World Travels: Australia

G'day Mate!

Our last adventure was very dry in the desert, but this time we found ourselves wet, wet, wet! We landed our balloon in Australia. Not on the western side, because that is mostly desert and we had just come from one of those. We landed on the eastern side of the country where most of the people live. Did you know that Australia is a country and a continent?

We met a visitor to the eastern shore, Adam. He was about to head out into the water to explore the Great Barrier Reef. Adam invited us to go with him and we couldn't resist. We rode with him on a boat to get to the reef.

We snorkeled in the water. It is kind of like swimming with a giant straw in your mouth so you can keep breathing while you swim. Delbert took a huge breath and swam 35 feet under the surface to see the sharks, but I liked staying near the top. The sharks in the reef were very friendly and safe to swim with. We saw a lot of beautiful and big fish. After a while a deadly water snake came along and we all had to get out of the water. 

We had a great time exploring with Adam. We even found some itty bitty fish toys to play with as we float away to our next great adventure. See you then!

Mister's own dad went to this country so we already have some fun stuff to play with. We have a bull whip, an alligator skin bracelet, and a boomerang. We are still getting a fun goody for him too though and we are sticking to our squinkie theme because he just loves them and he uses the zinkies a lot for math. He will also get to hear lots of stories from his daddy's trip. We will only have our Amazon Prime membership for 1 more week, so we may not get any videos in. He will have a blast tossing the boomerang around and hearing lots of stories though.

The picture this month is from here: http://madasamarinebiologist.com/post/35278601428/scinerds-coral-autopsy-reveals-great-barrier
Poor Adam didn't get a single good shot on his trip of the reef.

The Great Outdoors

School day in a bag

What better place to do school than outside? On Friday we were able to do that for the first time this year. It felt great. Plus I let Mister run laps around the house between subjects. It helped him to keep moving and fit in some extra Phy Ed time at the same time. I like to kill 2 birds with 1 stone when I can.

Now that spring is finally here, fellow northerners know what I'm saying, we are switching up our daily routine. I know that the summer will be hot and we will be trapped in my bedroom with the AC on during the afternoons. That is prime school time. So we are going to do all of our outdoor activity in the morning  have lunch, then hit the books. So far it is working out great. By the time we hit school time Mister is ready to be quiet and sit for a while. Tucker likes it too because he has been going on lots of doggie-dog walks (yes we really do talk like that at our house).

Word Time

When we bought the Perplexus ball I talked about yesterday, we also got Bananagrams since we had a coupon. I wasn't sure about doing it with Little Guy, but figured why not. We played the Banana Smoothie variation (where you start out with all your tiles and just build words) and he picked up on it very well. He mentioned that it would be a great game for school...great idea honey, I never considered that (he he he).

He really likes the word cat, he used it 3 times. I should mention that I did not help him with any of the spelling.

Testing and Toys

Add caption

Our state requires standardized testing for homeschooled kids. Many moms complain about it, but I love it! We took Mister for his test this month and we were thrilled with the results! It makes me feel great to see he is doing well and advanced for his age. I also feel confident that I am doing a good job of teaching him and on the right track. Now, if he was going with public school, he would have been in preschool this year because of his late birthday and wouldn't be going to kindergarten till next year. We are homeschooling kindergarten though. 

He took the Peabody test and did fantastic. He ranked in the 81st percentile for his age. His test results ranked him at a 1st grade level overall. I am most excited that he is reading at a 1st grade level! Reading is very important to me.

We were so excited about his fantastic results that we got him a special reward, a Perplexus ball. The woman who tested him has the whole collection, except the one we got, and Mister wanted one so bad. He earned it too! This maze ball has been a big hit and he has spent hours on end working on it. He has yet to reach the end but still loves it.

Bean Growth

Now that it is spring, we have finally begun learning about seeds. This is happening inside of course since we have a high risk of snow here in Minnesota.

Here are our beans (3) the day we planted them. The baby food jar has about an inch of water (do not allow them to be completely submerged as it stunts the growth) and the center is full of paper towel.

This is at 1 week. The leaves were straight up in the air the next day and there are lots of  roots.

This is just 2 weeks and 2 days. We transferred them to dirt and now the experimentation can begin.

If we go from left to right on the plants above, the first will get sun and light, the second only sun, and the third only water. We are also charting their growth. The experiment is supposed to go 1 month, so we will see how they fare till then.

World Travels: Saudi Arabia

Hello!

This month we landed somewhere very hot! We landed at the edge of an ocean of sand called The Empty Quarter in Saudi Arabia. We met an Arab boy named Fadil. He came with his camel to see our balloon. 

Fadil brought us to his home at Al-Khamasin. There were even more camels there because this is an important area of the country for raising them. We visited with Fadil's family and told them about our adventures so far. They told us some wonderful folk tales from Saudi Arabia. 

