He was a hard working man, who allowed his house to be a place of refuge. He was the longest serving missionary (serving for 40 years) and when he died, his death was regretted by all. His hand was active in the start up of many churches, and in the conversion of many Indians. Sources: Early Canadian Missionaries. Rev. Addison on Niagara. Ministries on-line. Wiki. Dictionary of Canadian Biography. History Sleuth. My son and I just finished reading this book, it was our history book for night time reading. It fits in well with the explorers course that my lad is doing with Veritas Press. Book Synopsis:
Meet some of the brave men and women who first settled the New World and helped found the colony of New France - Cartier, Marie La Tour, La Salle and Madeleine de Vercheres. Find out how they worked, dressed, ate and survived in their adopted land. Read about the King's Daughters, who came over from Europe on Bride's Ships, and about the powerful seigneurs, who ruled vast domains along the St. Lawrence River. My Thoughts: A good deal of information in an easy to read format. Short chapters, followed with activities for children to do. We learned a lot. :) Eight chapters. Leading us from the Father of New France to The Plains of Abraham. We learned why LaChine is named as it is, about a young heroine and about the giant black robe of Jesuit priest. Lots of details to interest us, it surprised us to learn how often the French and English battled and how the power swung back and forth. Seeing the strength of individuals like the young lady who rallied the men in her fort to fight off some Iroquois. Neat book, glad I read it with the lad. He asked good questions throughout. Continuing our studies of Canada, I thought it would be fun to work with lego today since I had found a neat castle/pirate/water/land thingey on sale after Christmas. :) I wanted to make it just needed to find a way to tie it all together. So I did some research this morning... did Newfoundland have castles? Did they ever have pirates? THEY DID!!! WOOT WOOT!!! Lego fun here we come!!! BUT first the learning. Newfoundland has had a few pirates but the best known of them is Peter Easton. Depending on the Youtube video you want he's in the top 15 of the worst pirates. Peter Easton was a man who started out his life working a commission for the Queen of England. His job... Take three battle ships and patrol the coast of the world. Easy enough, did his job. WHILE he was doing this job a new king (James I) came into power. The war with Spain ended, England, with no battles to fight, decreased it's military might leaving Peter Easton and his men stranded. No pay, no way home. What to do, what to do? AH HA!!! Piracy! Therein lies the answer. And he was awfully good at it to, for within seven years he was known as the "Notorious Pirate". In 1610 he was the wealthiest, most feared pirate in the Western Hemisphere. 5,000 men plus 40 ships. He fortified Harbour Grace Bay and there is still an Island named after him. He even took the King's emissary hostage trying to convince him to become a pirate. But Whiteboure refused, offering to petition King James for a pardon for the pirate, in order to be released. The pardon came, but Easton never received it, even though he waited two years for it to come. Growing tired of waiting he set off to fight for the King of Algiers, fighting a profitable war against Spain. He eventually retired, married and settled down. He was known in the end as the Marquis of Savoy. Since we were learning about pirates we played a pirate game called Black Spot. At least some people think it was started by the pirates. It's as logic/patterning game where your goal is to get the other person to take the dark stone. Rules are simple. Alternate who starts. One dark stone, 10 light stones. You can can 1, 2 or 3 stones away at a time. My 10 year old quickly figured out the trick to winning this game. So Peter Easton has fortified Harbour Grace Bay and Ferryland. Building himself a beautiful home and protected area. This led us into the story of the Castle built ... well. at what is now often called Castle Hill. :) Built on a site now call Placentia, Castle Hill is a walk back in time. King Henry XIV wanted to establish a strong base for New France, so he built a Castle hill to be a base of operations. Though it gradually lost influence against St. John's, particularly once the British were able to successfully blockade and defeat it, this place was the base of operations for d’Iberville and his devastating attacks against the English Settlements. As we looked for castles on youtube my son was delighted to find this minecraft video that use Easton's name in it. He kept saying "well done but mom, they must be using a different tone/skin pack. I bet I could do this if I worked hard at in creative mode". All the learning "done" we then set to build our pirate home and castle (though it's really NOT a castle we just pretended). :) but that's what Lego is for right? We also aware that they wouldn't have had power boats at the time or automatic weapons. After we finished our build we had fun using the different characters names that we learned about today. The British and the French fighting, Easton doing his raids, D'iberville and his attacks on the English. It was all quite exciting. :)
Sources: Castle Hill. Pirates of Canada. The Pirate King. Tide Forecast. Castle Hill National Historic Site. |
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