martinzoo

Nope!

Paper lunch bags and glue. Yep, I swear!

This was my part of the “yes” day. I wanted to do a craft.

First we made a pattern from a poplar leaf.

And cut out a bunch of them, enough to have two sides for eight or nine leaves.

We squeezed glue all over one leaf….

………. bent a floral wire and lay it in the glue…….

……..then covered it with another leaf.

Here is the fun part. You paint the entire surface of the leaf with school glue on one side (you’ll do the other side later). Don’t leave any of the brown paper showing because you are going to burn the glue, which won’t catch on fire. But if you leave the bag part exposed, that might catch on fire. So just don’t.

Now holding the leaf by the stem, hold the glue side against the flame. This is probably an activity to be done with a child who listens to directions well. GB had no problem at all. The wire did not get hot, and the leaves never caught on fire. But if they did, you’d just quickly blow them out. It’s all in the glue application.

The flame will blacken the glue, which is normal.

When you’ve finished with all the leaves paint and burn the other side of each leaf and leave them in a good spot to air dry.

The very hardest part of this craft was waiting for the glue to be completely dry. Don’t go to the next step until they are absolutely dry.

Next you’ll want to wipe them all off gently with a soft tissue or paper towel. Some of it will remain blackened, which only adds to the cool effect.

Here is a close up of the leaves. They really are so cool. It’s hard to believe that you can get that kind of color and shine from glue!

As you will recall from my Monday post, GB and I have been having sort of a rough week. His attitude hasn’t been the best. And he’s been holding back on our curriculum. He didn’t complain outwardly about the curriculum, but he’s had no enthusiasm for it; even for the science and history, which he typically loves. And I’ve felt all week like I was saying, ‘No, no, no’ over and over.

I’m probably a pushover, but on the advice of several of my readers, I decided to give GB a break from the curriculum. We can definitely afford it, we’re about two weeks ahead of schedule. So, today was a “Yes” day. He loves to go traipsing through the State Park down the way, and we have a cut-through path right across the street from us. So today we had a nature day for him, and for me, we did a really cool craft; which I will post later….. It’s not quite dry.

We were a little distressed that some of the pathways are getting a bit overgrown. It seems like people aren’t using the park paths these days.

We saw a surprising variety of wildflowers, which we haven’t identified yet, but we’ll do that soon.

And I showed him how some of the wildflowers disperse their seeds.

I love this pretty pink flower. It was such a contrast to all the greens and browns on the ground.

And the foliage is just so pretty here in central Virginia.

GB thought this moss felt just like carpet.

And this stuff felt just like the sponges that you pay a fortune for in the bed and bath stores. It’s roots didn’t go very deep at all. In fact, GB felt bad that he disturbed this little puff from it’s spot.

Check out the lichen in these photos. The green lichen in the bottom photo didn’t even look real to us, and we were there!

And, omg! It was a mushroom day! We saw so many different kinds of mushrooms. We are going to have to look through our field guides and identify all these. So many colors!

This one had a pretty lacy edge and was quite large.

But not as big as this one, which is splitting under it’s own weight.

This was a strange looking mushroom. I’d never seen colors or a shape like this. It sort of reminded me of a turkey sculpture….LOL! And no, folks, that is not an upside down mushroom. That is the way it was growing. Don’t bother trying to enlarge it, it’s fuzzy. Too bad, because it was so cool.

This one just made me think of houses for fairies. It’s so perfectly shaped, with just the right overhang. Aren’t they amazing in their perfection?

This shroom reminded me of the shape of my morning glories. Doesn’t it have that trumpet shape to it?

Again……. HUGE!

These little red ones were so cute! And I didn’t even notice the cool spider web in the background.

And for those folks that think we’ve come out of our drought….. I’d like to post exhibit A. This used to have running water about as high as that branch there.

I’m sorry for those family members who have slow computer collections. I know you don’t like it when I put so many pictures on my posts. But I just couldn’t decide on which photos to eliminate. So I kept them all.

It was a great “yes” day. Maybe we’ll do it again. And hopefully, GB’s mood will be much better the next time we sit down with our curriculum. I really want my easy-going guy back.

This past August my sister moved away. It’s been sad for the whole family. You get used to people just being down the road and easily accessible. And when I get pictures like this one, I miss her and her family even more. She is a teacher and they were dressing up for ‘Decades Day’ at her school. Being a child of the eighties made the choice an easy one for her.