When it was time to leave, Fadil gave us a book to read during our long days of flying in our balloon, 1001 Arabian Nights. We can't wait to read some more of their fantastic folk tales! 

Till next month,

The photo from this month is from this site: http://americanbedu.com/2011/11/02/saudi-arabia-how-empty-is-the-%E2%80%9Cempty-quarter%E2%80%9D/

This month I decided to browse some goodies and let them inspire the month. Mister has developed a love for Squinkies and when I saw this Aladdin themed set (which is also not ultra girly, yay) I knew I needed to look into Saudi Arabia. 

The middle east is a rocky topic for many people, but they are still people just like us and with interesting geography. We shouldn't let the bad news broadcasts sway our thinking of an entire people group. They never share the good things happening in a country after all. Soooo anyway...back to geography...

Our goodies this month are the Squinkie set shown above and a Children's version of Arabian Nights.

I also found this show that is free to watch with Amazon Prime, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations which has an episode on cuisine from Saudi Arabia. We will probably have to watch the Disney Aladdin too.

I would love to hear what you added to your Saudi Arabian studies this month! Just share in the comments.

Historical Napkins

We enjoyed the Living Long Ago book that came with our Sonlight curriculum. It often has fun little activities to tie in with what you are learning. This was one such day.

We learned about dinner parties in the 1800's and the book showed us how to fold napkins. It was so easy and I was able to use this new found knowledge to thoroughly impress some dinner guests of my own not long after. Who says only the kids are learning in a homeschool?

100th Day

The 100th day of school was a whole week ago. As my computer gets worse, it is harder to get posts up. We are looking at a replacement, but have not decided yet. Back to the topic at hand...

Happy 100 day!

We did 100 everything! It was nice to have a little break in the monotony that our classroom can sometimes be. Here is what we did by subject:

• Math: Sort 100 shapes into groups of 5 for skip counting practice
• Science: 100 drops of water experiment
• Reading: read 100 words
• Reader: Ready, Set, 100 Days (free with Kindle lender's library)
• Art: Use the 100 shapes to make a picture
• Bible: read psalm 100
• Also: made 100 day glasses, listed 100 people Mister knows, and had a 100 lunch

You can find some of the activities in my homeschool board on pintrest (I am crazyelephant). Sadly my computer is dying so I can't get the links up.

Volcano!

On Tuesday we read The Magic School Bus Blows it's top. Thursday we crafted our own volcano and Friday we set it to erupt.

Sculpy on a formed pie tin make the volcano. Baking soda, a few drops of red food coloring, and vinegar make the eruption.

What to do with a clay volcano? We filled the center with polyfil and glued it to a piece of felt. Add some cut up red felt and you have yourself an instant volcano play set!

World Travels: Ireland

Hello!

The wind blew us to Ireland this month! We landed at the Cliffs of Moher. The cliffs overlook the Atlantic Ocean. There were so many birds! The sea birds make their homes in the cliff face.

While we were in Ireland we learned all about Saint Patrick. He was brought to Ireland as a slave, escaped, and then came back to share his love of Jesus with the Irish people. It is an exciting story from the history of Ireland and Christianity. 

We had a lot of fun exploring this beautiful island and found a lucky four leaf clover. We look forward to sharing our next stop with you too!

If you are sharing with your kiddos this month, it is perfect timing! Ireland is a great topic for March and learning about St. Patrick. Here are some things we will be doing to add depth to our letter...

The Cliffs of Moher has a fantastic website, complete with virtual tour. I plan to do that with little guy and this is the address: http://www.cliffsofmoher.ie/default.aspx

I am ordering a fun clover cutter as his special gift. At $8.63  (on Amazon) it is still far less than the $15 I was spending on Little Passports, in case any of you are keeping track. We will use it to make quesadillas for St Patrick's day with green tortillas, of course.

We will be reading about St. Patrick in I Heard Good News Today which was a part of our Sonlight curriculum. We use this book sparingly as Little Guy doesn't like to read it much.

Man V Wild has an Ireland episode, SCORE! We did one of these with the Guatemala lesson and  Little Guy still talks about Guatemala. It really brought the lesson to life for him, so I will use these as much as I can!

I hope you are all enjoying my World Travels series so far! We certainly are. If you would love to see a favorite country or share a country you have visited, let me know in the comments section. The next 3 months are covered and then any locale is fair game!

Floating Peanuts

Water + baking soda + vinegar + Peanuts = Floating
Yeah, so what's happening? Well, peanuts do not normally float, let me get another cup with just water in it.  Okay, so sometimes they float and sometimes they sink. What are you trying to show me?

Here, let me add the baking soda and vinegar to the plain water with peanuts...
water + peanuts + baking soda + vinegar = Ohhhhhh!
Order matters...you learn something new every day, even when you are a mom!
This went with our Magic School Bus Gets Baked in a Cake book for science.

