David Building & Learning

Here are some more of David's recent creations.  For a while he was constantly making angels.  Now this...

 He says this is Grandma in heaven driving an Angel Prius.

 And this is Great in heaven.

Funny thing is that he's too young to remember that Great loved hats and big mugs!

 Obviously, Galileo for studying Jupiter.

I had to turn our recent trip to the Arboretum into a learning experience, so we made a folder for it.  Blogger is not accepting my cover photo right now, but on the cover, David chose his favorite photos of the tulips.  It's really pretty.  Here's the inside:

Here's the recent folder we did for Jupiter:

 Can you name this Looney Tunes character?

Hint: He's drinking a root beer.

 (ok, that's not really a hint)

 This was a really cool demonstration of the storm on Jupiter.

I previously thought Saturn was the coolest planet, but David seems to think it's moons are cooler than the planet, especially the one named Titan.  We ended up with not as much to fill our folder on this one, so we added a second illustration, looking from above Saturn.  You can see in David's view from above (illustration on the right) that he included two of the shepherd moons, as well as some sort of alien attack on the planet.

 My illustration is under David's.

TT Tuesday and Our Zoo Review Folder

Oh!  I almost missed Tuesday!  There's never a dull moment around here.  While many people are having spring break this week, we're not completely... We took Monday off to meet some friends at McD's for a play date.  Just now realized I should have taken my camera!  Oh well.  Today, we worked some more on our Zoo Review from last Tuesday's field trip.  Now there's a place that gets CRAZY on Spring Break Week!  Soooo glad we went last week!

I have to admit, the Zoo Review project turned into something for ME and not just a school project.  David wrote out all his animal answers, and I made him sound everything out, only giving a hint on the f sound in elephant.  He matched up photos and handwriting, drew his picture, but then the lost scrapbooker inside me took over.  David carried on with some other school work while I finished the folder.  I couldn't help it.  But maybe I needed that.

Half way through his math, David said, "Hey, I know what you're doing.  You're trying to trick me into having school!"  I told him there was no trick to it!  We will be having a regular school day on Wednesday, celebrating St. Patrick's Day on Thursday (which will include some school disguised as fun), and having a play day on Friday. 

Other tiny talk that has been overheard this week...

Wow, that's a lot of toilet paper.  You must have a big bottom.  (I'm not telling who said that to whom.)

Smell my feet.  They smell like lemons!

Cha-ma-milk!  Cha-ma-milk!  Cha-ma-milk... (the chanting of "chocolate milk" continues from the time I announced that I was making it, until it was going down her almost 2-year-old throat)

Oh, what fun it is!

Pseudo-Lapbooking

 One of my homeschool friends recently asked about lapbooking and I realized that I was behind on blogging
some of the stuff we've been doing in school.  We don't go full out on lapbooking, with fancy folding & all, but do a simpler folder.  For astronomy I've been cutting the folders down and hole punching them so that they can fit in David's astronomy notebook.
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 I like having all of the information neatly presented without a lot of little papers floating around.  And David likes seeing his work combined into one place at the end of each chapter.

 Handwriting practice, which is greatly needed, is a lot more fun when combined with a project than it is when we're working in the handwriting workbook! (which is more like torture)

 I use the review questions at the end of the chapters for the questions that he answers.

 This will also be a keepsake, because we used his actual footprint to make the flap book above.

  When something in the chapter has been especially interesting to him, we make sure that gets into the folder.  It doesn't show up to well on the red, but he drew a volcano (above) to represent Olympus Mons on Mars - the largest volcano in the solar system!

 David gets tickled every time he sees that picture of the asteroid that looks like a dog bone!!

 We also do folders (instead of pockets) for his ancient history.  In hindsight, I wish I had cut them down & hole punched them also.

 So that's a quick summary of our modified lapbooking that we've been doing this year!  See more.

Mesopotamia

We finished our study on Ancient Mesopotamian History.  I have no idea why he glued the title on like that.

Inside the folder is our information sheets, vocabulary, and a Mesopotamian man,

information about the invention of sail boats, ziggurats, and the hanging gardens.

The boat moves along the river on a craft stick and

the ziggurat pops up.

Each lesson has a postcard to fill out with something you've learned to send to someone.  He dictated to me and chose to send this one to Kalaya.  He was impressed by the chain pump of the Hanging Gardens.

The Joys of Homeschooling

We had another week of messed up scheduling thanks to appointments, errands and Dad being away from home most of the week for a hazmat class.  In spite of everything, we still got school done.  And that is one of the joys of homeschooling.

Another is sharing the excitement of learning.  Sure, any parent could have gone out to witness the Super Harvest Moon and Jupiter this week with their kids.  But it's something else to know that in a few months we'll be studying Jupiter and I can say, "Remember that night when we stayed up late and saw the moons of Jupiter? or when we saw it right under the big full moon?"

We're currently on Mercury.  It's an interesting planet.  We've gone outside before sunrise several times in the last week to try to spot it, but there have been too many low clouds on the horizon.  Still, it's bonding to be on a quest together.

David's favorite new word of the week is ziggurat, which we've been learning about in Ancient Civilizations.

While we've been schooling since August, we just started our math curriculum.  Those manipulatives are almost as fun as Legos!  And I have to admit that I was amazed (and grateful!) that the explanation of place value in Math-U-See was so easy for the kids to grasp.  I read it straight out of the teacher's manual & drew it on the board.  Later in the day, Elizabeth walked by the board and asked, "Mama, why is there only one hundred in the castle?"  I didn't even realize she was listening while I was doing math with David!

(Looking back at this photo makes me realize how right-handed our world is and how challenging it must be to be left-handed.)

I've already been able to incorporate some of the tips I got out of The Homeschooler's Guide to Attentional Difficulties.  I love how practical this booklet is.  And I love that I can at least try - do my best - to keep David interested in learning by altering the presentation, the subject matter, the environment, and even the time of day we have school.

And all this is where I found joy in homeschooling this week.

First Grade: The Sun

We're using Apologia's Exploring Creation with Astronomy this year for science.  Instead of using their journal, we've been doing our own lapbook-type activities.  We have to work in small spurts because of everything that's going on with David, but we finally made it through Chapter 2: The Sun.

First we made a size comparison by tracing a dinner plate and using a hole punch.  The hole punch is actually a little bit too large for complete accuracy.

David practiced cutting and handwriting in this activity.  And it's just cool to see how tiny we are.

A million Earths could fit in the sun!  Wow!

Next we learned how far the sun is from us.  Nice effect of the sun coming in through the window, isn't it?

This gave us some much needed number writing practice.  Wow again... almost 93 million miles!

Next, we discussed the importance of never looking at the sun!  I seem to have missed a picture of that, but you can see it in the over view photo below.  David drew a pair of eyes with a red slash over them and practiced writing with, "Never stare at the sun!"

To explain rotating & revolving, we did that fun activity where one person stands in the middle as the sun, another walks around the sun while spinning as the Earth and another person walks around the Earth as the moon.  I was the moon.  I couldn't keep up with David (the Earth).  Elizabeth (the sun) thought it was fun, too!

Again, this spinner thing gave more cutting & handwriting practice.

One of the activities was to illustrate the sun, so David made a sun for the cover of his folder.

He added some solar flares and one really big sunspot also.

We had really interesting discussions about the color of light.  Legos proved invaluable - a tangible way for David, in particular, to grasp what it means for something to absorb the colored light.

Note to self: Get a new silver marker.  Oh, look, there's the "No Eyes" thing I mentioned earlier.

And so we conclude our study of the sun:

Next stop:  Mercury!