Winter Solstice

I know there are a million blog posts floating around about the solstice.. 

but hey.. here is one more :)

Our house loves this time of year... and luckily we have had a bit of snow the last couple of days to help us celebrate the returning of the light!

We take out our holiday Lego and build it together!  It our version of a gingerbread house... that we don't eat but play with for a couple weeks before we disassemble and put away for another year.

Here is a book that was recommended to me that we are really enjoying this year... 

The Return of the Light; Twelve Tales from Around the World for the Winter Solstice

 by Carolyn McVickar Edwards

Not only do we enjoy the tales... we also look up the cultures and animals featured in each story... always some sort of learning happening :)

Of course, it is a perfect time of year to go over some astronomy... 

Brainpop has a great video about solstices and equinoxes... 

We made some borax crystals the other day as we waited impatiently for the snow...  I must admit, this was the first year I've done them.  They were fun and turned out great!  

Super easy.....

1. Boil water in the kettle

2. Dissolve 3Tbps of Borax for every 1 cup of water

3. Suspend some pipecleaner shapes in the super saturated solution

4. Let the crystals grow over the next 24 hours 

Here is a YouTube video Grow your Own Crystals!

Our family solstice traditions are pretty simple... 

1. Go outside for some fun... 

we have done everything 

from sledding to snowshoeing, 

sometimes with headlamps ;)

2. Have a fire with hot cocoa and popcorn.

3. Everyone gets new jammies and a new book to curl up with. 

Go out there and welcome back the sun with a celebration of your own!

Happy Winter Solstice!

.. 

Roald Dahl Day!

We took a break from our usual routine and had a Roald Dahl day in honour of one of our favourite authors!!  

Today was his birthday... and so there were some fantastic free resources!

First we watched a Brainpop video all about Roald Dahl!

The kids did some worksheets from the Roald Dahl website, 

we loved the which character are you and what is your name!

When the kidlets were working together on the quiz and crossword puzzle 

they kept running to their room to get the right Dahl book to find the answer! 

 We found some great short videos of fairy tales retold by Dahl...

I had never seen them before.. so fun!

 And now I just need to get the books they are told from, 

Revolting Rhymes and Dirty Beasts!

For art the kids drew a picture of their favourite book or character 

and we may end up watching a  fun Roald Dahl movie tonight!!

The best part... I found the kids curled up on the couch 

rereading their favourite Dahl books!!

 

I think we may have to incorporate an author day more often!!

“There are a whole lot of things in this world of ours
you haven’t even started wondering about yet.”
Roald Dahl- James and the Giant Peach

Charlotte's Web

I wrote this post the summer of 2014... the kidlets, Goober and Sweet Pea, were 4 and 7 years old.

We had a busy summer and did a book unit on Charlotte's Web... it was so much fun.
Mostly because Charlotte'sWeb by E.B. White ranks among my favourite books!!

I read the book aloud, partially for Goober's benefit but also because I love that we can share the book together.  The kidlets usually colour, work on a craft or build Lego while I'm reading... most often outside in the grass!

So what kind of activities do I pair with Charlotte's Web?  Farms of course, lots of other books about farms including Goober's favourite Click, Clack, Moo, Cows that type.  Then we moved on to pigs and finally spiders!  We watched a great BBC documentary, Life in the Undergrowth, which has a fantastic episode about spiders.

And since it is summer I reluctantly agreed to Sweet Pea's request to do some paper mache, everybody needs a Wilbur piggy bank.  It did however take a lot longer and was more work than I anticipated, Goober lost interest after day 2 :o)  Although they were super cute.....

Some pig slop for a snack with consisted of chocolate pudding, cereal, raisins and M&Ms!  Finally after the book was done... the kidlets loved it by the way... we cuddled up on the couch with some popcorn and watched the movie. (Charlotte's Web 2006)

All about owls.....

After the success of our hedgehog unit it was Sweet Pea's chance to choose a topic.. and her latest obsession?
Owls.. anything owly will count.... and luckily there is no shortage of that!!

It started innocently enough with a request from Sweet Pea asking if we could see owlets.. which led us to this fantastic live feed of a Great Horned Owl nest....  we were able to watch a pair of owls, lay eggs and incubate them.  We watched two owlets hatch, get fed, grow and fly away... it was just fantastic!  Even now that they are gone, we have found a Barred Owl to watch... the three eggs are being incubated..right now!

Next step was to find a great read aloud book about owls... Owls in the Family by Farley Mowat was a perfect fit.  The kidlets both enjoyed the laugh out loud funny adventures of a couple of pet owls and thought it was great that it is based in Canada.

I had a harder time finding a good lapbook to go with this unit but was able to put one together from multiple sources and use what we wanted from each...  There were a couple that we wanted to add, so we made our own from the homeschoolshare website templates.

