Oh Canada!

Did you know Canadians eat more macaroni and cheese than any other country in the world? Vitally important information of this nature demands action. We therefore had mac and cheese not one, but TWO days this week. THAT is how committed I am to my children's education, friends.

I challenge you to try to beat that justification. Can't do it, can you? I thought not.

ANYWAY... it was a good week in Canada.

We read Count Your Way Through Canada which is apparently out of print but our library system has quite a few in the series. I wish I'd known about this series earlier but we still have quite a few countries to go so we'll make good use of them.

We reviewed a lot of French words, read some of our French books and worked on counting in French.

This one was good too:

Z-Man and I loved this book and he looked forward to reading it together every day:

It's the fictional (I think) account of a family's summer trip across Canada. It's fun to look at with lots of pictures, the boy's cartoons, weird trivia, etc. We both really learned a lot. Amazing how little I really knew about our northern neighbor.

Using this book:

we learned about coniferous forests (also called the taiga). We actually managed to find some pine cones in the snow and brought them inside to cruelly trick them into thinking it's spring. (Is there a PETA for plants?) It worked and they are slowly opening so we can examine their seeds. We sped up the process by popping one in the oven for an hour or so.

The boys also enjoyed this experiment which showed how the shape of coniferous trees helps them shed snow.

They both enjoyed making a white flour blizzard but the conifer-shaped tree stood strong.

Z-Man put together this great mini-lapbook on Canada which costs, incidentally, exactly one dollar from Fortunately For You Books. No, I don't get any money if you buy one - I just thought it was a pretty good deal!

There is also an awesome Winter Olympics/Canada/Snow lapbook resource over at Homeschoolshare.com. We'll probably be using some things from that once the Olympics start.

We headed over to Youtube and listened to several versions of Oh Canada (I'm sure we'll be hearing that a lot more in the next few weeks) and watched some nice slide shows of the various provinces.

Tomorrow we're off to our homeschool co-op, then skiing on Saturday and church and a Superbowl party on Sunday. That will be a bit of time in the car for us to listen to the audio book of Anne of Green Gables, which takes place on Prince Edward Island in Canada. It'll be a busy weekend, but lots of fun. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend too.