Before.
After. (taken by my sister)
Homeschool Mother’s Journal
In our homeschool this week…
We are reading ‘Paddington’ by Micheal Bond. Mainly because I want him to start hearing books that are longer. Usually I can only get through three maybe four pages before he is done.
This week we picked back up with Right Start math after a break because he was showing signs of not being ready to move on. This week we started working on recognizing quantities between six and ten without counting.
Last week we started using the book ‘Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons’ and it seems to be working so far. Everything else I have tried got to a point where there was a big gap in steps and it was not working for wingnut. We have been taking it slow and spreading a lesson out over two to three days.
This week we did some science by making a CD Hovercraft.
My favorite thing this week was…
When taking our daily walks my son has been running ahead of me to push shrubs out of my way and saying, “Here mom.” So cute, even if there is so much room I could just walk around it 
What’s working/not working for us…
I started adding a daily walk right before we start school to help get some wiggles out of my son, both my son and I have been enjoying this. Also, I call school time tea time because we, well I, have tea and he gets a treat. This has helped add some excitement to school time.
I’m grateful for…
A loving, hard working husband who makes it possible for me to stay home and homeschool our child.
A photo, video, link, or quote to share..
My husband and my son have been playing mindcraft together.
Click here to see this weeks link up.
Hovercraft
A little while back I shared my science in a bag idea; which works in theory until it comes to implementing it. You would think with having everything ready you would be doing science everyday. Nope, it did not happen. This was the second time using one of the bags; a total of four months since the first. I know shame on me.
Well, today we got one out. Wingnut picked the Hover craft. I think it was only because it had a balloon in the bag, lol.
This thing was a pain to make. My first attempt with using superglue did not work. So what I ended up doing was just wrapping the balloon around the nozzle and then duck taping the whole thing to the CD. It worked wonders; gotta love duct tape! So instead of taking the balloon off to blow it up and then putting it back on, which was a pain, you just pick the whole thing up and blow it up from the bottom of the CD.
I got the idea for this project from Scribbit.
Ice Storm
So after our snow storm we got an ice storm. It was pretty crazy; downed trees everywhere. People even had power out for several days. Everything was covered in about a half inch of ice. Luckily we did not loose any trees or power.
The top of the snow turned to ice but underneath the ice the snow remained.
My lilac encased in ice.
Icicles everywhere!
Delayed Snow Pictures
We got about 20″ inches of snow which is a record for us. We normally average 4″ a year.
And because I could not resist, a snowman booger. More about this ice tomorrow.
Beatrix Potter Stories
I am always trying to find different ways to share books with wingnut. I tried reading ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit’ to him but he had no interest in it. I went on-line and found these short videos of Beatrix Potter’s works. Some are a moving sideshow and others are part of the animated show. I plan on watching one or two a week with him; hopefully it works
Here is the play list I made.
Twigs
This month one of the Outdoor Hour Challenges was for twigs. The suggestion was to bring a twig home and observe it and for once wingnut was willing to do it. Woot!
We started out with a walk to get outside. Even though the temperature was thirty-five degrees it was quite warm in the sun.
We took our dog who was overjoyed to come with us
For once he wanted to draw in his nature journal. I was just going to take the twig and point out the different parts but he went to the shelf and pulled out his journal on his own. I had him draw on the notebook page that I got from Handbook of Nature Study’s new ebook. Then, we cut the pictures out and glued them into our journals.
As suggested we put the twig in water to watch the buds bloom.
Here is how I felt about this weeks challenge
Update 2/18/2012: I posted some pictures of when the twig bloomed.
12 Years
Happy anniversary hubby! Love ya always and forever.
Evergreen Investigation
For December one of the Outdoor Hour Challenges from Handbook of Nature Study was evergreen trees. Once again wingnut was not interested in this activity, so I decided to pick the tree. At a local park there is a section that has a patch of old Christmas trees and I wanted to find out what kind they were.
On the first trip wingnut had a meltdown and refused to get out of the car. The patch of trees were only a couple of yards from the car so I decided to quickly get some pictures and grab a cone so that when we got home I could try to identify it. Needless to say, in my hurry the pictures were blurry and I got a cone to a different tree; it made it hard to identify.
On the second trip I took my husband with me, which was a good idea. Wingnut saw that daddy was interested in the trees as well so he finally got excited and started looking around to see what he could find.
After researching, we found out that the trees were Noble Fir. But of course my husband already knew that. Once again, I surprised my husband with how little I know about nature.
We looked at the needles and noticed two white lines that go down each needle.
On the ground, under the trees there were denigrated cones. This was one of the key points in identifying this fir.
I took a couple of the scales home to get a closer look. I never realized how beautiful they could be.
Someone had disrespectfully cut down one of the trees. My husband thinks they did it to get some boughs off of it. But because of this, we were able to see how old the trees were; about 16 years old.
One weird-looking thing was these needles that grow on the trunk itself.
And speaking of trunks, this is what the bark looked like.
Lego’s
Wingnut is a huge Lego fan, he can spend hours playing with them. This is a recent creation.
