So here we are on the 4th of December, just starting a new year with the Crew. Seems to make everything busy again, though in reality it just makes it a bit busier if one manages their time well. BUT that's not why I'm here, today I"m here to walk you through a day in our life. This morning I woke up WAY too early, I would have loved to have slept longer but I also didn't want to get up so I laid in bed reading and dozing off and on. Finally got up at 700, started my bunny chores, came in at 730 to wake up our student to get him on the way... I know he heard me, but when I got in at 900 he was still having breakfast so he got to school late. He mumbled something about falling back to sleep... The lad finally deigned to wake up when I brought laundry upstairs to his room. "Mom? What???" I My response was "It's 930 lad, you might want to get up. I"M HUNGRY!" While he readied himself I got laundry put away. After discussing our conversation jar question "what toy did you play with most as a child" (we both said lego), over a breakfast of cereal, we read our missionary story of the day. About a family travelling through the jungle of Belize, getting lost at night, and being protected by an angel. (that's the very short rendition). The lad and I were quite astounded by the events. We got a bit of a late start to the day, as the lad needed to care for his mice and snake.As I got our materials ready for our upstairs work, the lad did his 20 minutes of reading. By the time he was done I had printed off some math practice sheets for him and figured out our assignments from Mapping the world with art. Part of the time needed was in using my new map program to make some maps for my lad. He's been struggling with some of the complexities of the maps due to his "it has to be perfect streak". So I thought printing them out would be better and with the map program I could put my dots on the page, and put in mountains and what not. It worked a charm! My lad was able to focus on the countries and the places instead of working on doing the drawing perfectly. He was able to save his art acumen for creating a Medieval TO map. This project was really enjoyed by my lad. He enjoyed figuring out how to make the letters special even if they aren't done in a medieval font. We followed this up with some math practice, this took longer than it should have and my lad, when asked to double check his work with a correct answer sheet, said "MOM.. if I do that.. then there's no point in my correcting it as I already know the answer! It's best if you check them for me mom." (what does say in return to that?) By this time we were getting hungry as it was getting on 230, so we stopped to have lunch and while having lunch finished up our day with Classics for kids. Today our artist was Modest Mussorgsky. Of course, just as our school day was drawing to a close hubby dear said, "check this video out you two". Isn't science rather neat? My son now wants to go to a friends house and use their pool.. wrong time of year or not. :) The rest of our day was taken up with minecraft (1/2 hour the lad playing solo), 1/2 hour playing lego Harry Potter with Dad on the Xbox, cleaning the book room (me), having supper (the whole family), the lad writing out lines for venting his frustration inappropriately, the lad attending Cadets at the local Christian Reformed Church and that's about it. :)
So overall, even though the day started sluggishly and none of us had a whole lot of ambition, the day went fairly well. :) Now to see what tomorrow brings! So, do you have a day in the life to share? If so, I'd be delighted to read up on it. Leave a link in the comments and I'll check it out too. :) This fellow is a short-tailed bat.
They are primarily found in New Zealand in the forest. There are about nine distinct species of them. They are omnivores and are opportunistic hunters, eating whatever they happen to find in their territory. Their wings are very flexible enabling them to hunt on the forest floor as well as hunting insects via flight, or landing on plants to eat from them. They have large pointed ears, and a free tail. They are an important pollinator. Rats and loss of habitat are major threats. "Short-tailed bats are the only species of small bat which carry out lek mating (where males assemble in a special area and compete for the attention of females). During late summer, male short-tailed bats gather at strategic trees near communal roosts and attempt to attract females with prolonged singing bouts" . Sources: Wiki New Zealand Government. Teara. "Mom!" "yes lad". "Can we have a fire tonight? And can I build it?" "Well sure, you can try. The wood is wet though because we've had rain." Undaunted my lad ran off to get some tinder and his flint and steel. We rummaged through our wood pile to see if we could find any dry wood, and got ourselves all set. My son has recently learned how to start a fire using a flint and steel.and was excited at the opportunity to try his hand at it. The wood was damp and it was difficult to get it going well, but he did manage to get the fire started twice with the flint and steel, it would burn for a while, and then start to go out. He decided to give himself an edge up by using some newspaper and before you know it..one fire to be had! He tended it carefully. Before we knew it we had a nice fire to sit around and enjoy. Which of course, since we live in town so are required to have a fire ONLY for cooking with... YEAH for marshmallows!!!! :)
