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! 

Wordless Wednesday :: Math with Celeste and Orion

Weekly Wrap-Up ~ Three Weeks Worth!

We have been busy! I will try to condense three weeks worth of wrap-ups in one post, without putting hundreds of photos!

Starting with our regular subjects, we are finished with some and took an inventory of what still needed to be done with a count of lessons for each subject. Here are some highlights:

Andre is now finished his Math Teaching Textbooks 6 and after a two week break, he started Teaching Textbooks 7. Celeste also started Saxon Math 2! I thought I would never go back to Saxon but I decided to give it a try with her. Miquon Math and its discovery-based style worked out nicely, but I felt that she now needs a bit more in this subject. We'll see how it goes, we are giving it a try since we already had it (from Andre). Adrienne has about 50 lessons left in her Teaching Textbooks Pre-Algebra.

Andre is also finished with his Growing with Grammar 6 and is now taking a break, since I don't have the next one yet. He has been working on his writing for the last couple of months with the help of Write Source 2000. Adrienne is also well on her way with Growing with Grammar 8 and with her writing. She has been using Format Writing and I can see a big improvement since last year in her essays.

One subject that we are definitely behind in is spelling! We are using Sequential Spelling but have missed many days. We will work through the summer on it. It only takes a few minutes a day.

Now, for what happened in the last three weeks...

We finished our study of Canadian History too! This took us all the way to our current time and we wrapped it up with a brief study of our government and politics, since Voting Day was on May 2. We also learned about the Census which is happening this month in Canada. I had requested teachers materials from the government (free), which are also available for download here.  These materials are for various ages and we were able to all work together. My kids enjoyed the activity where they were acting as town planner and had to study the census data given to decide the best locations for a playground, a seniors centre, and a health care centre. They also liked the colouring pages!

In World Geography, we finished our study of Asia and are now learning about Australia. Adrienne has always been interested in Australia, so we'll make sure to spend a little extra time studying it! We are adding some library books, more are coming, especially on Dreamtime! The next unit in our geography study is the last one, Antarctica.

We also did some Art and Music Appreciation over the last three weeks. We listened to Richard Wagner and admired John James Audubon's work.

In Science, we are wrapping up our study of Physics. We now have 3 topics left to cover (lights, optics, and electronics). We covered sound and electricity over these last two weeks. I had picked up a documentary at the library to add to our study. We really enjoyed it, it was a nice change from reading. I will be looking for more from this series at our library. The series is from Disney, called the Science of Disney Imagineering. It is geared to grades 5 to 8, but Celeste enjoyed watching it too. We watched the Electricity one. You can see a little video about the series below:






We also had a lot of fun these last couple of weeks, the weather has been better..even hot! We enjoyed our time outside, going for walks, playing in the driveway, having popsicles and much more!

We attended the Science Rendezvous at the local University (see previous post). We celebrated my birthday by visiting Point Pelee National Park and so, I will leave you with a few of my favourite photos from that day:

This post is part of the Weekly Wrap-Up hosted by Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers. Visit her blog to read more posts by other homeschool families!

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday ~ Skittles Math

Weekly Wrap-Up ~ Snow, Science and Sewing!

Another weekly wrap-up? Another week has flown by! We are continuing our school work with science and math. We also finally had snow here, so the kids took advantage of it! I continued working on Celeste's felt food present, and Clara kept me company.

Here are a few photos of our week:

Lego creations..

Fun in the snow! We took a few walks with Orion, made snowmen, went sledding in the field near our house..lots of fun! The "extra kids" in the photo with the sleds are our neighbours. They all went sledding late afternoon, for only thirty minutes before the sun went down. Another beauty of homeschooling, being able to play during the day in the snow for as long as you want!

Inside, we worked on puzzles...this is a new one a dear aunt sent us in the mail:

Finally, I wanted to talk about a new-to-us series of biographies by Kathleen Krull called Giants of Science. I read Isaac Newton this week as our read aloud for science and loved it! It was very interesting, funny at times, and related perfectly to our physics studies. We will be reading Leonardo Da Vinci soon, and Andre wants to read Sigmund Freud as well. Check the other titles available here. I highly recommend the series, for children 10 and up. If you do read Isaac Newton, you might want to know that the author mentions the word "homosexual" very briefly in chapter nine. This wasn't an issue for our family, but I wanted to point it out.

I am not sure if I will be sharing a weekly wrap-up next week, but we are planning on continuing our science experiments until friday. My husband works a lot this time of year, so we rather mirror his schedule and take time off after the holidays.

If you would like to read more wrap-ups from other homeschoolers, please visit Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Another great TED talk, this time about Math!

An Early Start for Celeste

Celeste has been asking to work on her math (Miquon) for the last two mornings, first thing in the morning when she wakes up, so we have, with a little help from Clara and Orion!

