Friday, September 26, 2008

Caught Reading!

I looked out into the living room yesterday and saw this:

Hannah was enthusiastically and with great expression reading Sam and the Firefly to Ben. I wish I had gotten a better picture, because the excitement on their faces was priceless. I am so glad to have children who love to read!

Entymology and Camouflage

Wednesday, while the kids were napping, I found this on our back porch:

Knowing Hannah's love for bugs, and finding this one pretty fascinating myself, I recruited my husband to capture the insect in a jar and put it in our butterfly habitat until the kids woke up. The first thing I did was look it up in our Audubon guide and identify it as an Angular-Winged Katydid. In looking it up online, I believe it is more specifically a Greater Anglewing Katydid, which are often found in Ohio, and which have a distinctive clicking call that I have heard at times outside our house.

Once Hannah and Ben woke up, we took the jar (with the katydid still in it) out of the butterfly cage and let them look at it. Hannah confidently announced that it was a katydid. I handed her the field guide, open to katydids, and let her try to identify it. After looking for a few moments, she also decided it was the Angular-Winged Katydid.

Once both kids got a good look at the insect, we took it outside to release it. The book said that it liked the leaves of trees and bushes, so we carried it across the yard to one of our lilac bushes and placed it on a leaf. Immediately, Ben cried, "I can't see it! Where did it go?"

It blended in so well with the leaves, that unless we knew where to look, we could not see it at all.

In fact, a few moments later, Hannah tried to pick it up and it jumped to another leaf, vanishing so completely that we could not find it again. What a cool lesson about insect camouflage!

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Discovering Lapbooking

I discovered a wonderful educational tool the other day that I think will become a regular part of our homeschooling curriculum. I cannot believe that I never learned about this in my four years as an education major at a college known for its high quality teaching program! It is called "lapbooking."

A lapbook is a manila file folder, flattened and refolded in a specific way in order to make a book. Various colorful pockets, pictures, and small books are glued to the inside of the folder, each item containing pieces of information about the lapbook's theme. At the kindergarten level, the information is usually fairly simple, but high school students put together lapbooks containing essays, charts, and much more complex information. Seem confusing? I, too, needed pictures and examples before I figured out exactly how it worked, so I will share our first lapbook with you.

Because of Hannah's current fascination with scorpions, rattlesnakes, and animals that live in the Grand Canyon, I was thrilled to find a free "Desert Animals" lapbook at Home School Share. The pdf's on the site included printables and instructions to make a detailed lapbook about animals that live in American deserts. I did find that some of the information included was incorrect or incomplete, but for the most part, all of the facts needed were included on the webpage. If Hannah were older, I would have taught her how to look up facts about the animals by herself, but instead, I printed off the infomation, read it to her out loud, and had her pick out the facts we needed to make each booklet or activity. I wrote the details for her most of the time, but she wrote a few of the pages herself.

Hannah really seemed to enjoy lapbooking, especially since this lapbook focused on something that already interested her. Her love of bugs runs so deep right now, that when I showed her the photo labeled "scorpion," she announced that it was actually a giant desert hairy scorpion. I looked it up in our Audubon guide, and she was correct!

Here are a few pictures of the lapbook we finished yesterday. Ours actually ended up being two folders glued together on one side to make room for all of the little books and pockets.

The cover:


The inside:


A close up of one side:

Fun With Paint

After postponing the mess for a few too many days, I finally pushed up my sleeves, stripped the kids, and tackled the painting portion of the globe project.

I put the paper mache ball in a basin to keep it from rolling away across our beige carpet as Hannah gobbed on the blue paint. I also gave Ben a sheet of paper to paint so he would not feel left out.

Then, I had a brilliant idea! Ben had studied the color blue (which was the color paint we were using) and the letter "b" this week in preschool, and I had an idea for a project that would incorporate both concepts. I decided also to teach the kids the concept of symmetry.

First, we used a couple of practice pages to learn how to paint on only one half of the paper and then fold the paper in half to create the same pattern on the other side. Next, I folded a piece of paper in half and cut it into the shape of butterfly wings ("b" is for butterfly...). Ben painted a pattern on one wing, and we folded it in half to make the matching wing. We talked about symmetry and how a butterfly has two matching wings that are the same on each side.

When we finished that portion of the lesson, Ben spent the rest of the time just painting a page solid blue. Meanwhile, Hannah worked hard and covered her globe with blue paint.