You know, I was almost going to call this post "vice - boy vices to be precise" when I realized that vices usually refer to NEGATIVE or WICKED behaviours that eradicating would be a good notion. I don't think a love of bugs is vice, it's a virtue. Really. My boy has these areas, dedicated to his love of bugs, toads and fish. Looks like it should be enough yes?. The lad has overtime, expanded his area to include this. This particular long white table is meant to be a games and puzzle table. A place we can set things up and leave them out if we are in the middle of a game, or wanting to work on a puzzle or whatever. Can't do that as you might guess. ALL these games (below) are now just kinda sitting there and are occasionally brought upstairs to be played with but then immediately have to disappear again. To that end, since I needed to dissemble some racks and what not and had some spare wood that needed using instead of just dumping somewhere I though to meself... why not build the lad a quick shed that he can use for all his buggy, snakey, crittery stuff. In the summer he'll be able to collect all the bugs he wants. He'll be able to overwinter them there as well as he can collect containers of leaves and make his bugs all snuggly for the winter which means they won't hatch early either. :) AND... I WILL HAVE MY TABLE BACK. Won't that be delightful again? To that end, today we made EXCELLENT progress on a building a boy shed. It was an unseasonably hot today today, so we got tired by mid-afternoon... we kept slogging away though (but our talking got less animated). :) One side done. one shelf in, and the lad called it quits. He was too tired and hot and we did TOO much physical work today mom. Just too much. :) The tarp was donated to us. It was supposed to be the cover for a 10 x 10 shed but it's a couple of heavy duty side pieces with window cutouts... perfect for a bug shed don't you think? The bugs need good air flow to be happy. The other side done as well (hubby and I got it finished). It's not a great shed, but it will be a good bug shed. All we have left to do is build a shelf for storage, put another piece of plywood on the back and do something to make the entrance a bit more snow proof. It's a work in progress. The expensive part of this shed in the plywood we put on the roof. Man.. $35 was not quite in my budget for this shed but it needed to be spent to do it decent enough for the winter. A bit over five feet on the short side and almost 6 feet on the other. Good room for a child to grow into or to be salvaged into a tool/lawn mower shed down the road.
We are going to add another layer of dirt inside to make it more even (we have loads of dirt right now from the pond being dug out). But it will do don't you think? So have you made a good outside area for your children to use for their hobbies (if they are outside related?) If so, let me know, I'd love to check them out. :) I will link up with the following linkys. :) Last week was a busy book work type week, and this week was just so different. The weather has been lovely so we worked with it. :) Oh indeedy. The lad needed to use his muscles and it was good. :) We are in process of getting rid of the old pond/garden area. It will take some time to get it all down, but you see the missing stones? What? You can't see them? That's good. Cause you see they are now over here: You see putting in a wall will make it easier to know where the lawn ends and where the garden begins. Makes it easier to weed and water and mind the correct plants. Our plans are to extend the bricks around all our bushes and trees so as to make it easier all round for everyone to mow lawns and help with the weeding. :) Our "burn the nasty weeds after they dry" pile continues to grow. It's actually getting large enough I'm seriously considering just bundling it up and taking it all to the dump Then it's all gone once and for all. The dump will take it free of charge as well. My son's real life experiment of see how the water runs to keep it from flowing into the pond experiment worked well. I had to offer a bit of help with it to get him going and watching where the water was going, but overall...looks better to have the patio clean after we moved the huge pile of dirt from digging out the new pond. Ah.. my lovely hay.. all ready for my bunnies and piggies to munch on over the winter. Think they will be pleased??? Smells absolutely wonderful too. :) The lad worked hard helping to man-handled these bales. Hubby helped me bring them into the backyard and that was good. But stacking them... that was all me and the lad. :) Good thing I grew up on a farm eh? The shed is in much better shape too can't you tell? Organized, tidy, and workable. We shouldn't have a lot of a debris floating around the yard this winter by the time I'm all done here. :) i do need to find room for one emergency rabbit cage in here yet, still not sure where to put it but God will help me sort it out in my brain....
