So stressed out...

Poor thing. I think he needs a couple more cushions.

French Co-op

Salut! Ça va?

I couldn't take pictures at my French co-op (since I was kinda busy teaching it) so I'm just posting a photo of my supply basket. It's even heavier since I splurged on a gigantic Larousse French/English dictionary recently.



I had 8, 9, and 10-year old students this time. We practiced greeting one another and introducing ourselves. Bonjour! Comment tu t'appelles? We went over some ways to describe ourselves as well. Je suis grande et j'aime les livres.

We counted on our fingers and sang a counting song. Finally, we read one of my family's favorite stories, Un dîner en fuite, by Allan Ahlberg. You might know it as The Runaway Dinner, but I bought my copy in Montréal, donc c'est en français.



As always, it was a fun class. I love teaching enthusiastic learners!

Au revoir!

Some Days are Productive

And some days are not!

Maybe it's the cold, gray weather. Or maybe it's just Monday. For whatever reason, today we had attention and focus issues. And lots of bickering, which fortunately, is very unusual for Super and Dude.

We started the day with a quick language arts review. I made up a game using subjects and predicates on strips of construction paper. They were each allowed to turn over one of their subjects and one of their predicates. If they liked their sentence, they could keep it. If not, they could trade either the subject or the predicate.

Of course, the original sentences made sense, but it was a lot more fun to do it this way! Here is Dude's sentence collection:



And Super's sentences:



They loved the game, but every time one of them wanted to trade, it turned into an argument over who had the "best" subjects or predicates. Huh?

We also practiced using conjunctions.



We didn't get beyond our warm-up in math...

We always start with a quick review, and today it was positive and negative integers. We played a game using a number line "thermometer" and temperature cards. After a few minutes it was clear that the kids were having a hard time staying focused, and we were all getting rather cranky, so I scrapped the rest of our plans for the day.

We took a root beer break and then watched a Nature episode about wildlife in the Balkans. We read a few chapters of School Mouse by Dick King-Smith, and then gave the dogs a bath. Dad made a lovely vegetarian shepherd's pie for us, and we're having a cozy evening at home. Tomorrow is another day!

I love this!

Just listen. Maybe you don't believe in "big government" but should "big business" be running our country instead?

Maybe you don't like Obama's policies, but should you plug your ears and say "LA LA LA," or should we have open, rational discourse about how to solve our problems and improve our country?

Nothing will be accomplished if we deliberately sabotage the debate. If you just want to see a productive exchange of ideas without the diversion tactics, take a look at the site and decide for yourself. I'm in.

This Week at the Super Awesome School

Salt crystal study (more on that later...)


Dude's concrete poem about Seren


A batch of letters ready to go


Roll-and-Write game from The Mailbox


Practicing adding decimals with Menu Math


Sentence Shopping Spree from Grammar Games & Activities that Boost Writing Skills


Bastet by Dude


Bastet by Super

Serendipity

Rocky and his new friends

You have never seen two kids SO excited over something SO tiny.

We have had Rocky, our googly-eyed black moor goldfish, for about a year now. The kids declared that Tuesday was his birthday, and persuaded me to take them to the pet store for a couple of snails to keep him company. Super chose a gold snail, Dude chose a blue-gray one, and they lobbied for one more--a black and brown striped one.

As we were paying for the snails, the plastic bag started to leak, and an employee offered to get us a new bag. The kids took the new bag and checked on their precious snails. They both said to me, "There's a fish in this bag."

Being my typical distracted self, I didn't pay any attention until we were leaving the store. "Mom! There's a fish in this bag!" I looked in the bag and saw something tiny floating in the water. "It's probably just a piece of plant from the snail tank. Zip up your coat."

"No, Mom! It's a fish. It's shaped like a fish and it's swimming."

When I really looked at the speck, I could see the teeny tiny tail swishing back and forth.


Seren (the little speck above the flag)

The kids have named him "Seren," short for serendipity. He is just a little longer than a grain of rice and he might be a rosy minnow, but he's so small, it's hard to tell!


Two tiny eyes at 10:00

The kids were so excited about their new "baby fish!" They didn't want Rocky to eat him, and I was worried he'd get caught in the filter, so he has his own glass of water until he grows a little bigger. So far they have given him a tour of our school room, read books to him, written poetry about him, and drawn his portrait. We almost couldn't get through our school day yesterday because they had to check on him every few minutes!

