Inside the Earth

We did the first of our rock and mineral units yesterday.  We are using REAL Science Odyssey Earth and Space but out of order and only in pieces.

I like RSO for the nice concise overviews it gives for each topic and the simple demonstrations.  It is easy to supplement when desired. 

We watched a short video at Discovery Streaming called “Beneath the Surface:  Earth’s Inner Structure”.   This was a nice introduction to the topic.

We discussed various things that have layers. The video had mentioned a hard boiled egg, we discussed Oreo cookies, cake, sandwiches and fruits. We then talked about how the earth also has layers.

We read two books about the earth – The Magic School Bus: Inside the Earth by Cole, and How to Dig a Hole to the Other Side of the Earth by McNulty. The only problem with the How to dig.. book was that the book presented it as something that was really possible so I had to keep telling Georgie that “no, we couldn’t go visit the inner core and no one ever has”.




We read the summary page from RSO: Earth and Space and made our own play-doh model of the earth.   We made a inner core of pink, wrapped that in an outer core of yellow, a mantle of orange and then a crust of blue and green to show the continents and oceans.  Georgie had some trouble getting the new layers of play-doh to completely cover the previous ones.  We shaved a small piece off the edge so he did still wind up with 1/2 an earth that showed the layers.

  



We finished up by coloring and reading a small printable book and doing a worksheet from Evan-Moor Teacher’s File Box.

Our next unit will be showing how rocks are made of minerals and learning about mineral identification.

A Day in Our Homeschool

I’ve almost written a Day in the Life post a bunch of times over the past couple of years but whenever I start to record our activities in detail things usually take a turn toward the insane.  But today we had a great productive day and, luckily, I had decided to give it a shot and started keeping notes first thing this morning.

I think part of our productivity came from setting up some new guidelines for computer play for Georgie.   He doesn’t get to play until after his morning schoolwork (math and language arts) is done and then only during lunch break before we get back to our afternoon schoolwork (science, history, geography, art, etc.).

I also spent the weekend re-organizing (yes, again) and setting up a new plan that makes it easier to add games and fun activities to our day.

We started school at 9:30am.  By this time, we had all finished breakfast and had a chance to wake-up a little.  Vicki is a morning person and wakes up ready to go.  Georgie and I are definitely NOT, so it takes us some time to be ready.

Georgie started with his Handwriting without Tears.  Today’s activity was only one page so it didn’t take very long. 

Vicki wasn’t interested in doing school at first but came in after about 5 minutes and did some alphabet activities I had from Confessions of a Homeschooler.  She didn’t do them for very long before switching to some pictures with spaces for bottle cap letters.   She wasn’t really into either activity.



Georgie started in his binder with a math riddle, where he found the answers to addition problems that were adding 10 to 2 digit numbers.  Each answer matched up to a letter that was placed on lines to give the answer to a riddle.   He likes to try and guess what the answer may be before solving the problems while I keep telling him to get the answers first.



After his math riddle, he had both sides of a page from a Kumon numbers book to trace or write.  We had these last year before I bought HWT but I pulled them out because I feel like HWT isn’t giving him enough practice with writing numbers.  The page had the numbers written inside robots so Georgie had to jump up and act like a robot for a few minutes.  Once he got back to it, he did his usual non-stop mumbling “almost there, almost done, just one more, boy that was hard work”.

It was now 9:40 am.  Yes, all that happened in 10 minutes. 

Vicki switched to her wipe-off books while Georgie did his Explode the Code.  He just started Book 4 which covers dividing into syllables.  So far, he thinks it’s very easy and completed the 8 pages he had to do.  For right now, I’m having him do an entire lesson in one day.  We may slow down if he starts struggling.
Georgie then decided that he wanted to change into his t-shirt from the Insect museum but he didn’t want to walk on the floor in barefeet because it feels cold.



While I was arguing suggesting he just go and change if that’s what he wanted to do, I had my back turned since I was switching laundry around, and Vicki decided to give herself “whiskers” with a dry-erase marker.



At this point, since Georgie was still working on his independent work, I pulled out some paint chip word cards to do with Vicki.  The long strips had consonants on them, while the short cards with the hole in them had word endings.  I started with just the –at word family since that’s what we were working on in The Reading Lesson.  Either she was not feeling cooperative or she’s still not ready for blending since she decided that b –at was ass.

 

She didn’t want to do her Handwriting without Tears (“not that letter stuff again”) or Get Set for the Code.  She did an alphabet dot-to-dot puzzle and we did a Lesson from MEP – Reception, while Georgie finished up his ETC.
   