Anyways, that's a wrap up of our homeschooling week. Lots of hard work and thinking, and inbetween it all the lad.. did a smattering of math (on the computer and at the market), he did a bit of science (gardening, snake catching/feeding, frog catching, pond watching (we can see our fish swim), and standard deviants on the computer, we did our normal amounts of reading and did a lot of just on hands learning this week. It's good to have an excellent helper in a nine year old. Good learning and good work. At the end of August I talked about how we managed our computer game time. In that post I mentioned how my son needs to earn his computer time over and above the 1 hour he gets to play daily. It's sometimes hard to come up with things for him to do, and we've been working on getting him motivated.. over the past week he's been very diligent about working on the new pond. You may recall that back in June my son made a small pond with a friend. He did an excellent job with it, but it was...in a couple of different ways not satisfactory. 1. the toads kept escaping. 2. the space between it and the rose of sharon bush was tight making it hard to navigate the back yard 3. the pond just wasn't quite big enough...his pond fish were a tad crowded and 4. all the plants he put in it were "mom.. they are just too big now mom!" So we thought that perhaps a bigger pond was in order. We'd need a couple of supplies.. like a pond liner and eventually an outdoor pump (still need to find that). At the end of July/beginning August I found a pond liner on sale and said okay.. here's the liner. Let's get building, we considered a few different spots but finally ended up with right beside the old one, using up an flower garden that I've been unsuccessfully battling weeds in. So what do you think? Did we do good? Think the fish will be happier now? Think it will be easier to raise toads and frogs and encourage snakes to come around? That's what we are hoping for. :) We have some pond liner left over that the lad is saying.. Mom.. can I use this to make a couple smaller ponds? For the toads I don't want to have them escape? Think I can mom? I'm figuring we probably have room along the side fence for a couple of smaller ponds. :) We plan in the spring to put flowers and plants in that will lean down into the water, and put in some flowering plants around the edges a bit. Possibly throw a water lily or two in there along with some pond plants. Tomorrow (Wednesday) we hope to catch our fish and crayfish and show them their new abode (though that might have to wait until Thursday evening). It's supposed to rain today which is one of the reasons we didn't fill it all the way up (besides it was getting late and didn't want to risk forgetting the tap on). Let me give you a quick run down on how we did it. The goal had been for the pond to stretch along the fence, but we ran into an issue with an old sewer cover (at least that's what we think it is). That cover didn't allow us to dig down deep enough. So with went with coming out into the patio area. The back half and one side are about 2.5 feet deep, and the front corner is about 12 inches deep. This gives frog/toad eggs and little fishes a place to slip away from bigger fish. We cut away all the roots really short, cleaned out all the rocks and added a layer of sand from our old sandbox to the bottom. The lad doesn't use the sandbox anymore so we figured we'd might as well make good use of that sand. The lad took a good amount of time making it as smooth as possible. The stones around the top are from our old rose garden/small pond. We have a piece of wood in the new pond as already small finches have slide on the plastic in their attempt to get down to the water. We don't want birds drowning in it. Hopefully the wood will help. We may need to make a small island of some sort. We saw those at a pond place in London and that gave us ideas of our own to try to recreate. My son has learned 1. A big project is made smaller if you just work at it for 30 minutes at a time. 2. Asking for help doesn't mean you aren't doing the job, just means you are asking for help with things you can't figure on your own. 3. Things work best sometimes with a team (mom, international student, lad and sometimes dad). We couldn't have gotten the liner in all by ourselves, it took a team. 4. Paying attention to detail matters when it comes to making an area smooth. 5. To use the right tool for the job. sometimes he needed a spade, other times a square edge shovel and sometimes a trowel was the best tool. Anyways, that's T for Making Time.... our new pond. This post is part of a series from Marcy at Ben And Me. You can find that post here. :) Are your children interested in science? Are you a little leery of letting them experiment? Well, this book helps to put your mind at ease. If you have youngsters, take heart, Dad's book of Awesome Science Experiments is here for you. :) About the author: Mike Adamick (San Francisco, CA) is the author of Dad's Book of Awesome Projects (Adams Media, 2013) and a stay-at-home dad who writes for the Adventures in Learning science blog at PBS.org, The San Francisco Chronicle, KQED Radio, Disney's parenting website, Babble.com, and the Daddy Issues column on Jezebel.com. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, McSweeney's, Details magazine, The New York Observer, NPR, and other media outlets. Our thoughts: I received this book from Adams Media so that I could give you my honest opinion of it. :) It's science.. I love science. :) My son is nine, and we have done a lot of the experiments in this book already, there's a few that he hasn't so I been giving him the book as saying, which one would you like to do? I have to admit, that at age nine, if it doesn't explode or shoot off sparks or do something flashy, he's kinda like.. Oh, that interesting, but that's about as far as it goes. :) (sorry, that's just where's he's at right now). But he did manage to find a few that he was interested in. Here is one we did today. In this experiment he was to see if he could get a balloon to expand in hot water, and then see what would happen in cold water. He did it and said "meh", and then thought he'd punch it up a bit.. so he tried a few different things with it until he was done trying them out. :) It was a good morning. BUT that is what I like with this book. It encourages children to simply try different things if they didn't like how it turned out, or it didn't work in the first place. Just try. Be safe, but try it out. So what do you get with this book? You the the following
Each chapter follows the same format, children are expected and encouraged to experiment a bit if things don't turn out quite right the first time. The biggest thing is to observe what happens when you do something, and to be safe while do so. Do I recommend getting this book? Yes, if you have young scientists in your household, get this book, give them the chance to observe the world and learn from it.