In the meantime, we have moved Rocky to a bigger aquarium (the sphere above) so that Seren can live in Rocky's old one when he's big enough. According to the kids, Rocky was terribly lonely in his spacious new place, so we headed back to the fish store, and brought home two roommates, Treasure and Fugu.

As far as I know, there were only two fish in that bag.

School stuff

Today we practiced counting money...



...and played Roll-N-Multiply...



At lunchtime, we read Vincent van Gogh by Jen Green. After lunch we got out the oil pastels and drew our own Van Gogh-style pictures.

Dude drew a field of grain with crows...



...and Super drew a village under the night sky.



We also read about igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks, at Dude's request. We enjoyed How to Dig a Hole to the Other Side of the World by Faith McNulty, and our DK Rocks and Minerals book. We edited our wolf essay (see below) and added a couple of things to our wolf notebook. Finally, we did a couple of Grammar Minutes and called it a day.

Happy Friday!

Wolves in Yellowstone

by Super, Dude, and Mom

Yellowstone National Park is a beautiful and fascinating place, but for many years, it was missing something important. The government thought that wolves were dangerous, so all the wolves were shot and killed. Fortunately, the wolves are back!

Wolves bring the food chain into balance. If there are too many herbivores, they eat all the food and then they begin to die of overpopulation. When wolves reduce the population of herbivores, they don’t overpopulate and there is enough food.

Wolves scare the elk, bison, and bighorn sheep up to higher ground. The herds stop grazing on lower ground so the grass and wildflowers can grow. This allows smaller animals like birds, ground squirrels, and insects to move in.

Yellowstone is part of the wolves’ natural habitat. If wolves aren’t allowed to live in their natural habitat, they begin to attack people’s livestock.

When people visit Yellowstone, they want to experience nature. Wolves are part of nature. People enjoy seeing and hearing wolves in Yellowstone.

Worms, Wolves, and Work

Compare this to the photo in my previous post!

Hooray! We have our school room back! And--get this--it has a CEILING! It's still pretty disorganized and dusty, but we don't care. It was fun doing "sofa school" and "car school" and even "IHOP school," but as Dude says, "It's good to be back in our real school."

We started the week with our new science unit: we're using Mary Appelhoff's Worms Eat Our Garbage. Our red wigglers arrived last week and they are happily munching bread crusts and banana peels in their lovely new home.


Red wiggler and egg case by Dude

We put a couple of wigglers in a petri dish with a little water and held them over a lamp so we could see through them. I didn't get any pictures because the kids were so concerned for the worms' safety and comfort that they quickly dumped them back in the bin. We were lucky enough to find an egg case so we looked at it under the microscope.


Two great resources for worm study

Our Laura Ingalls Wilder study morphed into an American wildlife study, which turned into a wolf unit. You know how these things happen! So far we have read The Wolves Are Back by Jean Craighead George, Once a Wolf by Stephen Swinburne, and Best Book of Wolves and Wild Dogs by Christiane Gunzi.



Wolf myths

The kids are working together on a wolf notebook. They are particularly fascinated by wolves since we had the good fortune to see a wild one in Yellowstone last summer. We were at the right place at the right time, and it was an amazing experience!


Wolf facial expressions by Super. Alert; playful; afraid; angry.

The kitchen flood happened just as we were starting a new unit on decimals. I couldn't get to any of my MOTL materials while the basement was being repaired, so we had to improvise. We watched some Maths Mansions videos on YouTube and played games. I'm not even going to attempt to reconstruct what we covered for my MOTL records; it's easier to just start where we are now!


Homemade number sentence game

I really wouldn't know, but I'm pretty sure that when people decide to remodel their home, they usually make some sort of PLAN before they demolish the kitchen.


We're eating out A LOT

Since we didn't have that option, we are scrambling to get ours put back together. I'll never complain about making dinner again, I promise!

This is why...

...I haven't been posting lately! Last Saturday night while we were asleep, a cracked toilet tank leaked and refilled, leaked and refilled, all night long. We woke up Sunday morning to find water pouring from the light fixture in the kitchen. There was an inch of water on the kitchen floor, and it had seeped into a heat vent and soaked part of the basement as well.

This is what it looked like on Monday, after the water damage company removed the sagging drywall...





This used to be the cozy reading nook in our school area...



Needless to say, working with the insurance company, the water damage company, the drywall repair company, the painters, and the carpet store is keeping us busy. After Thursday, I won't be able to use my kitchen for a while (the cabinets have to come off the wall so they can repair the wet stuff behind them) so I'm trying to cook and freeze some meals.