 Owl Babies Lapbook

Nocturnal Animals Lapbook

 

Owl Lapbook - with owl pellet dissection booklet

We watched a PBS documentary Owl Power and
some related Wild Kratts episodes (Desert Elves and Snowy Owl Invasion).

A friend of mine showed us some great owl rocks we could make!  So we made a trip down to the river where we searched for the perfect sized and shaped rocks, washed them off and got out our sharpies....

Sweet Pea drew some great owls...

Goober, on the other hand, made some hedgehog rocks!  

I took out a variety of non fiction books about owls to help us complete our lapbooks...
and left them around the house to look at!

Owl: A year in the life of North American Owls 

Owls

We have had a great owl pellet dissection app for awhile now.. the kidlets love it... they have to find an owl, gather the pellets, take them apart and identify the prey and how it fits into a food chain.  It is well worth the cost of the app..

 But of course I need the real thing sometimes!
I found a place in Calgary that sells owl pellets..........  and made an order.....

They were fantastic.... the kidlets used their booklet from the lapbook to record their observations through the dissection and the bone identification chart that came with the kit was awesome!

They both found multiple skulls in their pellets and were able to identify them on their own!

Here are the finished lapbooks...  Sweet Pea opted for an owl drawing on the front of hers...

Goober found a picture in an old magazine to cut out...

And finally to finish up our Owl unit we did some yoga to an owlet story... I just recently discovered Cosmic Kids Yoga and we are loving it!! 

This was a fantastic unit... so much fun and I'm sure we could have spent a lot more time on owls!! 

Which happened when Sweet Pea decided on an owl theme for her birthday.. check out these great snacks, cupcakes and craft!

Big Biology Unit!

Sweet Pea really enjoyed our foray into chemistry last year and I must admit it was a great way to cover a lot of science.  It was another thing to pull the information together and figure out the best way to organize it..... Luckily I find I'm really enjoying doing it and my degree in biology may have contributed as well :o)

 

 

I'm not going to bore you with loads of links that will probably expire... but I will list our order of discovery and a couple of fantastic books we found along the way.  If you are looking for a specific resource, please leave me a message and I'll do my best to help you out!!

I needed a spine to help guide our unit study and chose this one.. Evolution Revolution.. I like that it tells the story of creation from a variety of myths and cultures and then shows when science came in and how it changed how we look at the origin of life.

I love this book...Our Family Tree.. it is a great picture book with lovely illustrations....  there is also a great timeline at the back... 

 

And what study of the origin of life doesn't need some Sir David Attenborough...

This documentary called First Life is just fantastic!  I was unable to find a DVD, so here is a link to watch it for free!

Part 1- First Life

Part 2- First Life 

As we did with our chemistry unit, we did a scientist study...  This website is so cool for making your own scientist trading cards!

First up was Aristotle and then Carl Linnaeus... because he was the coolest classifier!  At this point we also talked about taxonomy, and binomial nomenclature :)  Here are some super cool dichotomous key worksheets... we had way too much fun with some of these!

 

DNA!! Once we figured out how things had been classified, we started discussing how we know things are related... this book; Gregor Mendel, the friar who grew peas; was fantastic!

 

We also discussed Watson and Crick, and Rosalind Franklin, who together discovered the shape of DNA, which led to pipe cleaner models and an experiment to extract DNA... so cool!

The Scientific Mom has a great tutorial for the DNA extraction.

The next scientist was Charles Darwin, which I could spend a whole unit on!  My favourite picture book was One Beetle Too Many......

 

 

We watched videos, mapped the voyage of the HMS Beagle, found examples of natural selection and learned about the Galapagos islands. Our favourite documentary about Darwin was BBC's Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life.. Check it out!

We also found this book about a young girl who reads The Origin of Species and wants to become a naturalist... in the year of 1899.  The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate was a fantastic fiction read aloud for this unit!!
 

This was a great place in our unit to look at each kingdom of life in more detail.. BBC Life series was great for this!  We also took a look at prokaryotic vs eukaryotic cells, protists, animal vs plant cells and types of cycles (water, nitrogen, carbon).

 

 And how humans impact, interact and protect life...  Sweet Pea really enjoyed learning about Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring... this was a great picture book; Rachel Carson and her book that changed the world....

The final product?  A better understanding of the natural world, kidlets that pretend they are naturalists like Charles Darwin and Calpurnia Tate in the backyard, and this completed lapbook......
 How great is Sweet Pea's drawing of Darwin and his great idea!

We found most of the elements for our lapbook at Homeschoolshare, but also made some of our own!

 We all loved this unit.... looking forward to going over it again in a few years in more detail for both Sweet Pea and Goober!  Next up.... physics!