Biography writing

So I told X he has to write more, and just so happened in his book there is a unit about biographies. So he wrote one about me. It says I am special because I like to play video games. Hmm, I think he was thinking about himself on that one! But focused and hardworking all the same.

Little writer

Perhaps its just me, but I'm thinking that the fact my not yet 5 yr old writes more than my almost 8 year old is pretty interesting! She needed help with spelling, but this was all her! His handwriting is much clearer and he can write more words without help, but she WANTS to write and I have to threaten him in order to get a single word out.

It says-
"Deep in Jellyfish fields [in] a Pineapple, he turned into Gary"

byzantine empire & lego learning

Today is the first day that A hasn't had preschool.  We decided she was ready to be done going mornings to her preK class because she's developmentally ready to do harder work and, quite frankly, I don't want to be running around when winter comes.  She's been very excited about the idea of staying home and doing school with X so I'm hopeful that it'll work out well.


This morning we started out doing Lego school using materials from here and the redirect to the lapbook on the same site.  The kids worked mostly on math skills with this project.  The did estimating, measuring with legos, measuring with a tape measure, and graphing the colors of legos.  A also did some handwriting copying the color words.  She started to get bored so she went off and played with some army men for a bit ;)  While she was doing that, X finished up some language arts work from last week.  He worked on dictionary skills, looking up spelling words and writing down the number of meanings those words have.


Then we started working together again using Story of the World we are studying the Byzantine Empire.  Specifically Justinian and Theodora.  I totally lucked out because at after-Christmas shopping yesterday I found this mosaic kit on clearance so it was perfect timing!  A was particularly impressed to learn that Theodora was a wool spinner before she became the Empress!  While X worked on the mosaic and A colored some paper dolls of Justinian and Theodora, I read the history book telling the story as well as the Byzantine story of Saint Nicholas (again, perfect timing since Christmas was just a couple days ago!)  After lunch we'll be working on some math and reading then it'll be off to theater rehearsal this evening.  Busy day!


LEGO SCHOOL

LANGUAGE ARTS

BYZANTINE EMPIRE

Video Games & Homeschooling

Who says playing video games is ALL bad? As an example of real life application of learning, today my son was playing "Math Whack-A-Mole" on the Nook. Yes, its an educational app, but thats not the real win here ;) What I thought was cool is when he told me-

"Oh man, I only got 241 points but the high score was 251. I needed 11 more to set a new high score." This is math in action!

Maybe its just me, but seems this type of unschooled applied learning is much more practical than rote memorization of facts.