Homeschooling, Tinker Toys and Lower-case a's...

Today we covered quite a bit.  We read some of Aesop's Fables, along with some classic rhymes and poems for children.  We worked with our linker cubes as a math manipulative and I introduced the concept of percentages using the cubes.  We built a contraption with tinker toys, we are unsure of exactly what it was but agreed that the spinning fans were cool...that's good enough for me!


We took apart and put together the foam map of the United States, and discussed all of the people we know that live in different places around the country.  Logan worked with upper and lower case A's, and was very excited to form a few really good lower case letters.  We will continue to work on the letters in short lessons, which I am finding are much better as anything frustrating gets lost if pushing them to keep at it when you see they are no longer enjoying it.

I am continually amazed at the amount of questions and desire kids have to learn.  A day does not go by that we don't stumble upon something really interesting to research, and discuss questions as to the "why" of things.  Watching an "ah-ha" moment unfold, and see how quickly your child is able to then move forward with their new comprehension or mastery of a skill just reinforces the approach our family has chosen for our children's education.

August 23, 2011

Today Logan classified bugs by color and if the bug could crawl or fly (or both).  We discussed the protective shell many insects have as natural form of protection against predators.  We used the Busy Bugs Learning Set.

We worked on opposite concepts again and read aloud together the words at the bottom of each card.

After watching our sprouting beans continue to grow in our kitchen window, we were inspired to read Jack and The Beanstalk.  I must admit it has been quite a few years since I read that book and it is fairly violent by today's standards for what children read.  Then again it's nothing compared to much of what is on TV and video games.  We agreed that Jack indeed has other options besides lying and stealing in which to provide food for his family.

The question of nocturnal animals came up and we researched nocturnal animals online.  Logan realized the noisy up-all-night rats we have (Patsy and Cookie) are nocturnal.  Luckily, they reside in Mandy's room. We studied the Tarsier from Southeast Asia (it looks like a bug-eyed lemur with frog-like feet) which is nocturnal and kind of cute and a bit creepy at the same time.  In addition to learning about sharks and what wasps eat.