I told the kids we would go to the museum once we finished school since I have to check some things to set up for future lessons.  Vicki decided she needed to draw a map to the museum treasure while Georgie worked on his puzzle from Scholastic Algebra Readiness Made Easy.

She drew her pirate map and talked non-stop about it…”Let’s say Argh, you say Argh, My Matey, you’re not saying Argh!  You cannot look at the treasure map.   Okay you can take a peek at the treasure map.  I made it, so we have to look all over the museum to find the glow-in-the-dark treasure rocks.  Only I can power up the ship.  Vroom Vroom.”  Georgie’s reply to all this was “We can’t go until I get past this challenge”.  (his Algebra Readiness puzzle). 



At this point it was 10:17 am.  47 minutes of school done.

Vicki ate a granola bar and took off to play Reading Eggs on the computer while Georgie did his Spectrum Language Arts and Spectrum Reading (one lesson which is a two page spread for each).    All the while, he was complaining about having to do math since “I already know math”.  

After a short break for something to eat and despite his extensive knowledge, we went ahead and did math anyway.  He did 4 pages from Math Mammoth which took about 15 minutes and we moved on to All About Spelling.  This lesson was on compound words.  He didn’t have any trouble with the concept of compound words but he missed the spelling of some he should have been able to do by this point.  I think we will review all of AAS Level 1 before we move on to Level 2.

That would normally finish our morning work but I had put together a game to work on math facts over the weekend.  Georgie is definitely not a flash-card or drill kind of kid.  I bought two sets of flash cards over the weekend – addition and subtraction.  I mixed them together, divided the deck in half, then stuck each half into a sock since they were printed on both sides.  We then played War where who ever had the card with the higher answer, kept the cards.  Georgie had a great time with this, especially when he was winning, and didn’t even care that he was drilling math facts.

   

We took about an hour break for lunch and started science shortly after noon.  Our current science topic is Rocks and Minerals and we started it today by studying what’s inside the earth.  Among other things (a more detailed post of this is here), we made a play-doh model of the layers of the earth.

 

After we finished our science, I realized that the museum is not open on Tuesdays so we decided to do some Nature Study instead  (see post here).    We returned to the house around 2:30pm and Georgie and Vicki played on the computer until Daddy came home.

I’m hoping we will continue to have productive days like this one.

Nature Study

I made the decision to do more Nature Study with the kids when our weather took a turn for the gorgeous in mid March. 

I signed up for the Outdoor Hour Challenge newsletters and searched the web for lots of other suggestions.   We have the One Small Square: Backyard book, the Usborne First Book of Nature and a variety of other relevant encyclopedias and field guides.   The April edition of the Handbook of Nature Study newsletter, which can be signed up for at the blog which also hosts the Outdoor Hour Challenge.   One of the articles in this newsletter was on creating a backyard habitat.   This reminded me of the National Wildlife Federation’s program for certifying your backyard as a wildlife habitat.  I get their catalogs a few times a year and always found this program interesting.  Both articles/programs had the same suggestions – provide food, water and sheltered space/cover for raising young.   One of the nice things about our yard is that we meet these criteria without having to do anything.  

Both suggest a simple birdbath as a water source.  We have a river bordering one side of our property, so this is not a concern.

The next need for a backyard habitat is food sources for a variety of animals.    Again, both had similar suggestions but the NWF broke it down into specific suggestions – seeds, nuts, pollen, berries, fruits, foliage/twigs, nectar and sap and/or supplemental feeders for seed, suet, squirrels, butterflies, and hummingbirds (3 are required for certification).  We have a lot of flowering bushes and a large variety of trees and evergreens so we have nuts (acorns), pollen, foliage/twigs, nectar and sap.  We put out seed and a suet feeder.  So we have that covered.  We see deer, squirrels, chipmunks, mice, foxes, groundhogs, and lots of birds on our property.  We used to see bears but weren’t really sorry when they stopped coming around.

The third suggestion is to provide sheltered space for nesting, or for various critters to hide or live in.    The NWF requires two from the following list:  wooded area, bramble patch, ground cover, rock wall/pile, cave, roosting box, dense shrubs/thickets, evergreens, brush/log pile, burrow, meadow/prairie, water garden/pond, and an additional two from the list of places to raise young:  mature trees, dead trees/snags, meadow/prairie, dense shrubs/thicket, nesting box, water garden/pond, wetland, burrow, host plants for caterpillars, cave.  

We have a wooded area over most of our property leading down to the river, a bramble patch which happens to be in a designated wetlands down at the river, lots of dense shrubs/thickets, evergreens, mature trees and dead trees and snags.   I’m sure somewhere on our property there are burrows as well.  Our “lawn” is usually a mix of ground cover, wild flowers and weeds.

