Spring Series - #4 Dandelions

Outdoor Nature Hour - Spring Series - #4 Dandelions

We have snow (!!!) today so we weren't able to get outside, but I sent the older kids outside to bring some dandelions inside. Fortunately, the kids have eagerly been picking and playing with these smiling flowers the last couple weeks so we have some great pictures to share.
Because it is cold the dandelions were mostly closed when they were brought inside.
But they opened up after spending some time indoors.
We also found some giant dandelion leaves in a neighbor's yard (as I type our neighbors are having TruGreen treat their yard so I guess its farewell to the dandelions). This makes me sad - after seeing these fun pictures at Chocolate on my Cranium I wanted to make dandelion chains with my kids. We'll have to check some nearby parks!
Who can resist blowing a dandelion's seeds?
A large bouquet the girls picked for their dad


Journal pages:

A's

Mine

N's

One day we found this "super" dandelion with an enormous stem and head. Very impressive.

J loves to carry a dandelion in her hand as she plays - too cute!

We also studied dandelions as part of last years Wednesday Flower Study - its always fun to look back at past journal pages.

Spring Series #3 - Spring Bird Study

Outdoor Hour Challenge - Spring Series - #3 Spring Bird Study

For this Bird Study Challenge we didn't do anything special or extra - mostly just continued to notice and listen to birds when we have the opportunity.

We have spent a lot of time lately talking about and listening to birds. My little girls are starting to point them out and get excited to see them. We have been visiting local ponds and a farm where we can see ducks, geese, turkeys, and chickens.

But the bird songs my kids are most familiar with are the ones we hear in our own neighborhood. We sit on the back porch early in the morning to listen to house finches, european starlings, and mourning doves. My kids always stop and put a hand to their ears when they hear the calls of Canada geese, black-billed magpies, or California gulls.

Yesterday we were lucky tohave a Great Horned Owl nest with the mother and 2 babies pointed out to us at some local gardens we were visiting. It has reminded us to go looking for the Great Horned Owls we were able to watch and study last year.

This is a new bird for us and we are working on identifying it:

We have frequently seen it at Thanksgiving Point's Farm Country. When we were there yesterday we noticed a tree with multiple nests in it and we could hear lots of loudly chirping babies waiting for their dinner. The moms and dads were busy coming and going, but we managed to get this quick picture. WhatBird doesn't seem to be working this morning so we'll have to wait for another time. Any ideas?

UPDATE: For some reason I'm not able to view my pictures as larger images - sometimes this happens, but I don't know why. Sorry :(

Shadow Stick

Today we were able to do the shadow stick experiment we read about during our Spring Series Challenge - #2 Spring Weather.

Here is our shadow stick when we first set it up this morning. We cut down a dowel and poked it through a piece of cardboard. A little later we had to place flower pots at each corner to keep it from being blown away.

Starting at 9:00am we marked where the shadow of the dowel ended every 30 minutes until 3:00pm this afternoon.

My kids enjoyed hearing the timer go off and racing to the back porch so they could help mark the shadow. There were also times in between when I could hear A & N discussing how much the shadow had moved since the last time we marked it. I can tell they really enjoyed doing this experiment, and will look forward to doing it again in June, September and December.

Artist Study - Finishing up Picasso

Its time to move on to a new artist - Vincent Van Gogh coming up! - but first we needed to finish Pablo Picasso. I let the kids pick one of the pictures we have studied over the last couple months and then had them do a reproduction of it. While we spend some time learning about the artist's life, the point of our Artist Study is to be able to recognize the artist's work. So this is like our final exam for Pablo Picasso. A's - Still Life with Bulls Head, 1958
N's - Child Playing with a Toy Truck , 1953
See how focused and peaceful O is coloring beside A & N? Such a deceptive sight.

Here she is after I was pulled away to answer a phone call (Hello Amelia!) - marker all over her face and arms, eating the cinnamon & sugar for toast. She probably had some butter too. Thankfully J was napping or I shudder to think what would have happened.

P.S. My sweet N is a major perfectionist and shed multitudes of tears over things in her picture she thinks are wrong. She didn't want me taking pictures or sharing them, so if you have a moment, please leave a kind word for her and A - thank you!

