A couple of weeks ago, my hubbie had his birthday! The girls and I took him off on a fun birthday adventure to The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Michigan! It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining and the weather was cool but not cold! We got to see SO many amazing things. From history to industry to transportation! There was a lot of cool pieces in this museum and if you ever have a chance to get there to check it out you should! I think one of the coolest thing was being able to see so many houses at the Village from famous people. We saw Webster’s House (you know…..he wrote the dictionary) and Robert Frost’s House, and Thomas Edison’s Workshop and the first places he installed electricity (this was a nice follow up to a trip we took to see Thomas Edison birthplace in the spring)! The girls, I think, thought that the Oscar Meyer Weiner Mobile was cool! My hubbie was really interested in seeing the original generators that Thomas Edison used! It was a great day for everyone…….at least until the end when our feet were killing us!
Today we went to a homeschool class at that amazing Lego place in our town. They are having classes that teach kids science, math, and technology concepts through hands on lego building! Super fun, super easy, and super Bunny! She was so excited about this. Today they were learning about gravity and force while making a marble run. The goal was to build a run that was 30 inches long and used gravity to move the marble down the track. Bunny worked really hard and she didn’t quite make 30 inches, but she did a fabulous job! My brothers joined up for the class, and they did a great job too! V. got his marble run to go 40 inches, and N. have about 5 different turns on his! They loved it and had fun learning! Here are some pictures from their marble discovery!
So I have been MIA again, sorry. Our work of late has been pretty hit and miss due to lots going on! Plus I have been scrapbooking a lot which takes up a lot of my computer time. But we are still here, still making discoveries, and still happy! So what is new with all of you? I would love to hear what you have been up to!
Today was such a beautiful day that my friend and I decided to take the kids to the zoo. Now as a good homeschooler, I really needed to make sure that we had some educational fun. So I told the girls that they needed to find the animals from North America while we explored! Bunny was to take pictures of them and then we could make an animal page for our north America study later on. (yes I am still promising a post on that, but another day)!. We saw all sorts of cool stuff. We got to watch the otter’s feeding, the polar bear cubs playing, and the hippos actually moving around! Plus some ducks even ate right from out hands! It was a great day at the zoo! Here are some pictures…..ok maybe a lot of pictures!
So that was pretty much what we did all day! 😉 I hope that you are enjoying the beautiful cooler weather too! I love this time of year! It is such a great time to be outside. Happy Fall Y’all!
PS. Sorry about the sideways pictures. For some reason when I put them into wordpress, they are getting rotated back. Hmmmm…..looks like a techie problem.
Well today we had the unique experience of walking with Wallabies at our zoo! Today was the opening day of a special Australia exhibit that included a group of wallabies that were free walking. It was an amazing day for it and the girls loved it!
I love that we are able to visit the zoo and the girls are really able to see animals from all over the world! It is one thing to see a picture of an animal, its another to see one in real life. To see the way a wallaby hops and the three toes on their back feet that are one, and to see the small joey is a world of information that they cant get in a picture. The cane see the look in their eye, the way they eat, and the way they interact with the other wallabies in the group! It is such a special thing to really observe animals in real life and I for one love to make it happen for the girls. We aren’t able to travel the world and see all the diversity. However, taking these small moments to really experience bits of this great world for real can make all the difference. This is going to be one of our main goals for the next school year! To see, explore, and fall in love with the world! But more on that in another post!
What do you like to do to help your kids explore the world?
Also, I am a part of the Top 25 Homeschool Blogger Vote! That means I need your votes! Please take a moment to vote for me and some of the other amazing bloggers there!
