The Salt Dough Map

One of the unwritten requirements of homeschooling seems to be that you must, at some point in your adventure, make a salt dough map with your kids. I don't know why this is, but mine is not to question why. Anyway, a salt dough map seemed like a fun way to gently ease back into school after a couple weeks off.

My idea was to make our own continent with as many geographical features as possible. The kids thought it would be excessively cool to make Wahoo Island from our Wii Resort game. We compromised. Who am I to argue with enthusiasm? We made a mostly authentic Wahoo Island and added a few extra features.

We used this book to learn some new geography terms and figure out how to model them:

We then baked our creation for 3 hours and painted it!

The finished product:

In the end, we had just about everything in there, including:

• an isthmus
• a waterfall
• a river
• a butte
• a sea arch
• a plateau
• an atoll (well, half of one)
• a lagoon
• an erupting volcano
• beaches
• caves
• islands
• a breaching whale

Good fun!

Teacher In-Service Day

Every once in a while, we have a "Teacher In-Service Day" here. I highly recommend them.

This week, things started feeling just a little bit out of control, disorganized, inadequately planned, etc., and I knew it was time to regroup. I announced the news to Z-Man first thing in the morning, just when he would normally be doing Saxon math. Needless to say, he was thrilled.

With the boys joyfully occupied with a living room football game, I made a list of things I wanted to organize/plan/schedule.

Now let me say right here that IDEALLY, you want to have treats at these things. I mean, in the schools, there are donuts and coffee in the morning and you always get a free lunch. I made do with Dunkin Donuts cinnamon spice coffee and Dove sugar-free chocolates. I was pretty happy with that.

Anyway, here's my list of things I wanted to work on:

Prayer - make a list with the boys of things we're thankful for and a list of needs/people to pray for. Leave a place to write down answers to prayer.

Bible - We've been using Bible Study Guide for All Ages and that's good. Also the Daily Audio Bible for Kids podcast. I hope to keep doing both of those. I would like to get Z-Man a devotional that he can do himself too. Any ideas?

Character - we need to focus on character around here!! I plan to use this website: http://www.characterjournal.com/ and spend a week or two on each character trait. I think I'll give Z-Man a character chart for his notebook and he can color in each one with a highlighter as we cover them. I hope to find children's books that exemplify the virtues that we're studying and also to find ways to "practice" using those virtues. Maybe some family recognition at dinner time for those who showed the virtue that day.

Memorizing - Andrew Pudewa of The Institute for Excellence in Writing really emphasized this and I want to do much more of it. We'll focus on scripture and some poetry and I want to work on some system - index cards that we all say each morning? Contests with parents? A sticker chart? It's definitely something our whole family could use - maybe we could do it each night after dinner? I'll talk to Mark about this one.

Reading aloud - we already do this but need to work on having Z-Man do more narration.

Chores - any suggestions here are welcome!! I'm thinking of some sort of checklist so the boys can see what they need to do each day and THEY are responsible for it - not me constantly reminding them.

So you can see I have a lot to work on here. Add to that the fact that this is the time of year when I start thinking about planning NEXT year and it looks like we may need to have several more "Teacher In-Service" days very soon!

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.

Home to the USA!

Continuing in North America, we come to our own beloved country. How on earth can you study America for ONE week? How can you possibly focus? Well, for one thing, we studied American History ALL year when Z-Man was in first grade.

One of the lanterns from Paul Revere's ride.

Then, in second grade, we studied a different state each week.

That's Arizona in back of Little Man.

So, for this week, I decided to narrow our focus to patriotism, immigration and symbols of America. Oh, and American artists. And composers. How's that for narrow?

First, the books we read and some of the related activities:

This one is packed with information. We used a couple pages from the teacher's guide and just explained/talked about the rest.

One of my all-time favorite Five in a Row titles. I was overjoyed to find it at a library book sale. We discussed our own family genealogy and looked at lots of old photos. We also watched the Schoolhouse Rock video, The Great American Melting Pot. Love those!

I strongly dislike books that make me cry, but I'll make an exception here. We watched two online videos on Ellis Island from the History Channel.

There are some books you just want to own and this is one of them. Naturally, we had to listen to people sing the National Anthem on Youtube. Whitney Houston during the Gulf War was my personal favorite. I'd love to hear someone sing the fourth verse at the Super Bowl.