Foreign Country - India

A couple weeks ago we pulled out our map and I let A (He & N take turns) pick our next foreign country to learn about - INDIA! I was expecting this pick because India has been featured in the last couple books we have been listening to (A Little Princess & Jungle Books I & II).

I thought I would share some of what we have been doing and will be doing to learn more about India.

I start by looking at the country on our world map - there are always important places and cities to learn about listed on the country. We look these up at Wikipedia or in our book, Atlas of the World. Here is our list for India - its pretty short right now, but we will be adding to it as we learn more about India:

New Delhi - capital

Delhi

Bangalore

Calcutta
Himalayas

Western/Eastern Ghats
Great Indian Desert
Deccan Plateau
Ganges River

I make a notebook page with a world map, continent map, and country map on it. The kids color India on the world & continent maps. We use the country map to map out the cities & places as we learn about them.

Next stop, library website & home library - these can be fables or a book that features something special about the country, or non-fiction books or a cookbook. As we are reading I make note of vocabulary, animals, activities the characters do, etc. that we will discuss in more detail.

The Story of Little Babaji - pancakes with lots of ghi (butter), character names were changed from author's original names to more Indian names (Black Sambo to Little Babaji), Tigers in India

When Agnes Caws - ornithologist, Himalayas, Pink-headed duck (doesn't that duck just sound fascinating? I want to see one!)

Once a Mouse - hermit, peacocked, fable, Tigers in India

Sailing Home - cargo, China Sea, Indian Ocean

As I mentioned we have also been reading about India in The Jungle Books, and we also have a book of fables from Asia that had a story in it from India - "The Son of the Ogress."

I also make up a notebook page for the story books. The kids can write about the stories or draw a picture from each of the stories. Here is N's:

I also recently picked up a fabulous cookbook at Costco - Around the World in 450 Recipes. It has an entire section of recipes from India. I'll look through it and see which ones I might possibly convince my kids to taste, and which ones won't be too much of a challenge to make, and which ones I can find all the necessary ingredients for, and hopefully there will be 2 or 3 we can try. Also in our home library, we have Wee Sing Around the World CD & book. There are a couple songs from India, and it looks like we will even spend some time memorizing on of them.

Next stop, Netflix & home movie library -

India: Kingdom of the Tiger
Disney's Jungle Book
Chuck Jones Collection - includes Rikki Tikki Tavi, Mowgli's Brothers, & The White Seal and has some stories not by Rudyard Kipling (Cricket in Times Square)
Bride & Prejudice - Don't laugh!! We just happen to have this movie (obsessive Jane Austen fan that I am), and I plan on showing the kids some of the dancing scenes.
Two Brothers - I think this is actually about Tigers in China, but it is a favorite movie here and any talk about Tigers means we need to watch this movie again.

I wasn't planning on doing more movies, but I was a little disappointed with India: The Kingdom of the Tiger. It focused more on the conservation movement to protect the Tigers, which is informational and an excellent movement, but didn't really give the depth of information about Tigers that I was hoping for, and I'm not sure man-eating Tigers is the direction I wanted their Tiger-education to go in. So its back to Netflix to look around.

Now that we have our resources listed, we will spend some time each week discussing the important cities & places, adding them to our individual maps, as well as finding more stories about India and perhaps watching some more movies.

January - June 2010 School Plans

I've come to the realization that I am not going to get all my links updated under my curriculum heading on the sidebar. So I decided to do one post with everything. You will notice I have simplified many of the subjects we are studying. For now, our plans are to keep going right up until our new baby comes around the beginning of July, but I might also decide to have a little vacation time right before the baby comes too.

Daily Subjects:

*Pledge of Allegiance

*School Motto - this, and the pledge, the kids recite together or by themselves. We aren't very formal.

*Math - We use Math-U-See

*Reading - I only have the kids read on their own if they don't read very much with our other subjects, and I let them pick the book they are going to read. They also read with us during family scriptures so I try not to overload them - especially Nyah as she isn't very fluent yet and gets easily discouraged.

*Copywork - I use things I can find as free downloads, right now we are doing "The Voice of Spring" which was a free download at Homeschool Freebie.

*Chapter Book - right now we are listening to The Jungle Book & The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, unabridged original edition. This includes the story of Mowgli, as well as Rikki Tikki Tavi, Toomai of the Elephants, and others.