We have a large deadfall of tree tops that came down due to last years Halloween snowstorm and hurricane Irene.  We also have a dead tree that is a favorite place for our red-bellied woodpecker and we have seen him pop in and out of a hole in the trunk.  We think he might be preparing a nest in there.   We have seen male/female pairs of cardinals, blue jays, chickadees and tufted titmouse in our yard since we started putting out seed.  When startled they head down the hill so we think they may be working on nests down closer to the river.

 

Since our property is an acceptable habitat, we got right down to our nature study.  

A few weeks ago, I saw these very neat science/nature exploration kits  while checking out blog posts.  I love the little carriers and all the stuff that she put in them.  I immediately starting working on something similar for my guys.   Since most of our explorations involved at least leaving the main part of the yard for the river, and my kids are small enough to not be able to carry much on their own especially up and down our steep hill, I decided to put together our kit in a backpack.    Since today’s study was going to be a fairly general one I added a variety of stuff I thought we might be able to use.

Inside I packed two magnifying glasses (my kids don’t share well), a sketch pad, a spiral notebook, large heart crayons and broken pieces to do rubbings, a small plastic container, a thermometer (I was thinking of seeing how cold the river water is but didn’t get around to it), The Usborne First Book of  Nature, National Audubon Society Field Guide to Birds: Eastern Region and of course my camera and a bottle of water in one of the outside pockets.

In addition we bought crayons, colored pencils and a clipboard to lean on if needed.

Once we were outside, I grabbed three large foam mats that we used to use at the bottom of the slide and under the swing when the kids were little.  I wasn’t sure how muddy it would be down at the river since we did have a rainy weekend.

Instead of heading down our steep hill, we walked down our street to our neighbor’s house and cut though her yard (she’s okay with this).

Vicki started out by taking a close-up look at the bark of one of the trees and then I showed the kids how to take a rubbing.

She used the binoculars to look across the river and to try and look into the river.

While exploring Vicki came running back “I SAW A BUMBLE BEE, I SAW A BUMBLE BEE, AHHHHH”.

 

She stood on a stump and said “I’m the king…uh I’m the Princess of the WORLD!”

She brought me over a handful of dirt and told me there was a worm in it but he scrammed.

  Next time I have to remember to bring down a trowel so she can dig in the dirt down there.  I’m sure all kinds of interesting things will be there.

Georgie went off sketching different things.  He drew a bottle, a bumblebee and a butterfly.  He’s not overly into realism in his drawings right now so the bee and the butterfly both had big smiles.

After they explored for a while, I had the kids come, sit down, close their eyes and listen.   After a few minutes, I asked them what they heard.  Georgie said he heard a “spooky sound” that I told him was a mourning dove.  We also heard cars very faintly, the wind in the trees and a really loud bird chattering at us that I think was a blue jay. 

We walked a little farther down our street to a marshy area at the end.  I think this will be a great place to find frogs and turtles once the weather gets warmer.

There are many flowering trees in our neighborhood that are in full bloom…..

but many others look completely bare until you take a closer look and see the little buds growing on the branches.

As we walked back home, we discussed the various things we saw and how we thought it may change if we waited a month and came back.

Weekly Wrap-up

Georgie had a very good week while Vicki was not interested in doing much school.  Which worked out fine since Georgie took the California Achievement Test this week.  I still have to send it in for scoring but he did very well on the Reading and Math sections and not as well on the Language sections, especially punctuation and capitalization.  Not surprising since we have just begun working on those.

Vicki did a few pages in Handwriting without Tears and some Reading Eggs this week.  The rest of the time she played Toon Town or Webkinz on the computer or playing.   She has completed through Lesson 9 on Reading Eggs.

Georgie completed Book 3 in Explode the Code and we moved on to Book 4.  So far he says it’s easy but I often see talk about 4 being a big jump with it’s syllabication work.  We already have Book 5 so we can skip ahead and return to Book 4 if that happens. 

He is continuing along with Handwriting without Tears and with copywork.   He definitely prefers the HWT workbook to the copywork, and has returned to doing a random mix of upper and lower case letters with the copywork.  I may have to increase his copywork and have him redo it when he does it wrong.

We’ve switched from the Scholastic Grammar and Reading Comprehension to Spectrum workbooks.  We’ve just started these so it’s early to know how well they are going to work.

We are on Step 21 of All About Spelling Level 1.  I ordered Level 2 which we will start after doing a review of all the words in Level 1.