I miss you Slick!!

Because I’ve been pulling my hair out all afternoon!

Today was one of those awful homeschooling days that makes you wonder about it all.

GB was in the most uncooperative, annoying, distracted, disinterested mood EVER!

This was a weird morning. I did something this morning that I haven’t done in many, many years; I overslept. It caused my dh to be late to work, too. Basically, if I don’t wake up, he doesn’t wake up. I am the family alarm clock. So it was a very strange start to the day.

So I decided to flip-flop our usual day. Usually GB does his curriculum until lunchtime, and then he does his unit study after lunch. That way, we get our most important work done early. But since we only had a small part of the morning available, I told him he could work on his unit study.

This unit is going to be TOTALLY self-directed learning. GB wants to learn about Delta Force Special Operations Teams. This is not my forte. So I told him to do some research and find some key bits of information. I wanted him to learn the history of Delta Force, the main figureheads who drive the team, special equipment that they need, special training that they go through, and some of their more widely publicized missions. And he was very happy to go off on his own and do some self learning. He worked diligently all morning on it.

After lunch, I told him we would do our curriculum studies, which were all Math, since this is Monday.

And we hit a brick wall.

Ugh! Frustrating!

It was not a complicated concept to learn. In fact, we went over it easily last year.  We were working on the properties of multiplication.

Multiplication Properties

There are four properties involving multiplication that will help make problems easier to solve. They are the commutative, associative, multiplicative identity and distributive properties.

Commutative property: When two numbers are multiplied together, the product is the same regardless of the order of the multiplicands. For example 4 X 2 = 2 X 4

Associative Property: When three or more numbers are multiplied, the product is the same regardless of the grouping of the factors. For example (2 X 3) X 4 = 2 X (3 X 4)

Identity Property: The product of any number and one is that number. For example 5 X 1 = 5.

Distributive property: The sum of two numbers times a third number is equal to the sum of each addend times the third number. For example 4 X (6 + 3) = 4 X 6 + 4 X 3

But all I kept getting from GB was a blank stare……….. He just kept looking at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. Then he would giggle and laugh at my frustration. Or, he would shrug his shoulders and say, “Um, I don’t know.” Or, too often to count, he’d just give me any old answer, not usually the correct one. I should have just quit and came back to it another day. He was so bad that I ended up punishing him by taking away a toy he has been fascinated with. He’ll get that back on Thursday…. It would have been Wednesday, but he back-talked me.

I need to get better at coming back to things later. It’s hard for me to go with the flow. I have my plans, and I try really hard to get through them in an orderly manner. And it is frustrating to realize that so many hours of our day, today, were wasted.

It didn’t help that I got SO many phone calls today, either. Other people are forgetting that we are busy doing school also. Maybe I should just turn off the ringer………. But then, what if there were an emergency? Maybe I should just not answer. USE that caller ID. Then I could call people back later.

Man! I’m sorry to post so negatively. I just needed to vent.

Thank you……….. I’m going to go fix my bald head now………..

Tomorrow is a new day.

A diamante poem follows a very specific format – there are seven lines, and each line must have a specific number and type of words. When it’s finished, the poem will be in the shape of a diamond.

Line 1= Topic (noun)
Line 2 = Two describing words (adjectives)
Line 3 = Three action words (-ing verbs)
Line 4 = Four words: (nouns) the first two words relate to line 1 and the last two words relate to line 7
Line 5 = Three action words for the ending noun (-ing verbs)
Line 6 = Two words to describe ending noun (adjectives)
Line 7 = Ending noun (opposite of Line 1)

GB wrote this diamante poem today.

*                                 War

*                      Violent, Destructive

*               Killing, Fighting, Shooting

*         Battle,     Gun,     People,     Home

*              Hoping, Working, Talking

*                        Secure, Calm

*                               Peace

Gramma and Grampa came over yesterday and took advantage of our park day with the homeschoolers. Our group alternates parks every other week. And this particular park is pretty far for us to get to. It takes us about 40 minutes to get there. But that just goes to show how spread out the homeschoolers are around here.

Anyway, we homeschoolers usually meet around 1:30. And Grampa has been bugging GB and I to go letterboxing again soon. So when I went on the letterboxing site I saw that there were several boxes in this particular park. So I fullfilled my haircutting duties and off we went to the park.

