Book Sharing Monday :: The ABC Book of American Homes

The ABC Book of American Homes is written by Michael Shoulders and illustrated by Sarah S. Brannen. We love alphabet books and this one is another wonderful one. As the title suggests, this is an ABC of all different types of homes that can be found in the USA, and for most in Canada as well. This book was labelled for preschool 3-5 years old at the city library, but I think it would be good for much older kids as well. You could use it as an introduction to house architecture and certain pages really open up to more reading, for example the straw house page got us talking about the type of materials that could be used to make a more "green" house. We also were interested in the "junk" house, which uses materials that were thrown out by other people. Here is a short quote from that page:

"J is for Junk House. This type of house is made of materials that most people send to the dump. The shingles on the roof might be recycled rubber. The family may walk on carpet made from discarded soda bottles."

Year 5 :: Week 10 Home Learning Report

This week was a short week! We celebrated Thanksgiving on Monday here in Canada and we took a day trip to Kitchener/Waterloo area on Thursday. My husband had a meeting there for work and we visited family too.  

We covered our main subjects of Math and Language Arts. We also did French on Tuesday, reviewing greetings, family members names, numbers, and colours. Adrienne also reviewed the verbs "etre" and "avoir".

In World Geography, we completed our study of South America. Along with map work, we completed a comparaison chart. In this chart we compared the size of the countries chose, the population density, the infant mortality rate, and the government. 

We are continuing our read aloud of Chasing Vermeer and really enjoying it!
A very light week for us!

Interesting TED Talks for Home Learners

I shared before a few TED talks, here and here. I enjoyed listening and sharing Sir Ken Robinson's "Do Schools kill creativity?". Just a few days ago, I posted on my facebook a link for another Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk. This one is called "Bring on the learning revolution!":




I received a few days ago an e-mail from bachelorsdegreeonline.com, which I thought was junk at first! It was actually a personal message letting me know about a link to one of their pages. They have put together a list of 50 Awesome and Inspiring TED Talks for Homeschoolers. The list is divided into sections Arts & Culture, Business, Sciences, Technology, World Issues and each talk shared has a short description along with the link.

Lego Quest # 27 :: Archeology

This week's theme for the Lego Quest was "archeology" and both Adrienne and Andre participated.

This is the story Andre told me : "The red pile of bricks is an egg. This egg is from when the dinosaurs died, there was a dragon there and the dragon threw the egg out of the atmosphere. The egg started to orbit the earth and one day it was hit by a meteorite and it came hurdling back into the atmosphere. It struck this area and the people that work at Area 51 came to excavate it. They are planning on bringing it to Area 51 and putting it in an electrical cage until it hatches. The person with the number 10 on its back is looking for evidence in the soil. The person with the space helmet is looking for evidence in the water. The person with the red top and blue pants  (holding the pile of red bricks) is pulling the egg out of the water."

Here is Adrienne's archeology site's description which goes with the photo below: "The black tent is where they examined the objects found at the site. On the site there are more objects dug up, broom, wheel, money, treasure chest, lamp. One digger found the head of R2-D2 in the dirt by the river. The brown area has been all dug up, the green area on the other side of the river will be dug up later." 

Book Sharing Monday :: One Halloween Night

We have been enjoying many Halloween themed picture books for the last few weeks. You can see some in my librarything widget right below the main blog header.

This morning I asked Celeste to choose her latest favourite to share with you.

One Halloween Night is written and illustrated by Mark Teague. He is the illustrator for those wonderful How Do Dinosaurs... books.

This picture book has great artwork and the story is a lot of fun too.

Three kids are looking forward to Halloween, but this halloween seems to be a little different for them. Their costumes aren't really what they had planned,  the candy is different and the evening just keeps on getting more strange.

A fun Halloween story!

"At other houses, the treats were weird, or awful. Soon their bags were full of candy with names like "Broccoli Chews," "Sweet'n'Sauerkraut",  and "Eggplant Fizzlers."