Well this is it! I am officially here to let you know that our school year is over! Ok…for right now! 😉 I have grand plans for an ocean study before we head there on vaction, but for all intensive purposes we are all done! This week we wrapped up our botany lessons by talking about flowers! Honestly it was a really fun lesson and great way to end the year! Bunny loved it and so did Pup! We even threw in a field trip to the Botanical Gardens! Bunny really seemed to absorb all the information that she needed to. We started off by talking about the parts of a flower. I was so excited to have received a beautiful boquet of flowers for Mothers Day. It had Lilys, Crsanthimums, roses, and carnations. It was the perfect way to explore all different kinds of flowers. We started with lily since it is the perfect flower to see the all the parts. After we diseceted the flower, Pup matched the parts of the flower to the nomenclature cards. Bunny and I labled them and added the parts of the the pistil and the stamen. Bunny really like this and we ended up dissecting about 6 flowers! While Bunny was working on the flowers we were able to talk about the different kinds of flowers, like the compound flower and the perfect flower, since we were working with so many different varieties.
The next day, I pulled out some q-tips to tlk about pollination of flowers and what flowers are for! The idea came from here and the q-tip was colored yellow to represent the bee. We then moved the bee from flower to flower to show how the pollen needs to move from flower to flower. The girls loved this. We talked about how the pollen travels down the pistil to form a new seed. It was fun to “see” how this happened. I was able to go out to our garden and see the overy of the daffidols swollen up and the flower dead after it was pollonated. We also cut one open to see the seeds starting to form. Don’t you love it when the perfect learning materials are right where you need them?
We ended the study with a trip to the botanical gardens! There wasn’t too much in bloom yet since the bulbs are mostly done and the preneinals are just getting planted, but there was tons of great stuff to look at! We had some friends join us which always makes it more fun! 🙂
Here is our friend discovering a robin’s nest in the tree! There were eggs! We quickly left after that, but I did manage to grab a picture! 🙂
As you can see we had a great time! With their interest in the flowers we managed to cover quite a lot our Botany album in a very short amount of time. It was a really fun way to learn and play at the same time! Happy Schooling (and almost summer)! I linking up over at the Weekly Kids Co-Op, Virtual Montessori Fair, and The Ultimate Homeschool Link Up!
PS: As you can see, I am still having some issues working out the pictures! I promise to get it worked out soon! 🙂
Today we got together with our friend for a fun day in the woods and the sun! There was lots of running, laughing, smiles. and talking. Some climbing, and new things tried. And there was some little fish that got names during the picnic lunch! It was a beautiful day and wonderful way to spend a spring day!
Digging for fossiles
Here is Pup “reading” this sign. She said the sound of each letter she saw!
Look at how close this squirrel got while we were in the bird blind.
Feeding Fish
Playing with the Puppets
This underground tunnel was hit!
Well….Bunny was not amused by my camera! 🙂
Here are the fish the kids names while they ate lunch. One was named Puffy and one Longy. 🙂 They kept coming back to see their new friends!
Today we found a true education gem in out area! It is a center that is has bin upon bins of Legos, Duplos, and Knex! For $5 an hour, the girls can come and build to their hearts content with thousands of legos! And play we DID! The girls had SO MUCH fun! We will definitely be going back soon! Bunny said we should do a family day and have dad come too! Plus we found out they have summer camps. Here is some of the fun the girls had there today!
So that was our fun today! It was a great day of fun and playtime with the girls! Simple happy fun! 🙂 I hope you have a wonderful weekend!