Lots of Learning

We had a great homeschool week! This is the windmill generator that Mister got with his World Travels letter. He put it together with his Daddy during "boy night". They had a blast with it!

Jayne finished All About Reading Level 1! After a long hard think, I decided to give Alpha Phonics a try as our next level. Mister seems to really like it and I was able to get it for free from the Kindle Prime lenders library. We loved AAR, but it is very slow paced and Alpha Phonics will end with him at a 2nd-3rd grade reading level. He is looking forward to the many Boxcar Children and Magic Tree House books we plan to spend the saved money on.

He drew a picture of how he felt about my having covered his face in stickers!

Adam got a chance to read to Mister on Friday, giving me a vocal break. This book really sucks our  Little  Guy in! It is Usborne's Time Traveler. They read 10 pages!  I usually cut him off at 6 because I know I need my voice for all the other subjects. I expect that I am going to have quite the reader when he has the skills.

Little Guy Cooks

We decided that it would be fun for Little Guy to be in charge of a meal every week. Yes, he is 5. Kids will reach as high as you set the bar, so why put a limit on their abilities? He surprised me! I thought for sure he was going to want to make corn dogs or something. Instead he decided to make a soup in the crock pot, selecting all the ingredients on his own.

Little guy scrubbed the potatoes and carrots (we always leave the skins on) and plucked the leaves off the broccoli. These are the 3 fresh veggies he chose for his soup.

Putting ingredients into the crock pot.

Soup is ready.

He even made Jello Jigglers for desert!

His soup had:

1 potato

2 carrots

1 head of broccoli

1 can cream of mushroom soup

1 8oz bag of shredded mozzarella

1/2 box shell noodles

Probably 10 cups of water (that is a nearly full 8 quart crock pot)

Things he learned from his cooking day:

• Noodles should not be in a crock pot for 8 hours. They practically dissolved.
• If you make a big meal, it can last more than 1 week. He made enough for 3 meals!
• Crock pots are very easy to cook in.

World Travels: The Netherlands

Hello!

We flew to the most amazing place this month! I said, "Delbert, we have to land there and see what that is!" Below the ground was striped with every color of the rainbow, reds, blues, yellows and more. What could have possibly caused these fantastic stripes?

When we landed, Delbert and I saw that they were giant fields of Tulips. The were so beautiful and there were so many! In the distance we could see a tall windmill. It did not look like the white, sleek windmills we are used to in the USA. We had landed in The Netherlands. The family that runs the farm brought us a picnic lunch with tasty Edam cheese and homemade bread. Yum! 

We will talk to you again next month!

Image via pintrest. Original link: http://katieinluxembourg.blogspot.com/2011/04/saturday-1530.html

This month is all about The Netherlands, mostly because little guy wants to know more about the place we are considering making our home. There are some really amazing shots of the fields if you want to share more with your kiddos, on pintrest. Just search: The Netherlands Tulips.

I am ordering this windmill kit as our gift from Delbert and Dinah. Cost is  currently $9.56 which is way under the $15 we spent on Little Passports before. I got it here: http://www.amazon.com/Green-Science-Windmill-Generator-Toysmith/dp/B0016PBH9Q/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1360375777&sr=8-7&keywords=windmill

Burt Wolf Holland and Belgium is a very nice tour of the area and is available on Amazon Prime. I recommend  previewing any documentaries you show your kids before showing them. Amsterdam is very well known for it's less family oriented virtues, but this video shows all there is to truly love about the country, including some interesting history. 

e2 design Season 2, Ep. 5 "Adaptive Reuse in the Netherlands"

is another interesting Documentary about architecture. We won't be watching it again with little guy, because e2 is just not his cup of tea.

Castle-rific!

 It was a castle-rific school week at our house! We have been reading the first section of Usborne Book's Time Traveler, which is all about Baron Godfrey, his castle, and the lifestyle of the time. Jayne came up with a great project to keep all thoughts on castles...make the Baron's castle in Minecraft! We started on Monday by drawing out plans for our large scale project. For those of you who are not familiar with Minecraft, you mine the supplies you need and build by laying 1 block at a time. We are all able to enter the same game on our separate Kindles (or any tablet nearby) and it became a great family project. There are also block zombies, creepers, skeletons, and spiders that can get us as we try to build this massive monument, as shown on Little Guy's yellow draft paper.

 I also surprised him with Angry bird printables since we are ahead of schedule on our normal work I thought I would let him switch it up a bit. He loved them and is still talking about them even though we finished them up on Tuesday. I got them at homeschoolcreations.net!

Minecraft tour:
It is not quite finished in the photos, but you can get the idea...
In this shot you can see the view from the top of the castle. There is an inner wall and an outer wall. In the distance, between the trees, is a series of entrance gates and a ditch with "draw bridge".

