Monthly Archive: February 2011

Update on my wounded relative who is a Marine 4

Update on my wounded relative who is a Marine

 Another quick update: R had surgery (one of many, many he’s had in the past week) a couple days ago to attach the muscle to the bone. Apparently it was very painful.  That coupled with the fact that they found a blood clot in his lung, R is having a tough time.  My prayers, love and hugs to R.————- I wrote a short post about my cousin’s son who was...

2

Garden Science – Compost, Food in America & a Raisin Bar Recipe

I have been reading a lot of books about gardening and food.  Oh my, I’ve learned so much about our food sources…  I went on for so long, I pushed my thoughts/rants down to later in this post. Anyway, I told LD that he could have his own plot in the garden and he could choose whatever seeds he wanted to plant. He is SO excited and wanted to start...

2nd Grade Math: Clock Work & Other  Math Work 4

2nd Grade Math: Clock Work & Other Math Work

I saw this wonderful clock idea at Suddenly 2nd Grade — http://mrsnielson-2ndgrade.blogspot.com/. The blog appears not to be up and running any more. Anyway, LD has been working on time in intervals of 5 minutes.  This idea and the clock printout made by Mrs. Nielson is  great.  She has the bottom sheet available to print out too, but when we made it I felt it’d be better for LD to...

1

Skip Counting by 3s and 4s — Active Math Game

LD continues to work on his first multiplication tables from 1s to 6s — with lots of skip counting along the way.  Today I had him working on 4s mostly. It has been quite a long time since we’ve done active math games outside and we had a reprieve in the weather. So we set up a chalk math snail again. LD had to multiply each number by 4.  DD...

Just sending love to my family and other wounded Veterans 8

Just sending love to my family and other wounded Veterans

Goodness, I’ve been completely stumped on a title for this posting. Maybe I should have just left the title blank because that doesn’t seem quite right.   I  have always been extremely close to my cousin.  We’re three weeks apart in age and that made us have a very special bond/connection growing up and on into adulthood. She had her kids at a young age and I had the privilege of...

How Castle Walls Were Built 2

How Castle Walls Were Built

 We’ve been reading bits of Castle by David Macaulay aloud together.  It is a very detailed account about how a castle and the adjoining town were planned out and built.  One section talked about how the castle walls were built.  We tried to design our own walls to be as strong as possible. The drawing from Castle shows how thick the castle walls were constructed. We tried to do the...

4

The Four Alls (Learning about Feudalism in the Middle Ages)

A place for everyone and everyone in his place: We have been studying the Middle Ages.  We’ve read lots of books or snippets of books about castles, knights, the Church, and feudalism.  This is an activity suggested in one of the books we checked out from the library.  It’s called the four alls and talks about some of the roles people had in the Middle Ages. These roles were ‘fixed...

How mountains form - activity 15

Earth Science: How Fold Mountains are Formed

The most common types of mountains are fold mountains. Some fold mountains include the Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, and Alps. This activity showed how plate movement creates folded mountains.When the two continents collide, the plates wrinkle and fold.  Here’s our activity to show this happening.  It’s the same principle as the damp graham cracker we did a few days ago, but this shows the “layers” of the earth folding/wrinkling. Showing how...

Tectonic Plates Hands-On Activity 8

Earth Science: Plate Movements, Pangaea

We were still talking about plate tectonics on Friday. We talked about how scientists theorize that the continents were once connected as one giant super-continent, Pangaea. I cut out South America and Africa and asked them to fit them together as best the could. When they didn’t fit together perfectly I asked the kids why the continents wouldn’t match perfectly after 250 million years? We talked about erosion and the...

2

Earth Science: Plate Movement, Earthquakes

We looked a bit more closely at what happens at fault lines where slight shifts in the crust cause earthquakes. First the kids all made their own layered crust. ED especially enjoyed this! Then we placed an index card in a larger container and created layers on both sides of the paper. We moved the index card back and forth and watched as the grains of rice shifted and moved....

Wonderful Valentine’s Day Math Activities (for K or 1st) 4

Wonderful Valentine’s Day Math Activities (for K or 1st)

I’ve come across a number of beautiful Valentine’s Day math activities that I plan to use this week with DD. They are so pretty and well done, I just had to share in case someone else might want to incorporate them into their week! I wish I had the time (and health!…I still have a vicious cough from the pneumonia.) to be making such beautiful things, but at the moment...

Some of LD’s Activities (2nd Grade) 2

Some of LD’s Activities (2nd Grade)

Science: Obviously we’re working on our Earth Science Unit and that will probably continue for at least another month.  We are also working through the Real Science-4 Kids Chemistry book Pre-Level 1.  I really like these books and recommended them to my sister (they homeschool) back a couple of years ago. Her kids are older than mine and she went through the Pre-Level one books and then continued on with...

A few of DD’s Activities (K) 0

A few of DD’s Activities (K)

It turns out that DD has pneumonia and an ear infection as well. She’s been sleeping LOTS these past 10 days. Only today did she show interest in resuming work on her penguin lapbook. But she’s been pretty amazing — and has kept up with her reading and math most days despite being sick. She’s to the stage that she picks up books to read on her own as well....

Age 3 activity 4

A Few of ED’s Activities (Age 3)

ED turned three this week! Happy Birthday Sweetheart! ED still enjoys this math activity.  She does it with snowflakes and Christmas trees — now I’ve made up the same activity with heart stickers and beautiful heart erasers from Oriental Trading.  She really gets the one-to-one correspondence now. We play many, many rounds of Cariboo together.  This game is just perfect for her.  Each card has a shape (triangle, square or...