Koalas at Cleland Wildlife Park
We always love Cleland Wildlife Park in Adelaide becauseyou are able to interact with the animals — pet the koalas,feed the kangaroo and wallabies and so forth.
Author: Liesl - Homeschool Den
An Amazing Playground in St. Kilda, South Australia near Adelaide
This great playground was in a small, small town about 45minutes or so north of Adelaide. It’s a free playground, butis really unusual with long slides, two fly foxes, hugeswings, a pirate ship on the water and more. The kidsand the parents had a blast! It was so much fun — andyou wouldn’t believe looking at the skies that it wasbucketing rain as we drove from Adelaide!
Mom’s Holiday Reading — The Read Aloud Handbook
I’ve been reading lots of books this holiday. Among other things (several novels, some science experiment books for kids and things like that), I’ve been re-reading one of my favorite resources, The Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease. I find this book inspiring and I recommend it to anyone who has children whether you homeschool them or not. It gives so many amazing statistics, facts, and real-life examples about why...
Solitaire Math Game
LD enjoyed this game — this one from Games for Math byPeggy Kaye. It’s set up like a game of solitaire, but in thisversion LD had to find pairs whose sum equalled 10 (5/5,8/2, or the 10 card) The jacks, queens and kings wereremoved.
Human Body
While ED and DD painted, LD wanted to workon his body — no weight lifting involved! He laydown on the paper and I did a rough outline ofhis body. Then he put together the bone puzzlefrom a book that Grams gave us.
Organs
We looked at the organs in the human body in thebook that Grams gave us and I penciled them inlightly on outline pictures of the kids’ bodies (bythis time DD wanted her outline done — and thenED immediately lay down on the paper and wantedhers done too!) I suggested to LD that he colorthe organs in (the book had them colored). Heoutlined them instead. DD and ED spent a lot...
Our Thankful Tree
We’ve been reading, learning and doing activities relatedto (American) Thanksgiving this week. I found a tree thatlights up at the discount store (Mad Harry’s, which soundslike it’s like the “Dollar Tree” I always hear about online). Anyway, this week I printed out some leaves on differentcolored paper. The kids had to think about what theywere thankful for. Each day I wrote down one or two oftheir ideas on a leaf...
Thanksgiving Activities — Learning about Native Americans
Living where we do, our kids really don’t hear orlearn much about Native Americans. (On the otherhand, we have learned a lot on Aboriginal culture.)Anyway, this week I introduced them to some ofthe Native American tribes (in a VERY basic way). We read The Magic Tree House: Buffalo BeforeBreakfast. We watched the buffalo hunting scenein the movie, Dances With Wolves. And we pulledout some of the Native American items we...
Making Dream Catchers
LD and DD were especially intrigued by the dream catcher.They decided they wanted to make one of their own. Theyeach wrapped yarn around a clothes hanger wire that Ihad shaped into a circle. LD worked very hard (and lateinto the night I might add!) and did his without any parentalhelp. He was very proud of his work. He also tied all theknots on the spider’s web (we haven’t worked much...
Turkey Math Game
The kids have really enjoyed this game this week. I gotthe turkey print outs from mathwire.com . I used somecraft cubes and wrote numbers on the dice 0-5 on twoand 6-11 on the others. It was good practice countingfor my preschooler. I made the spinner using a templateonline which I printed on cardstock and glued on cardboard.I put a brad through (it’s sticking up a bit) and used one ofthe...
Dino Blast Game
The other game we played this week was an odd-evengame called Dino Math Blast also from mathwire.com.The dice were craft cubes. I used blue, green and yellowcubes and wrote the numbers 0-5, 6-11 and 12-17. Thefirst player rolled the die of the color space they werecurrently on. If the number was odd the odd dinosaurmoved ahead one space, if the number was even theeven dinosaur moved ahead. Then it was...