Once the paint on both projects dried, we moved on to the finishing touches. I helped Ben glue the center of the butterfly wings to his solid blue page. Then, we attached a popsicle stick, colored it brown, and drew a face and antennae to complete Ben's blue, symmetrical butterfly.For the globe, I cut out the shape of North America from craft foam, and we glued it to the globe. We will be using straight pins and little paper strips to label all of the places we discuss, and we will add the rest of the continents as we learn about them in future units.
I am excited by how well both crafts turned out. Maybe I will be a little braver about tackling more fun and messy projects in the future!

Friday, September 12, 2008

More Word Creation...

Hannah made some more words today with the post-it cards that I have. She just had to add a letter or two at the beginning to create a word. Again, I'll put her letters in bold, then a dash, and then the letters she was given.

b-ug
n-ot
qu-ail
n-est
r-ip
y-ay
p-ink
w-ell
s-ick
f-in
sp-ill
c-at
s-ap
p-ack
r-ing
c-an
s-ock
k-it
f-ake

When we were done, I had her tell me a story, using each of the words in sentences. It was all about a bug stuck in a spider web that got out when the web ripped, and then the spider made a new pink web. I think a cat had sap spilled on him at one point, and a quail built a nest... it was pretty wild. But, she got the point, and she seemed to enjoy creating a story, no matter how fanciful and crazy it might have been.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

First Day at Preschool

Hannah and Ben had their first day at the one-day-a-week preschool program. Ben was especially thrilled, as this was his first time attending. He went in the morning, from 9:00-11:30. I worried a lot about dropping him off, because he is so sensitive and hesitant in new situations. I worried needlessly, though. The fact that he cried last year when we dropped Hannah off because he could not stay with should have given me a clue...

We arrived nice and early after some pictures outside our house. I paid his tuition and started to walk him down the stairs to his classroom. He turned to me and said, "Why are you still here? Aren't you going home?" I laughed and explained that I at least wanted to walk him downstairs and help him get settled first. Inside, I felt a mixture of pride and sadness that he wanted to go by himself. We organized his backpack and school materials, and then I left. I did manage to get a quick, half-hearted kiss before I walked unnoticed through the door.

I picked Ben up after his class and he bubbled with enthusiasm about his day. He painted and played games and learned about apples. I think this will be a great fit for him this year!

A little over an hour later, we returned for Hannah's 1:00-3:30 class. What a crazy day! I spend about an hour and a half driving on Mondays just dropping off and picking up each kid from preschool.

Hannah has a great opportunity this year at the school. Because she completed the 4-year-old class last year, her teacher allows me to send kindergarten work for her to do during seat work time. She can do crafts and activities and games with the other kids, and then she can work independently when they do what she has already mastered. Additionally, the teacher lets her read parts of the stories to the class, because she is reading so well. She can still make friends and interact with kids her age, but she will not feel bored repeating the same material.

I am excited about this year and so are the kids. Now if only I can survive all of that driving...

Hannah the Zoologist

Hannah loves animals, especially cold-blooded ones. For the past several weeks, she has spent hours nearly every day poring over two books I recently purchased: National Audubon Society field guide to North American Butterflies and National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders. She sits and reads the name of every bug she sees and studies its appearance under a magnifying glass so she can absorb all of the details.

When we were camping, she informed me that the bugs another little girl had caught were common water skimmers, and she was correct! She also can tell me the names of many different ants and butterflies and even scorpions. In fact, she told me that her favorite bug is a scorpion... shudder!

In addition to her love of all things creepy and crawly, Hannah has a remarkable knack for catching these specimens as well. Moths, butterflies, millipedes, caterpillars, crayfish, and other invertebrates inevitably end up in her little grasp for further study. She even had a tiny butterfly land daintily on her outstretched finger and remain perched there for a few minutes before fluttering away.

We visited my parents' cabin this spring just in time for the tent caterpillars to hatch, and we caught hundreds during our stay. I think my grandmother cringed every time she saw Hannah with the insects crawling all over her arms and hands.

Because of her fascination with bugs, she learned two new vocabulary words during our camping trip, and she has been using them appropriately: exoskeleton and endoskeleton. We had been planning our insects and spiders unit for the spring... but I think we may tackle it now. I'd hate to waste this time of interest just because I want to stick to a schedule!

Where homeschooling is just a small part of becoming life-long learners.