Canadian Home Learning

Wednesday, 1 February, 2012

Educational and Fun Events in February

February is full of fun and educational activities that you can do with your children at home!

{photo from Mystery Class site}

Journey North Mystery Class started this past Monday, but it's not too late to register and take part. "Mystery Class is a global game of hide-and-seek. Follow photoperiod clues to search for ten secret sites around the world. Track sunlight to solve a mystery! Discover the reasons for seasons along the way".

(photo from World Education Games)

World Maths Day, World Spelling Day, and World Science Day will held again this year in March. "The World Education Games is the exciting event for ALL schools and students around the world. It runs from 6-8 March, involving 5.5million students from over 200 countries and territories. Practice opens on 1 February. This is the global challenge to get ALL students (4-18 years of age) excited about learning, and to give the top students in each school an opportunity to see how they measure up against the best". Homeschoolers are welcomed! We have participated for the last two years and enjoyed these free events. Practice starts today!

(photo from GBBC)

The Great Backyard Bird Count is held February 17 to 20 this year. "The Great Backyard Bird Count is an annual four-day event that engages bird watchers of all ages in counting birds to create a real-time snapshot of where the birds are across the continent. Anyone can participate, from beginning bird watchers to experts. It takes as little as 15 minutes on one day, or you can count for as long as you like each day of the event. It’s free, fun, and easy—and it helps the birds".

Tower of Freedom statue in Windsor

Black History Month is in February as well. Black History Canada has an interesting website with teacher resources. Family Education also has excellent resources with many links: Celebrate Black History Month. I have a few reading suggestions from my past Book Sharing Monday posts here including related links.

Homemade Valentines 2011

Valentine's Day is February 14 and so many sweet ideas are floating around, especially on Pinterest! We liked making these valentines in 2010.

Groundhog Day is tomorrow, February 2nd! Kaboose has a nice page of the history, activities, and crafts to do.,

So much to do this month! I hope you have a wonderful time with your children learning and discovering together!

Saturday, 28 January, 2012

Weekly Wrap Up :: Weeks 19 & 20

We have had two full weeks of homeschooling and also have been busy with showing our house. We are hoping it won't take too long!

We have been very consistent with completing our school work, all the math and language arts lessons were completed every day. Andre switched in the new year his spelling, grammar, and writing curriculum and so far we are both very pleased with the change. He is now back to using Growing with Grammar, which we feel is a better and complete curriculum than the Gage Language Power. When I was ordering his grammar, he noticed that they also offered spelling "Soaring with Spelling and Vocabulary" and writing "Winning with Writing" at his level now and after checking it out further, we decided to try those as well. He has done well with the spelling so far and the writing is interesting for him and gives him more practice than the assignments from Lightning Literature (which he still doing too).

In other subjects, we have learned about animal classification, cnidarians, worms, and echinoderms. Celeste and Andre are working with the same curriculum and we are all enjoying this one. R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey has been a winner in our family this year! I add library books and internet links to our lessons and we complete the labs suggested. I have found that this curriculum has been helpful in helping Celeste discover the field of life science and for Andre, it has been a great review.

A couple of notable links we visited related to what we studied were (we were very interested in jelly fish and in starfish!):

Monterey Bay Aquarium Jelly Fish Animal Guide

National Geographic Kids - Jellyfish (check out the video)

Jellyfish colouring page

Source: mesa.edu.au via Alexandra on Pinterest

For starfish, we enjoyed watching a few videos on youtube, especially this one:

Starfish eating

We will be doing the lab part of our worm study in the spring, when we can find them. We did read a couple of library books about them, and enjoyed Yucky Worms by Vivian French especially. You can see inside the book here.

In ancient history, we studied Greece, Crete and the Minoans, and we are now listening to the Tales from the Odyssey by Mary Pope Osborne. We found this seven disc set at our local library and we have all enjoyed this.

In world geography and cultures, we were also in Greece last week! We tasted Moussaka, an entree made with eggplants and ground lamb or beef (I used turkey).

Moussaka straight out of the oven!

This week, in geography, we studied Italy. We used the Enchantment of the World book and I found a great book of old Italian tales retold by Domenico Vittorini called The Thread of Life. We also used google maps to "visit" Venice and another area of Italy where I had spent some time vacationing with a friend and her family many many years ago!

Last Monday (23) marked the start of the Chinese New Year. We found this page interesting Chinese New Year for Kids and a friend on facebook shared a page with gorgeous photos of the celebrations.

Canadian Home Learning is now on Google+ ! You can find the link on the left side of the blog. I am keeping the facebook page as well. I have been on Google+ for a while now, but haven't used it a lot yet! I have been quite busy over at Pinterest (that's quite addicting!!), you can also find the link on the left. I have pinned many links related to homeschooling, I have tried to organize them efficiently. All of them start with "learn" then the subject. Let me know if you use either Google+ or Pinterest by leaving a comment!