Today we started off with some school time and both girls started the day by creating things with pipe cleaners. Bunny made a butterfly with woven wings! It was really pretty. Pup made a… you guessed it….cheetah! She then wanted to read more books. We did and then I asked her where she thought we could find out more about cheetahs, she suggested that we could see the two at our zoo! I told her she was right and asked what she thought she could find out. She wanted to know their names and what they eat in the zoo. She also suggested that we could talk to a zookeeper to find out. So…we packed up and headed to the zoo since it was sunny outside (cold, but finally sunny)! I wasnt sure what we would see since it was so cold out, but we luckily saw a lot of great animals! While we watched the cheetahs, we werent able to find the answers she was looking! So I thought we would find some people, but it turned out harder to do then we thought. We finally found someone at the Administration Office who called up to the zoo librarian. The librarian was more then happy to help us out! She found the names of the cheetahs, called up to the zoo educators to find out if they eat live food in the exhibit, and how old the cheetahs were. She also gave me her number so we can set something up next time! Hooray! Pup was there with me to ask the questions (even though she was too shy to do it). And I think that we learned alot! We found out that the cheetahs are about 10 years old, that they are both males that are brothers, and that they dont get live food to eat (they do occasionally get a squirrel that finds its way into the exhibit). Their names are Amani and Moja. It was a great trip and a wonderful start to helping the girls understand how to find information in the real world from experts. We also got to see alot of other things too and the girls had a really great time!
I forget how very fun going out can be and how much the girls can learn. Today we may not have found alot of information about cheetahs, but we did learn how to get out into the world and how to ask experts our questions to find answers. In the real world, to be able to find information is more important then knowing everything! Not only that, but we also got to see a real cheetah. There is so much value in a child being able to really see something that they are studying. They can see the claws, the eyes, the way the animal moves, the way he eats, plays, and where they live. I think that they can learn and solidify what they have learned by seeing things in real life! This is what Maria Montessori called the extended classroom and she was right is saying that this is just as important as working in the classroom!
What do you like to do with your kids to get them learning outside the home?
Today we were headed down to do some school, but my mom called and asked if we wanted to go sledding! Well who wants to say no? It was a beautiful day and with the couple of inches a day for the past few days, it was a great time to get out there! We ended up being the only people on the hill and it was great! Bunny wanted to know why there werent other people there since it was such a good day to go sledding. I told her it was because everyone else was in school! Somedays it is the best to be homeschooled!
It was a great way to spend a morning! Everyone was so exhausted after a good hour and a half, that we never did get around to school work! Oh well, we will hit the book tomorrow! Happy Schooling!
Well, as I am sure you noticed, I have been rather busy! This doesnt leave me with much time for blogging! Christmas sewing, online shopping, party planning, you get the idea! On top of that, we are heading into a great space theme study that I have been prepping for! We have however, been working along here! Do you want to see some pictures of what we have been up? Here is a bunch of thing we have done this week!
Grammar Farm
Pup did some more pin punching.
I love this series of pictures! Pup was so happy that she was able to trace the blue part! 🙂
Mirror washing
Nuts and bolts
Tangrams
Pup and I also counted the number rods. We picked a number tile and she counted the rods to find the right one! She LOVED it! We did all of them and then we built it into a stair and layed the tiles against them! After we had finished, she told me she had to write her math down! 🙂 So her did and the results blew me away! She really did write her numbers down and she drew the rods too!
Plus I finally started the music bell work! We started off by matching the bells by sound. Pup LOVED it, Bunny was disappointed because she thought we were going to learn to play music in one day! 😉 I told her it took time before we could do that. I think she will love it as we go!
We also started some space work! I did the universe presentation from Karen Tyler albums and we also made the universe project! It was a bit of an epic fail, but after a couple of trys (and a TON of glitter) we finally got it to mostly work. The girls really did love it! Their universes are in a place of honor on their tables!
We also got to go to the Fire Station this week! We started our field trip with a story about fireman. Next we were off to explore all the trucks and rescue vehicles! It was so much fun! One of our homeschool mom’s husband is a fireman and he got to share his love of firetrucks with the kids! Plus they got see another mom in full fire gear! It was shocking for the kids at first, but the firefighters really want the kids to realize that if they are ever in a fire, the firefighter coming to find them will not look or sound like a person. This way they know! The rule is if you are in a fire and see a fireman, give him a hug! It was a great way to start talking about fire safety, which we did this week too!
So there we have it! What a busy, fun and happy week! Stop back in the next day or so to see some trays and what we are going to be up to this week! Happy Schooling!