Here you can see the castle. It is 4 floors and is on the other side of the inner wall that you can see the doors to here. You can also see Jayne building a tree house out of the tree to the left (not part of the original castle).

Here are my guys working hard. It took a lot of teamwork, but it was sure fun!

Freetime Unlimited

Little Guy got a Kindle for Christmas. It is going to be an essential tool for our homeschool abroad  One of my favorite parts is an app only available on the new generation of Kindles, Kindle Freetime. I love it! You can set it up to only have the books, videos, and apps you want each child to have. You can set it up for each child, so they all have the materials that are right for them. You can also set up timers. You can set it for overall screen time or you can set up time by category. We currently have ours set at unlimited for books, 1 hours for videos, and 1 hour for apps. This has been an incredible app on Little Guy's new Kindle and we are so happy to be able to have and use it.

Amazon thought this wasn't enough, so they created Freetime Unlimited. For a low monthly fee, your kiddo has access to tons of apps, videos, and books that are appropriate for ages 3-8. There is a lot to choose from and you can only find some of it by doing a search. It includes some really great educational materials in all categories. It also contains a lot of fluff, more than I would like.

Little Guy has enjoyed exploring all the content, but filled his Kindle by the second week. There is so much on there that he can't find what he is looking for and some of what he does find, and grow attached to, is more toward the 8 year old level than the 5 year old level. Our free trial subscription is nearly over and I have not been won over.

I would love it if I could personalize it. With normal Freetime I have to manually select what is available for him to use, but with Unlimited it is all there. I would like to be able to at least remove things that I don't want him to have access to or that he doesn't want. It would clean up the screen so he could find his favorite things. In the meantime, we did find a handful of content that we will be buying after we end the subscription. We also got 2 weeks of free educational content that covered all of our history, science, and read-alouds since we started school back up again.

Back in the Groove

I don't think I could possibly feel better about getting back to normal! This was our first week back to our normal routine. It feels great! Our house is clean again, and our spirits are high. If it weren't for a sore throat Little Guy would have had me reading to his constantly for the last week. He just dove back into his school work.

 Little Guy was thrilled to get his first package from Delbert and Dinah all about Guatemala. He was so excited to get a bunch of bananas and a pile of chocolates. I was surprised at how captivated he was with the videos we watched too. He is now an avid Man v. Wild fan too!

Another great surprise was that the first time he got his Kindle on Monday he didn't hop right onto Minecraft! Instead, he pulled up the Brain Pop Jr. app (free on Amazon) and watched videos about scientific method and classifying animals. He is getting used to only having an hour of play time each day too and makes sure to turn it off when he isn't playing to save time.

 We started "ng" words this week. They are tricky! You can't sound them out and it is hard to say on it's own without saying a whole word. We have pegged them "ping-pong" words. When he says that he gets a chance to hear that ending sound and it brings it back for him. This is deffinitely one we will have to keep practicing though.

Math was all review. It is incredible how much he forgot during our 5 weeks off. I have decided not to take any more breaks that long. Since we are going to do year round, I think we will be taking no more than 2 weeks at a time. He was excited to break out the 100 blocks again though. They are his favorite!

I am looking forward to keeping things simple around here for a few weeks. It felt great just being "normal" for a week, you know, as normal as life can be.

World Travels: Guatemala

Hello!

Dinah and I enjoyed our first trip on the hot air balloon so much! It was amazing seeing the earth from so high up. We floated through the sky for a very long time, going wherever the wind blew. When we were ready to touch ground we found a perfect break in the trees. 

We couldn't believe where we landed! There were old stone buildings all around us. Lots of people were walking around looking at them. A girl named Nicole came to see our balloon and told us we were at the ruins of a Mayan village in Guatemala. She showed us around the ruins. We climbed many, many stairs and saw lots of carvings in the rocks too. The Mayans even had a ball court because they liked to play sports too!

Nicole was a tourist visiting Guatemala  She had seen many markets and had even gotten to see were they grow coffee beans, bananas and cocoa beans. She even gave us some of the bananas she got straight from the tree! She shared some fresh chocolate with us too. Our trip to the Mayan ruins was incredible, and we made a new friend too! We'll write to you again soon!

Photo of Tikal from Nicole

We are going to work this into our geography/history study of the mountains. I am going to put a banana and a bar of chocolate in his package this month. I downloaded Google Earth, so we will check out Guatemala on there. We will be reading the mountain section of the book Wild Places.

Also, we'll be watching several videos about Guatemala and the Mayan people that are available for free on Amazon Prime Instant Video.

Guatemala Episode

Lost King of the Maya and Maya Lords of the Jungle

Passport to Adventure: Guatemala's Dramatic Lake Atitlan Region