Howizter Fun

Yes, we are studying World War I. No, this is not a World War I tank. If you know anything about this machine, please do tell.


This afternoon we were in town with some time to spare while Ellen was at her trumpet lesson, so Jacob, Emily, and I decided to find a few geocaches. The first geocache at Cracker Barrel was an easy find, but the one on this Howitzer was so cleverly hidden that we just about gave up. I think we spent at least 20 minutes checking this massive monster out, but to no avail. We even took Ellen back after her lesson to help search, but she also gave up. Mark met us in town (had to take a car to the shop for tires) and so we took him to the Howitzer, and what do you know, after about 10 minutes of searching, he found it! I was excited, because out of the 18 caches we've searched, we have only not found two. (It bothers me to not find a cache when I know it's there!). Fun day, fun memories.

TOG, Y4, U1 :: World War I

We started our study of WWI last week. This poster came in one of the books I bought, and so I hung it on the wall. Emily finds it fascinating. She and Jacob think the gas mask uniform looks like E.T. and they say it's "creepy." :D

Homemade Granola

Granola! Yummy Granola!

Too bad this will only last 2 or 3 days before it's all eaten.

Titanic Wooden Ship Model

In my post about Jacob's Titanic lapbook yesterday, I forgot to include a picture of Jacob with his model ship that he glued together and painted. He didn't want me to take a picture of his ship because the masts had already been broken off. At least he did smile for the photo.


By the way, the kit for the model ship is made by Darice like the one here on Amazon.

Titanic Lapbook

Today Jacob finished his Titanic lapbook. This boy of mine gets so excited about the Titanic, and he never minded working on his lapbook except for when it came to the writing parts. For me, I'm ready to move on--World War I, here we come!

the front

Jacob's drawing

three file folders

The above picture shows the booklets closed,
and the picture below shows the booklets opened up.

The photo is in a clear pocket that
flips out to reveal what's underneath.

More pictures can be found on my Flickr.

Flanders Fields::WWI

Today we read this book, In Flanders Fields: The Story of the Poem by John McCrae, by Linda Granfield, and I could not make it through without choking up. (My 10 year old must surely think I'm crazy). In light of the 10 year anniversary (yesterday) of 9-11, this story about the fallen soldiers of WWI was quite timely.

I memorized this poem by John McCrae when I was in elementary school, and surprisingly, I still can remember it. I think I'm going to have Jacob and Emily memorize it as well over the next 4 weeks as we study World War I.

After our study today, we each drew our own renditions of Flanders Fields, using the stirring illustrations by Janet Wilson as our inspiration.

Notebooking::Vocabulary Words::Landforms

My son's vocabulary words last week were all pertaining to land formations and bodies of water. Ah, the perfect setup for more notebooking pages!

I instructed my son to look up the definitions of his vocabulary words and copy them down on the paper I gave him. Afterwards, I let him look up images on the internet (under careful supervision, I might add...internet searching can yield some inappropriate images) for the specific water and land forms. We then resized the images to fit on his vocabulary pages and he next printed, cut, and pasted the pictures down. Now when we review the definitions, he has a visual picture in front of him.

I can certainly see using this format for subject-related vocabulary words in the future.

Notebooking with TOG

I have rediscovered "notebooking". Notebook pages, to be more descriptive, something I used to do eons ago when I was homeschooling my older (now graduated) children.

I like to think of notebook pages as mini posters--small posters that slide into sheet protectors and then into a notebook. A record of what we studied. A nice collection that makes a book of sorts on any given topic or a variety of topics.

Right now we are learning about the 1900s in our TOG studies. These pictures below represent some of the topics we're covering. One day, as my son's notebook gets fuller, I can envision moving all the president pages to their own notebook, and similarly grouping other pages together and moving them to create separate notebooks. Or perhaps we'll just keep everything in one gigantic notebook titled "The 1900s". Oh, the possibilities....

Lapbook::Wright Brothers

We studied about Wilbur and Orville Wright during our TOG studies a few weeks ago, and Jacob made his first lapbook.. I let Jacob choose the topics to include in the lapbook and I let him choose which pictures from the internet to use. Eventually I hope to see more writing included, but believe me, this much is great for a 10 year old boy who is reluctant to write anything.

Now we are studying the Titanic, and Jacob has begged and pleaded (okay, he asked) to make a lapbook for the Titanic. Yes, he asked. So now the Titanic lapbook is in progress.... :)

Meet Rosie

We got a new puppy! Her name is Rosie, she's 10 weeks old, she's a German shepherd, and she's going to get B.I.G.!!!!
:)

TOG, Y4, U1 :: Wright Brothers

It's been years since I've posted on this blog site! Well, I've decided to use it to post about some of our homeschool activities. This year we started using Tapestry of Grace, Year 4, which starts in the early 1900s and goes through current day history. I'm excited about studying this time period of history. It seems that all too often we teach history starting at the pilgrims and ending at the Civil War.
Last week Jacob and Emily learned about the Wright brothers and their airplane. We made model planes from instructions we found here and here. Jacob also made a lapbook of the Wright brothers, and I'll post a picture of it when I put new batteries in my camera and take a picture.