It's Learn Nothing Day today, July 24! We obviously failed, but I wanted to pass the word around!

World Maths Day Broke Their Record!

We are so happy to have been part of this event. World Maths Day was a great experience for Andre and Adrienne. They loved seeing which country their competitors were from. They even logged in at different times to see what other countries they could go against. It was a great educational math activity, that also had us talking about geography and time zones.

Here is the current message from the official World Maths Day site:

"World Maths Day is all over! Congratulations on a new World Record!



1,133,246 students and 56,082 schools from 235 countries have united to set a new world record by correctly answering 479,732,613 questions.


2011 will be even bigger with World Maths Day becoming part of the The World Education Games. Everyone is invited to unite the world in learning!"

Next year, there will be a Maths Day on March 2nd, a Science Day on March 9th, and a Spelling Day on March 16th! Mark your calendars!

World Maths Day

Adrienne and Andre have been practising these last few weeks on the World Maths Day site, in preparation for today. The competition started yesterday and continues on today.

This year, more than two million students from 37,000 schools in 200 countries are taking part in the online competition. (Toronto Star).

They have both really enjoyed competing against other children from all over the world. They are already talking about next year and how to prepare for it, mostly how they want to learn how to type!

Math Curse ~ A fun picture book full of math problems!

I am not a huge fan of math...but this picture book "Math Curse" by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith was so much fun to read aloud. The kids and I tried to work out most problems as we were going through it.
A couple of quotes from the book that made us laugh:
"English is a word problem: .... #2 Does tunafish + tunafish = fournafish?" I know, I know...pretty cheesy but we loved it!
The other one was :
"Social Studies is a geography problem: The Mississippi River is about 4000 km long. An M&M is about 1 cm long. .... #2 Estimate how many M&Ms you would eat if you had to measure the Mississippi River with M&Ms."

Dragon and Fairy enjoyed this quick picture book. For another Math related book suggestion, that is a little bit longer, we liked reading "The Cat in Numberland" this past spring.

The History of Counting ~ A great living math book

We read this book, The History of Counting by Denise Schmandt-Besserat this morning during our math time. We all thought it was quite interesting, blending history and mathematics. The author, who is also an archaeologist, explains how counting evolved from little marks on bones done by hunters and gatherers to our Arabic numeric system of today.
Here is a cute idea to make your own little abacus with Popsicle sticks and beads!

Another Interesting Living Math Resource

I read about this series of Business Math on one of the Yahoo Groups I subscribed to.
This resource is available on the Simply Charlotte Mason website, as a printed text or as an e-book. Here is a description from the website:
"Your Business Math Series is a fun and “living math” kit that reinforces math skills for ages 8–12! Your student uses his math knowledge to keep his very own store running and, hopefully, make a profit. But there are also some surprises along the way!"
I thought this might be a great way to review math skills, it can be completed in a few weeks or a whole school year. The student can choose to "run" a pet store, a book store or a sports store. They cover many aspects of running a store...sales, inventory, paying bills, writing checks, keeping a bank account ledger, etc.

Happy Day! Math is done for Dragon!

I know it might seem a bit silly to post about having finished our Math curriculum, but Dragon and I are both so happy we are done with Saxon Math Grade 3!

All 140 lessons are done, all 27 assessments and all 168 fact sheets completed.

The plan for the summer is to do only a little bit of Math using Mammoth Math. The first set we will do is about Canadian Money. The focus is on counting coins, counting and making change, dollar-amounts, mental math and solving simple money problems.

I also want to add some living math and will be using this link to find book titles. Video games are always appreciated around here...so I thought this Cyberchase site would be fun for them to try.

There are more suggestions for math games at the Living Math site .

Fairy only has 2 lessons left so she will be done very soon too! YEAH!

More Math?

I was planning on doing some fun math games and reading math stories this summer, but I think we have already started!

I found this DVD at the library yesterday. Dragon, Princess and I watched it this morning, while Fairy was painting. It was really well done. Here is a link that explains more : Reading Rainbow "How Much is a Million?" .
I was expecting just the book to be read aloud, along with the illustrations. I haven't watched this PBS show before, so I didn't know how it worked. After the story, there was a visit to the Crayola Crayon Factory and to the Giants Stadium. The Giants Stadium talked about estimating, how they need to estimate the amount of food that will be serve, how many toilet paper rolls they will need for the 72 washrooms!
You can watch a sneak peak here. There is also a Parent/Teacher page with some extra ideas to go along with the book, check it out here and here.

Cute Little Math Story Book

Dragon is having fun with this story. It talks about the Numbers living at the Hotel Infinity. The black and white illustrations are appealing and Dragon laughs every time we read about the cat that is trying to figure things out!
Fun and Math don't usually go in the same phrase for me, but in this case...it does!
The book is " The Cat in Numberland" written by Ivar Ekeland.