Insects and more

My son is more and more using his reading skills in his learning.

Today we started a new program called Samson's Classroom.  I was able to purchase this quite inexpensively through Educents.

Everyday of doing formal homeschooling (or is the hope) my son will be doing a new sight words list and working through a reading comprehension game.   He will be practicing the spelling word list that I designed for him all week.   These are words that he has struggled with pronouncing and reading on a regular basis or are taken from his reading program.  The goal is to reduce memorization and to cement words into his brain better. :)

Today he showed me how well he knows some of the common sight words which is a confidence booster for him.   Each level he needs to do perfectly in order to advance.

Oh Insects...where does that come into play?
We continue to work through our Insects Study from In the Hands of a child.

The lad is enjoying this study.  Today we learned the exciting fact that Katydids hear through their knees.  That struck the lad in interesting and kinda funny.   But the Moon Moth totally intrigued him so we looked it up.  They don't eat when they are fully mature, and then to live as adults for only one week (surviving only on what they took in as caterpillars).   They go through five larval stages, changing colours at each stage.  We read these online articles:  Meet the Moon Moth and Wiki.

The above photo comes from this source.

The lad also continued this morning to work through mammoth math.  This morning's sheet was a puzzle he needed to solve in order to answer a question.   The lad had fun doing it but was highly disappointed in the answer.
The question: how do you get a giraffe in the refrigerator?
The answer: open the door.  Put the giraffe in.  Close the door.

Made me laugh, but the lad was just ... but mom, that won't work, giraffes are too big to fit in, you have to shorten him first!

This afternoon the lad will go for a bike ride (phys ed) and do some horitcultural work with me (planting our beans and moving his broccoli around a bit to make room for our own veggies).

We've continued to enjoy our bird feeders and I am hopeful to put up a finch feeder this afternoon and to get the lad to help me protect one or two of our feeders from the grackles.  I like grackles but they will eat a feeder empty in one afternoon and I can't afford to feed that many birds, eating that much food, ALL THE TIME.

this captures perfectly how hard the grackles will work to get free food. They don't fit on the feeder, but boy oh boy will they try hard to do so. They flap and flap and work and work. They do succeed IF they are the smaller grackles, the bigger ones just can't. :)

Oh!  It was rather cool on the way home last night.  I saw a smallish turtle on the side of the road.    So we stopped to take a look.   It was rather neat.  It was a wild eastern painted turtle.  :) 

We didn't mean to, but we made him hiss at us.  It was a soft but determined KR--ISS.   He threatened us with an open mouth and everything.   But the lad commented something to the affect of "Mom, why do people call turtles slow, he can really scurry away fast".   But I pulled him out of the grass a few times so we could take a good look at him.  He was quite determined to get away from us and as soon as he was put down would get as far into the grass as we could.   When we were one looking at him, we made a path in the grass for him to get through more easily and he used it speedily to get away and down into the ditch.

This encouraged some research on the boys part.  How do you tell a girl turtle from a boy turtle?    The size of the tail for the most part.  Boys have a longer, heavier tail.