End-of-the-school-year program(s)

Tis the season! End of the year programs are upon us. Our co-op had an excellent program last week. The kids did their various recitations, songs, etc. Z-Man and his class even performed (is that the right word?) John 3:16 in sign language. Little Man was non-participatory but hey, we expected that. After the program, visitors were invited to peruse the many tables in the lobby where families displayed projects from their school year. One of Z-Man's friends actually made a mini dinosaur skeleton out of two turkey skeletons. How cool is that?!

We displayed our rainforest dioramas and lapbook but the kids have done so many different things this year that we thought it would be fun to have our own little "world tour" dinner for their grandparents. Z-Man set up "stations" for each continent that we studied and then led his grandparents on a little tour, explaining projects and answering questions. They, being the very sweet grandparents that they are, were attentive and impressed with the boys' work. I wish I had had the presence of mind to take pictures of everyone during the tour, but I'm afraid we'll have to make do with these:

Z-Man's notebook with all his maps and samples of math, language arts, Bible verses, cursive, drawing and hymn lyrics. These sticker books were great. We love stickers.

Europe

Africa

Asia

North America

South America

We also had a little slide show of some of the things that weren't displayed, like science experiments and field trips.

Now I'll box up most of their work and, let's see, we have two more year-end picnics and Z-Man's evaluation (yes, we live in one of THOSE states) and then I think we can officially call it the end of the year! It's been a great trip!

Our time in China

The school year is drawing to a close, the weather is starting to feel like summer is coming and there is excitement in the air! My thoughts turn to planting flowers and planning summer camps and next year's curriculum. My boys' thoughts turn to playing outside - ALL day. Is anyone concentrating on our school work? Well, it's been a little tough. So... you all aren't going to believe this, but I - compulsive planner extraordinaire, eclectic homeschool girl, do-it-yourself poster child - I bought a pre-made unit study on China! Yup, I did.

And do you know what? It was great.

It's a five day study but we spread it out to two weeks because there was a lot there and also because we wanted to do extra reading. Each day started out with one or two videos and we loved that. One of the videos on the Great Wall inspired the boys to play "Great Wall" on our stairs, pretending to shoot innocent passers-by who were accused of being attacking barbarians. Don't worry, the windows were closed and the "barbarians" went on their merry way unaware and unscathed.

We did quite a bit of map work, studied Chinese inventions, animals, missionaries and places of interest and created a nice little lapbook.

Z-Man balks at handwriting as you can probably tell, so this was pretty good for him.

Of course, we still read lots of books. And OF COURSE, we read Ping.

We still love Children Just Like Me and the Look What Came From series:

We translated our names into Chinese characters at this site and then tried calligraphy. We played with tangrams, and since the Chinese invented dominoes, we had to play with those too.

If we had extended our study another week, I would have liked to make paper and an abacus, since they were both invented by the Chinese, but there are always things that don't get done and I can live with that. Paper making might be a good, messy, summer outdoor activity anyway.

Next stop: our last country - Australia!

Until then,

(which means Valerie)

Konichiwa from Japan!

We've been having a rather laid-back tour of Japan for the last week and a half or so. Basically, what this means is that we've been learning about Japan, hitting golf balls in the yard, learning about Japan, throwing the football in the yard, learning about Japan, jumping on the trampoline. It's been nice here.

But get this: today we read a FIAR book that we love, A Pair of Red Clogs.

In it, Mako and her friends in Japan play a weather forecasting game. They kick off their clogs, and the way they land tells what the weather is going to be the next day. Naturally, we had to play. MY (obviously superior) shoes predicted a fine day tomorrow. Both boys' shoes, however, predicted snow. Snow. So guess what? Here we are in Central New York, just days away from May Day and the REAL forecast for tomorrow is snow! Can you stand it? Cause I know I can't. I mean, I switched out our wardrobes this weekend. Fleeces and sweaters are put away and there are t-shirts and shorts in my kids' dressers. Sigh.