I'm doing my best not to complain--after all, we still have a home, unlike so many others in the world. This is an inconvenience, not a disaster. We are getting some school stuff done in spite of the mess. My new homeschooling motto: when life gives you soggy ceilings, rely on documentaries and independent reading!

Yikes! No time!

Mr. Popper's Penguins; the Egyptian pharaoh Menes; measuring angles; fractions to decimals; bacteria experiments; Galileo Galilei; the animal kingdom; make your own pop-up book kit; speech club; swimming; ceramics; a new glockenspiel; a trip to the library; independent reading. Whew!

Just some photos from today

Helping Haiti

Anyone in the mood for brownies, sugar cookies and root beer was in luck today!

The kids recruited a couple of friends and set up a snack stand on the corner. We were lucky to have a warm(ish) day, so lots of people were out. When the sun started to go down, the kids broke down their stand and sold the rest door-to-door. At the end of the day, they had earned $20.60. Dad and I had agreed to double their earnings, so the kids will be sending $41.20 to Unicef tonight. They are proud of themselves, and we're proud of them, too.

Drop Everything, We're Studying Haiti

We'll be spending most of the day talking about Haiti and earthquakes. Enchanted Learning has an outline map of Haiti and its flag. BrainPop has a couple of good movies and activities, and we'll be visiting some of National Geographic sites here and here. The Mercalli scale is explained here. The USGS has good resources for kids here and here. A good simple explanation of the Richter scale is here. And a news article explaining what happened in Haiti can be found here.

It's nice to have the freedom to scrap our plans and focus on current events. The new plan seems more relevant than Ancient Egypt, mixed fractions and eukaryotic cells today. The kids are also planning a bake sale to raise money for Haiti.

If you come across any other good resources, please let us know!

This Week at the Super Awesome School

We had a fun, productive week here at the Super Awesome School!


Laura as a young woman

Our Laura Ingalls Wilder collage and timeline is shaping up. Super and Dude don't want me to post it until it's done, but here's a sneak preview. We watched a YouTube video called "Alone in the Wilderness" and then the kids wrote a description of how they might feel if they were there. (I know, it's Alaska, not Wisconsin. But it's not easy to find the Big Woods in Wisconsin anymore!) Both kids were very interested in how the log cabin was constructed. It reminded them of a certain toy they used to play with when they were younger!

Dad helped the kids with their Mesopotamian timelines, and then they read Gilgamesh The King by Ludmila Zeman. Since they were already familiar with the story of Gilgamesh, they found this version lacking in detail (but beautifully illustrated.) To begin their Egypt unit, Dad had them watch the Discovery Channel's "Engineering an Empire," and then they read Ghosts of the Nile by Cheryl Harness. They are really excited about next week, because they will get to "make stuff," as Dude puts it.



Super's version: I love the little deer running by!



Dude loves to draw flies buzzing around Enkidu.

We did two cool science experiments this week. We combined seltzer tablets (solid) with water (liquid) to make carbon dioxide (gas); then we tried to catch the carbon dioxide in balloons. We experimented with different amounts of water and Alka-Seltzer and tried to fill up the balloons as much as we could.


Before...



...and after!

Later, we used a different solid and liquid (baking soda and vinegar) and tried to funnel the gas toward a candle and put it out. It was hard to put the candle out but we discovered that it was much easier to blow out a match. Then the kids wrote about the experiments in their science journals. Phrases like "totally exploded" and "went kaboom" were used, but it was really more like "ran all over the table" and "made a mess."

For our French lesson this week, the kids made mini-books called Les Animaux de la Foret. (How I love EnchantedLearning.com!)



Editing our rough draft

My favorite writing resource, Mastering the Mechanics, recommends doing lots of modeled writing for kids. So...I wrote some boring sentences on the whiteboard and after the kids proofread them for spelling and punctuation, we worked together to make the story more interesting. Once they caught on, they wrote their own paragraphs about our trip to Yellowstone. I was really proud of what they came up with.



Big numbers don't scare us!

Our math review went well, and since they finished it early, they got a break from math today. Next week we're going to continue with fractions, but we'll do lots of multiplication fact practice as well. I'm really pleased with Math on the Level so far, and my favorite quote of the week comes from Dude, who said, "I LOVE 5-a-days!"

Just 'cuz, we read about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch on Wikipedia. We postponed our museum field trip because a playdate sounded more fun. We'll be hanging out at the library tomorrow, and on Sunday, we'll attempt to make a vinegar pie. (I have been assured that it's a lot better than it sounds!) Hope you had a great week, too!