You know what I love about Go Science DVD's? I love that it inspires my son to try things out on his own. To attempt, to fail, to try again and then to hear that hollered "YES!" (brief pause. "MOM! Come see it works!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" The thing that I don't like.... when he tells me something works and I don't have my camera on hand to prove it to you all! :) I know... I know...I'm being silly there. :) Library and Educational Services has put together a series of seven videos and I had the distinct pleasure of watching them with my eight year old for a review. Ben Roy does an excellent job with these science demonstrations connecting science with the things of God for children. The series of DVD's is called Go Science. Here is a list of the videos available. The ones in bold are the Go Science DVD's that we watched. Volume 1: Sound, Gravity, Space Volume 2: Life Science, Weather Volume 3: Air Volume 4: Motion, Friction, Electricity, Light Volume 5: States of Matter, Water Volume 6: Chemistry Volume 7: Engineering, Design, Flight The videos follow a basic set up. Ben Roy has a table or experiment set up. He calls up three children up out of the audience, sometimes this is at a studio type set up and other times at a Vacation Bible School type set up. He explains a bit about what they are going to do and has the children do as much of the experiment as is safe for them to do. He has a helper for the more difficult experiments (such as one where they needed to lift heavy weights to set up a pendulum). He has an emphasis on being safe (safety glasses, be aware and careful about what you are doing etc). The children do the experiment and then he explains why it works. He then finds a way to connect that experiment with the word of God. Each lesson ends with the statement "when we learn more about science, we learn about our creator,... God". One of the things I appreciated in the video was the pop rocket (with vinegar and baking soda). As you can tell from these three videos this totally inspired my son. IN the video, the experiments didn't work out as well as anticipated AND they left those "failures" in. This totally intrigued my lad. They didn't work in the video.. could he make it work? He tried a variety of ways to make it work and it did. :) He was so pleased with himself. :) In this last video he's trying to teach other people how to do it when he finally had it all figured out! :) He was SO very pleased... and that is what I like to see. :) Okay, so what did each video teach us? First.. let me explain something. We were supposed to do two. We said which ones we wanted to do but then I couldn't remember which two I said. It's was like ACK.. what do I do???? So I got three (I ended up paying for one which is totally fine) The three are picked are the ones I had a hard time choosing between so I figured I simply couldn't go wrong doing that. :) And it benefits you my reader, since you get to learn a bit more than you thought you might. :) Volume 2: Life Science, Weather included: (Running time 1.02) Life Science:
Volume 4: Motion, Friction, Electricity, Light (running time: 55:03) Motion:
Vol. 7: Engineering, Design, Flight (Running time 56:09) Engineering/Design
How we used it. We would sit down and watch it as a family.. 3-5 episodes at a time. Any that my lad was intrigued over we'd watch again so he could set it in his mind for later thinking and experimenting with. One DVD he took with him to gramma's house on a rainy afternoon and they watched the whole thing. That one he was unwilling to share with me as that was "for gramma's and she wants to see it again mom". "OH?" was my response? "Yes, she wants to do it with me sometime". I have orders to get magnets! So I do have to admit, I have not seen Volume 4 myself. That's gramma's DVD and that's just the way it is. :) Gramma told me that she thoroughly enjoyed watching them with my son, "Good lessons. Teaches the children. Shows more of God. Good that. And the lad likes them, that's a good thing". In a nutshell. Library and Educational Services, provided me with some Go Science DVD's to watch for free and then to review. You can them on facebook. The videos are geared for ages 4-12 (as per the videos). They retail for $14.95, but is available on their site for $8.97. The full set of 7 DVDs retails for $99.70, but is available through the Library and Educational Services site for $59.82. Good deal eh? We've enjoyed them so much I may be getting the rest of the series down the road. Would I recommend them? For sure I would. My eight year old enjoyed them. He had fun recreating the ones that he could, and using his imagination to expand upon them. Please do go and see what others of the crew had to say about the Go Science DVD's. You can find those reviews by clicking on the image below. Each of us reviewed a slightly different combination... Product details:
Vendor: Library and Educational Services Product: NEW (Series 2) Go Science DVDs. Received: Volumes 2, 4 and 7. Age Range: Per DVD, age 4-12. Price: On their website: $8.97 each or $59.82 for the series. This past Monday our family joined several others from our homeschool group in a trip toMarineland. We had a good time, come on in and let me tell you a bit more about it. We gathered at 1000 a.m. to enter the park. it was a quiet day.. we almost had the park to ourselves. We stopped off first at the killer whales and seals. Rides are always fun and the boys enjoyed a variety of them (and one the lad most definitely did NOT). Interspersed with the rides where a variety of animal attractions. it's been years since I was at Marineland, I looked forward to the show they had. They've taken the Orca out of the show and replaced with belugas. The seals are out completely. Not sure why that is.... it was a good day out with the family. :) We didn't see much of the other families who went, the lads were all walk and lets see it all right away type of attitude and go. :)
We left around 230, stopped by to see the Falls since we were so close anyways. We plan to go back sometime to see more of the Falls. A good day to go. :) |
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