But let's talk about Japan. I'm sure it's warm there.

We started our time in Japan with a long drive in my husband's car. Since his is one of five cars in America with a cassette player, we had a chance to check out the Powerglide Japanese course that I found at a book sale for TWO DOLLARS! We learned about 16 phrases in one day - it really wasn't that difficult. I'm not saying that I want to write it or anything, but if you do, go to this site to see what your name looks like in Japanese:

http://japanesetranslator.co.uk/your-name-in-japanese/

We did a lovely crayon-resist, topographical map project that I found here.

It's a little hard to see in the picture, but it really turned out nicely. The whole crayon resist idea caught the boys' imagination and we did quite a few "secret messages" written in white crayon which they decoded by painting over them. Z-Man did one for me too. It said, "Mom, I love you. Can I have some M&Ms?" Hmmm.

We read Japan ABC's

The illustrations are done in a Japanese woodblock print style so we tried our hand at that too. We cut pieces from a clean styrofoam meat tray and "carved" our illustrations by pressing down hard with a pen. Then we painted them with a flat foam brush and pressed paper down on them to make our prints.

Here's a book that we just loved:

It's Make Way for Ducklings set in Tokyo. If you read this blog, you know I love children's books based on true stories. It is a teeny bit tense though, and one of the ducklings doesn't make it through a bad storm but the heroine does make it, floating on, of all things, a styrofoam meat tray. At this point, I'd like to extend a warm welcome to anyone who haplessly stumbled upon my blog after googling "styrofoam meat trays." You are welcome here.

One last book -

Z-Man and I are reading this together. If I ever learned any Japanese history in school, I have zero recollection of it. Now I find it fascinating.

Yet another great reason to homeschool.

P.S. - Konichiwa means hello.

P.P.S. - If you feel compelled to leave a comment using the words, styrofoam meat trays, be my guest. It has 5 syllables just in case you were considering a haiku.

Out of Africa

This is the display that greeted the boys on the first morning of our Africa study. We found so many great books to read. I'll list our favorites for you.

Little Man's favorite:

We love Jan Brett books and you just can't beat her web site for cool extras to go along with the books. Here is a video of her in Africa looking for the plants and animals to put in her book:

http://www.janbrettvideos.com/african_safairi_low_bandwidth.htm

Then we watched a different kind of safari: safari in a hot air balloon at the Newton's Apple science site.

Little Man also liked this book:

Apparently if you lose your tooth in Africa, you get your own live chicken! But not under your pillow. Cause that would be weird.

Mine and Z-Man's favorite:

Come With Me To Africa

It's the story of a photographer who dreamed of going to Africa as a child and finally made the trip. He's so positive and enthusiastic that you can't help feeling the same as you read it and his photos are wonderful. There's real-life adventure too: a sand storm, the vehicle nearly tipping over in the desert, climbing Kilamanjaro and standing guard for thieves. A great read with great photos!

This next one was an unexpected bonus, as we were studying the virtue of humility at the time:

And finally, sometimes the books your kids like are kind of surprising. I thought they might not care for this next book about a 30 year old English spinster who headed to Africa alone, always in a proper Victorian dress, (true story!) but they loved it.

Naturally, we had to study lots of African animals! I bought a big box filled with animal cards at a yard sale last year and that has been just invaluable.

We drew our own herd of animals and learned about creating depth in a drawing by putting objects in back of other objects. There are printable patterns for that project at Art Projects for Kids.

We read about some African children in our Children Just Like Me book, which the boys love and which has undoubtedly been one of my best purchases for this Around the World study.

And we read about David Livingstone and Samuel Morris in Hero Tales: A Family Treasury of True Stories from the Lives of Christian Heroes, which has been another great asset.

I'll leave you with a Youtube video of a South African group called Ladysmith Black Mambazo singing Amazing Grace. Wow!

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.