Weekly Subjects:

*Bible - This year (2010) we are studying the Old Testament. We are using this "Discover the Old Testament" study guide.

*History - We are reading "The Story of the World" Volume 2: The Middle Ages. We were struggling with our original plans for this school year, so when I was able to pick up a couple of these books for $5 each we switched to the one that is closest to the time period we were studying. I read a section of a chapter and the kids do their history journals - draw a picture from our reading and tell me back the story. I am looking for a way to put our timeline on the wall instead of having it in a notebook so it will be easier to remember to do.

*Literature - We are still reading from American Tall Tales, Little Pilgrim's Progress, and A Children's Treasury of Mythology. For poetry we started reading from The Oxford Book of Story Poems. We are also reading the Felicity American Girl books for Nyah's Liberty Girl's club.

*Nature Study/Science - We continue to do the weekly challenges posted at the blog "Handbook of Nature Study." We have also started studying astronomy with Exploring Creation with Astronomy. This is one of those books in the news lately in the old creationism vs. intelligent design vs. evolution vs. whatever debates. I don't want to get into it, but will say that I try to present my personal views, as well as a rounded view of what other people believe. After all, no one really KNOWS anything for certain. We are still using Backyard Scientist for our science experiments, but we've slowed down because the astronomy book has hands-on activities and experiments to go with each chapter. We are also still reading Pagoo - we only read part of a chapter each week so it is slow going.

*Geography - We are still reading and mapping Tree in the Trail - here is a link to my last post which has the links I use for this book. We also just started a new foreign country - India. We are using library picture books to learn folk tales from India, documentaries from netflix, and an old-fashioned world map. I let the kids pick which country we are going to study and I think with listening to A Little Princess and the Jungle Books they have had India on their mind.

*Composer Study - Instead of studying a specific composer right now, we are learning about the Orhcestra. We are using a few library books to do this: The Story of the Orchestra, A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, and The Story of the Incredible Orchestra. Next I am thinking of focusing on the story "Peter and the Wolf" before we go back to learning about specific composers. I guess we could just do Sergei Prokofiev.

*Artist Study - We are finishing up Picasso, and will be starting on Vincent Van Gogh next.

Spring Series #2 - April 2010

Outdoor Hour Challenges - Spring Series #2 - Spring Weather Observation

Winter Weather - 2/17/10

Autumn Weather - 10/30/09

We looked up our sunrise & sunset times at http://www.sunrisesunset.com/, and calculated we now have approximately 13 hours of daylight. You can get a monthly calendar for your city here.

We have had a wide range of spring weather . . .

Snow, rain, hale, sunshine, clouds, and lots of wind!!

Today is a sunshiney, breezy day - the kids have been so excited to be able to be outside so much. My little's are throwing tantrums when it is time to come in :(

We plan on putting together a shadow stick as described in the Handbook of Nature Study (pg. 852, #13), but we are waiting for our next trip to the store and then all we'll need is another sunny day!

UPDATE: We did the shadow stick on April 26, 2010.

Spring Series #1 - April 2010

Outdoor Hour Challenges - Spring Series #1 - Spring Tree Observation

Fall Tree Study - 9/2009

Winter Tree Study - 1/2010

I loved the quote Barb used when she posted the challenge on her blog, Handbook of Nature Study, and want to share it here:

"Like a friend is a tree, in that it needs to be known season after season and year after year in order to be fully appreciated. A person who has not had an intimate, friendly acquaintance with some special tree has missed something from like."

-Anna Botsford Comstock, A Study of a Tree

It made me to think about the favorite trees from my past. Climbing, swinging, making tree houses, and lots of falling. Being 6 months pregnant I am not going to be climbing any trees in the near future.

A's Tree, with A in the background fighting off imaginary enemies with a giant screw he found in the empty lot behind us.

New buds

A's journal page-

N's tree. This is also my tree, but I haven't had an opportunity to do my journal page.

Coming soon - new leaves!

She was so excited to find a bug on her tree, especially one she had just learned about on a field trip to a local garden center. The boxelder bug is a "bad bug" and was flicked off the tree (onto the 3 year old who was not so excited to meet it).

N's journal page-