A Few Things We've Been Up To Lately

We began our adventure a couple of weeks ago mostly with some simple math review.  Getting back into the rhythm of things.  Math is one of those areas that seem to be plagued by simple mistakes.  As we know, there is no room for simple mistakes in math.  So brushing up on some basics is a definite must for us. 

You'll have to forgive the sideways photos, it's refusing to co-operate and turn for me.  But you can see that our math review consisted of basic addition, subtraction, times tables 1 - 12, as well as a few fractions.  The Gingersnap math lesson was particularly tasty and fun.  He scores an A+ on that one.

 After our meeting with our teacher at the home learning school we were encouraged to pick a subject from which we could gravitate our studies around.  It could be anything.  Of course Mckenzie picked insects.  His pick, not mine, that's for sure.  But September and October are great months to focus on insects, particularly spiders.  So in spite of my extreme dislike of spiders it became our goal to chart them on our way to and from K's school.  We made note of how many empty webs we saw as well as spiders in their webs, either in full sun or shade.  We charted the results for both morning and afternoon when the temperatures were quite different.  Today we made a graph to show the results.  We will continue to use his research to make a fraction chart as well as he made a neighbourhood map and we'll use colour dots to represent every spider we see and where we see it.  (update: we marked spiders in webs and empty webs since the sun was not so much of a factor today.  The end tally was 50 spiders and 34 empty webs, down quite a bit from last week)

 Another interest Mckenzie has is skeletons.  So we scooped up this DVD from the public library and worked it into a project.  Well, not so much of a project as it was just noting things he did and did not know before watching the show.  As expected, the printing and spelling are still areas of struggle but that just means there is room for improvement.

 We will be using Picture of the Day as one of our writing tools.  You take any photo, this one happens to be from an old National Geographic and write about it.  His goal set before him was to write his thoughts and inferences about the past present and future surrounding this photo.  We used old school brainstorming methods to come up with the main themes.  He then told me his story aloud while I scribed it on the computer. 

 

Another great resource we picked up from the library is this audio book, How To Train Your Dragon.  It's great for down time when we don't want to have screen time but it's still nice to listen to a story.  I personally love the Scottish accents used. 

And this is the book Mckenzie is currently reading.  He's watched the movie before and enjoyed it so we got the book and it's just one more book he is thoroughly enjoying.  He's watched the 2nd movie as well and the second book is waiting on the shelf to be read. 

As well as these things, we're continuing with Lumosity, and online brain game program. It takes roughly 15-30 minutes a day.  It's simple yet good training for his brain to work in ways it doesn't necessarily come by naturally.  He loves seeing how his accuracy, skill level, achievements etc... are charted. 

He's also out on his bike doing tours around the neighbourhood in between work as well.  As the rains threaten, we want to make sure we get him out there as much as possible.  So nice to do 'work' outside rather than always sitting at a table looking through a window.

And he's also been enjoying a new TV series called Brain Games (?) on the National Geographic channel.  It's about how the brain and our senses play tricks on us and a whole gamete of interesting facts.  Quite entertaining.

For the most part I think that covers what we've been up to - at least the gist of it, for today.