OMSI

The Freckle and Shady family at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.

We played and explored.

We watched an informative, but scary dinosaur movie.

(Please excuse the crappy photos. I forgot my camera...again. Thank goodness for cell phones!)

Spider Lapbook

Our spider studies have come to a close. As has become our new custom with studies like this, we finish with a lapbook.

I found a lot of the mini books here, just page down the list to spiders. Enchanted Learning has some of the pieces we used, too. SpiderRoom.info has a wealth of information and great pictures. Be sure to turn your sound down. The animated spiders talk.

I have to say that finding resources for this lapbook was the hardest so far. We did have lots of spiders around the house and yard we observed which is always a great bonus in a lesson.

Princess decided on a colorful spider for the cover.

Since she is just learning to write, Princess isn't comfortable writing long answers. Here we found the definition and pasted the answers with the vocabulary words.

For shorter answers she is happy to write.

She really likes to make the number 8!

Princess enjoyed answering the questions at the end of this mini book.

Here she wrote the short words and I wrote the long ones.

These are spider defenses and offenses.

Here Princess labeled the parts of a spider.

Who doesn't love a little poetry?

Sorry for the sideways photo. Blogger is acting funky.

Anyway, here we have spider life cycle cards.

These were my biggest challenge by far.

I finally took the life cycle from SpiderRoom.info and

made them into sorting cards.

Sorry for the funky photos. I think maybe I need to wipe my lens. ;P

Spider Studies

Continuing our spider study, we decided to make a spider egg sac. We used beads for spider eggs. We put the "eggs" into a balloon and blew it up.

We wrapped the balloon with yarn as our spider silk.

We mixed a glue wash.

covered the sac with glue wash

and waited days for it to dry

When it was finally dry, Princess popped the balloon with a pin.

It worked!

If you look closely, you can see one of the "spider eggs" inside the "egg sac".

Pretty cool project, huh? I love homeschooling!

I'm Hooked on Lapbooking

I found some really cool lapbook resources that I wanted to share.

Homeschool Share has TONS of templates and lapbooks topics already designed. This is where I found materials and lots of information for our butterfly lapbook. They also have a huge variety of blank pockets and books that you can print and design yourself. Oh, and they are free! Very cool!

You can also find information and templates at Homeschool Helper. Homeschool Helper offers lapbook folding instructions as well. These are free, too!

For other materials, I simply Googled what I was looking for.

We did another lapbook today. For this one I Googled "money lapbook" and found this and Googled around and found some other things.

Another really cool find...Enchanted Learning. I've been pondering joining this since we started homeschooling. You can get lots of stuff from them for free, but if you become a member for only $20 for a whole year, you have access to even more and banner free printing. Here I found several of the booklets we used in our lapbooks.

Here is our money lapbook.

Later, we continued reading the 'Bugs & Insects' book we got at Costco. The second chapter is about spiders. Princess really enjoys placing the stickers.

Can you guess what our next lapbook subject will be? ;)

Butterflies

I have mentioned that we're homeschoolers, right? Yes, it has been a while since I've posted anything that we've learned. That is probably because we spent a month not doing any official school work. Not that we didn't learn anything, I mean really, how can one not learn?

Anyway, we spent the last week of so learning about butterflies. We found four awesome science books at Costco. We started with "Bugs & Insects".

The books are well written and interactive, using stickers to answer questions at various points in the book. Princess loved this.

When we started this book, I had no intention of doing anything more than reading, placing stickers and discussing what we read.

A while back, I heard the word lapbooking. I had no idea what it was. A friend showed me her lapbook, but I never did anything.

When I started reading Sherry's Living and Learning blog I began to get more curious about lapbooking. She has created some pretty awesome lapbooks with her son. One day she mentioned that there are tons of resources available on the internet. That was enough to get me hooked. I love Googling! I was ready for us to create our very first lapbook.

I decided that butterflies would be a great topic and began scouring the internet for resources. I found a ton of them! Here is what Princess and I created.

I hope you enjoyed our first lapbook. We are looking forward to making A LOT more. Isn't this the perfect way to summarize what we've learned? They make wonderful keepsakes, too.

More Sid the Science Kid

In an effort to keep from boring myself with inane posts about pain, I now bring you something completely different.

A couple weeks ago we learned about animal homes on Sid the Science Kid. Then we built a nest and made a bird to live in the nest.We gathered materials from the yard: sticks, twigs, stems, leaves, dried grass We even found a bug in our materials that we gently returned to the outside.

We used a bowl to help form the nest...

...and glue to hold it all together because we aren't as good at weaving these things as birds are...

and made a bird for our nest...

...and ended up with this.

Mommy's Nose Failed

After watching each episode of Sid the Science Kid, we do the observation in the show and/or the activities presented on the Sid the Science Kid website.Today we watched the "What's That Smell" episode. For the observation, I placed familiar smells into jars. Princess smelled one jar at a time, blindfolded, and then she drew what she thought she smelled. She was right 3 out of 4 times. Pretty great observations!

Then Princess wanted me to do my own observations. I gave her four jars and let her loose in the kitchen. Then it was time for my observations. She put the first jar under my nose, but I couldn't smell anything. She put the second jar under my nose, again I smelled nothing. I smell nothing with the third jar as well. What is wrong with my nose? The fourth jar, finally, I smelled something! Toothpaste! But what was wrong with me? Why I couldn't smell the other jars?

After removing my blind fold, I understood.

Jar #1: play money

Jar #2: salt

Jar #3: water

Jar #4: toothpaste