...Blest with vict'ry and peace may the heav'n-rescued land

Praise the power that hath made and preserv'd us a nation!

You must know we watched The Preamble from Schoolhouse Rock. How could we not?

The Story Of The Statue Of Liberty

We made an adorable little paper Statue of Liberty from Papertoys.com!

This book has Z-Man determined to ask Mark to run for president so that we can live in the White House.

OH MY! Could this be a cuter story? And the ducks REALLY MARCH into the fountain at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis! After we read the story, I started a Youtube video of it (there are many!) and the kids just stood watching, mouths agape. To this very day, there are ducks actually living on the roof of the hotel, in a little duck palace and they swim in the lobby fountain every day! That's definitely on our "places to visit" list now. (I feel I should note that several of the characters deceive someone - we explained that was wrong and were still able to enjoy the book. Just so you know.)

This also led to an interest in John Philip Sousa marches, so we first listened to several Classics for Kids shows about him, then to some of his marches on Youtube.

This one is just funny. We have the game too which is a lot of fun.

Z-Man made this free, printable file folder game of United States Landmarks. Scroll down to "Passport to America."

This is getting to be a long post, but stay with me - I've saved the best for last!

We took a look at Norman Rockwell's paintings entitled The Four Freedoms in a very old book we have here. We also did a limited study of John Singer Sargent. Our computer is in the dining room where everyone passes it frequently. I simply find paintings on Google Images and make them my desktop background for a week or so. Below is "Woman Fishing."

And last, but certainly not least, we listened to patriotic songs! God Bless America, America the Beautiful, Let Freedom Ring, etc. Here's my favorite. Enjoy!

Fun in Mexico

We managed to have a fun week studying Mexico even though both boys were sick all week.

We read this cute book about a little girl learning to make tortillas with her Grandma. It is written in both English and Spanish:

Then we made our own Mexican treat - Churritos! Yum! And easy too. We cut flour tortillas into quarters, fried them one side at a time in hot oil and sprinkled them with cinnamon sugar. Mmmmm...

We read this true story about Paracutin, a volcano "plowed up" by a farmer in Mexico:

And this wonderful Five in a Row title about a little girl and her tall-tale-telling Grandpa:

We read about Omar in Children Just Like Me:

And lots of interesting information in these two:

Countries of The World: Mexico by Leslie Jermyn (Gareth Stevens Publishing) and

The above book did have some Day of the Dead stuff and Aztec gods that we didn't care for. I gave Little Man a brief explanation and Z-Man and I talked more in detail about what God says about contacting the dead and other practices in Deuteronomy 18:9. Countries of the World: Mexico talked about human sacrifices in the Aztec and Mayan civilizations and we read what God told Israel about that too. Z-Man and I read some pretty exciting stories in

Missionary Stories with the Millers (Miller Family (Harvest House)).

We read about the discovery in Mexico of the over-wintering grounds of the monarch butterfly. I was so pleased that we found this book:

Monarch Butterflies: Mysterious Travelers

What a great story! A Canadian professor and his wife started tagging butterflies in 1937. Children all over North America reported on tagged butterflies and it appeared they were headed to Mexico. The professor wrote to Mexican newspapers, asking for help. An American who was traveling with his dog wrote back and offered to help. After marrying a Mexican woman, they searched for nearly a year before they finally found it - millions of butterflies high in the mountains! The professor and his wife traveled down with a National Geographic photographer, who then authored this book! This one is a winner!

AND, Nova has a special on Monarch migration that is airing on PBS this Tuesday at 8:00 PM EST. Great timing!

Little Man enjoyed this one:

And to round out our study, we did some fun projects. First we colored butterfly lifecycle pages, which you can find here (scroll all the way down.)

Then we talked about the symmetry of butterflies. With an outline shape of a butterfly, I had the boys fold then in half and put colored glitter glue on only one half. Then we folded the halves together and pressed down: voila! Perfect symmetry.

And finally, we colored some butterflies and attached them to pipe cleaner rings to make finger puppets. Little Man was still partial to the Blue Morphos of the rainforest from last week.

All in all, it was a fun week, in spite of sickness. And it should here be noted that both boys managed to rally themselves sufficiently to play the Wii. They're little troopers, they are.