Math continues to be Georgie’s favorite and I’m continuing to try to find new interesting things for him to do.  He loves the lessons from Scholastic Algebra Readiness Made Easy: Grade 2 and I’m sure I’ll buy the Grade 3 book when he finishes this one.  I LOVE the Scholastic dollar sales.    At the latest sale, I bought a book of Solve-the-Riddle Math Practice: Addition and Subtraction to give him more practice with memorizing his math facts.  He’s very good with figuring out word problems and new concepts but doesn’t have all his fact memorized.  The pages consist of about 12 math problems with each answer associated with a letter.  The letters are then filled in blanks at the bottom with the numbers underneath them.  Each is the answer to a simple riddle like “What do frogs eat with their hamburgers?   - French Flies”.  Georgie loves riddles so I thought he would enjoy these and so far he does.

We did a lot of bird watching this week.  Most of the pictures were taken through the screen door and from quite a distance but we were able to identify quite a few of the birds.

We saw a red-bellied woodpecker…

our usual cardinals, bluejays, mourning doves, what I think was a tufted titmouse and some chickadees.

Earlier in the week we had the field trip for our 4-H Cloverbud bug unit.  More about that can be seen here.

4-H Cloverbuds – Bugs Part 1

We had the field trip portion of our next Cloverbud unit today.  Our current topic is Bugs, so we took a trip to Insectropolis – The Bugseum of New Jersey.  We had a large enough group to get a guided tour and I’m very glad we did.  Our tour guide, Jesse, was great with the kids and they learned so much.  Each room of the museum had a different theme and a different colored floor so it was easy to tell the kids to stay on the green floor or move on to the orange floor.

Georgie took a lot of interest in the metamorphosis display in the introductory room.

The first thing the kids were able to touch was a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach.  These are very popular at zoos and museums so we’ve seen these before. 

 

In addition to live bugs, there were also some great mounted specimens.  It’s amazing how big some bugs get around the world. (and kind of creepy).

Jesse pulled out a millipede for the kids to touch.  I kept my distance from this one since millipedes and centipedes really give me the creeps.

In the jail room there were displays of bugs that were detrimental to food crops or harmful to people.

 

The kids were able to touch a scorpion next.  

A display of iridescent butterflies.

We finished up with a discussion about spiders and the chance to touch a tarantula.

Georgie didn’t want to touch the tarantula so he hid under the bench.

I thought it was funny that the Bug Museum was located behind an exterminator.

 

In two weeks, we’ll do Part 2 of our Bug unit with a Bug Hunt and craft.

Weekly Wrap-up

Most of what we did this week involved enjoying the absolutely BEAUTIFUL Spring weather. 

We did finish up a Pets unit with our 4-H Cloverbud group that can be seen here.

We took a walk down to the river at the bottom of our property for the first time since last fall.  We don’t do this often since the kids still need a lot of help getting down the steep, over-grown slope.   A lot of the smaller brush still hasn’t started growing after the winter but there were a lot of limbs down from Hurricane Irene.   Once we made it down to the river, the cleared area was actually larger than normal since much of the brush washed away with the flooding after Irene.

The long walk back up.   
 

Georgie spent some time reading in my hammock.

And we did some bird watching.  I started putting out seed for the birds again.  We stopped when a bear bent our metal shepherds hook in order to get to our old bird feeder.   Instead of a feeder, we are just scattering seed along the top of the old stone fireplace in our backyard, in the hope that it won’t attract the bear again.  The kids love using my binoculars to get a closer look at the birds.

 

My father and my grandparents were always avid bird watchers so I can identify some of the most common birds.  We have blue jays, a pair of cardinals, sparrows, a titmouse and lots of mourning doves.  Mourning doves are the only birds I can recognize by sound.  Georgie is a big fan of cardinals.

I’ve been trying to find inexpensive ways to encourage the kids to spend more time outside.  We have a small trampoline, a small slide/climber that the kids use as a fort, sidewalk chalk, Nerf guns and bubbles but no swings and no sandbox.  After seeing a picture on Pinterest of a toddler garden, I decided to set up something similar for the kids.

We don’t exactly have a lawn so there was no concern for preserving grass.  When Spring gets here for real, our lawn will consist mostly of ground cover and wild flowers.  There was an area that Vicki had already spent some time digging in so I decided to put the “garden” there.

First we dug up and raked the dirt to loosen it up.   It was fairly rocky and had a lot of roots throughout so we didn’t dig down very far.  Basically just loosened up the top few inches.  

We used some large rocks to build a border around the outside edges and Vicki added some old fish tank gravel to the inside.

We finished it up with some wind spinners, fake flowers, a decorative rock and some small flower pots from the dollar store.  Vicki enjoyed “planting” her flowers and arranging her garden.

It looks like our Spring weather may be here to stay so we will be spending a lot of time outside.  I’ve preparing materials to start doing the Outdoor Hour Challenges to bring more purpose and learning to our time spent outdoors.