Once we got there I discovered I had made a major boo-boo. I had forgotten to bring the clues to the letterbox. I was SO bummed. But Gramma and Grampa were so enchanted with the park that we decided to just do the nature trail, which turned out to be about a mile and a half trek around the park. And it is SUCH a beautiful trail. It skims right along the beautiful James River and has lots of benches to sit and watch the water flow. I loved it!

Here, GB is partaking of one of the nicely placed benches, and getting acorns dropped on his head……..LOL!

The wind was something fierce. See how it’s blowing his shirt all over? GB was genuinely worried that he may get blown away.  In fact, as I write, we are under a wind advisory.

Here are Gramma and Grampa with their nicely coiffed hair.

Isn’t the river pretty?

This was a boat landing. Although, I couldn’t imagine actually bringing ours out here. It’s pretty dry. But maybe it’ll be better next year. GB was enjoying the hill while Grampa conducted an experiment to prove which way the river flowed. I said something about how the river was flowing fast, and he said “No, that’s just the wind. The river actually flows in the other direction, towards Richmond.” So he promptly threw a light stick in there and made us watch as it actually moved against the wind in the opposite direction, albeit a bit slowly due to wind conditions.

I remember Grampa thinking he was tough and doing this to me when I was a kid. Little did he know that I just thought it was annoying and frustrating. I’m pretty sure GB was having similar thoughts.  But yeah, Grampa, I’ll concede, you’re still strong…………for an old guy……….LOL!

I thought this tree was really cool. It literally grew out of the river bank like that. But the erosion on the sides of the bank made it seem like it wasn’t long for this world, which will be a shame.

After our journey around the trail, where I took no pictures of the beautiful wild flowers (what’s up with that?), we had a nice picnic. It was windy and chilly, but the view more than made up for it.

Then Gramma and Grampa went on their way and GB and I stayed for his weekly Wednesday park day. He looks forward to this day more than any other during the week, even weekends! So it’s really easy for me to say, “If you don’t behave, there will be no park day.”……..LOL! ………. I have to use what I’ve got, you know?

You know one of the things I love about homeschooling?

It’s the opportunity to stop in the middle of what you are doing to follow another path.

As I’ve mentioned zillions many, many times, I really want GB to become more fluent with his math facts. I’m really trying to be patient here.

Really.

I keep having to remind myself that when I was in the 5th grade my parents made me go to Summer school for math because *I* wasn’t getting the multiplication facts down.

Sound familiar?

So, I’m trying to stay patient and offer any way that I can that will help GB in the quest for instant fact recall.

Today I remembered an old program that I bought WAY back in the 3rd grade when GB was first starting to dabble in multiplication. It’s called TimesTales. And I took it out and looked at it and my first thought was that it was too babyish and he would never go for it. But you know what? He liked it! Basically, there is a story that involves each number, and when combined with other numbers the story changes in a way that helps you to remember the answer. For example: Mr. Snowman (8) and Mrs. Snowman (8) must eat [6] snowcones [4] times a day or they will melt. (8X8) = [64] We spent all morning learning it, and by lunchtime he had the facts that they include in the program down pat. The ONLY problem with the program is that it assumes you already know the 3’s and 4’s fluently. GB was wanting to know where the stories were for those numbers.

After spending all morning learning the multiplication facts, GB was in a very proud mood. And I was feeling pretty good about him, too. And he said, “After all this talk about snowcones, it makes me want one.” And my mind started clicking. And I remembered that Aquagirl had given my dh a snowcone maker one Father’s Day a few years ago.

So I told GB, “You know what? You deserve a snowcone. So let’s go make some!”

It was a totally spontaneous moment. And it was nice to just be able to decide to do that.

After snowcones, and lunch, we got back to the math. We worked more on the process of solving bigger multiplication problems, which he can do, but normally takes SO long to ‘figure’ out the multiplication, that he gets frustrated with the time the problems are taking. Having the facts down really helps aleviate that frustration. And hopefully he’ll retain what he learned today.

I think that since we’ve finished our Drug, Alcohol and Tobacco unit that I will focus on math for this week and really push for better fluency.

Module 6

Looking through our last module, I realized it was just a review of all the other modules we’d done so far. So rather than read from the preformatted script, which was kind of dry and boring, GB and I perused this incredible site from The University of Utah’s Genetic Science Learning Center.

Mouse Party showed us the effect that different drugs have on mouse brains.

And we loved this great visual page. I really think that this, along with all we’ve learned in the past two weeks, has helped GB so much to know what he would be getting into if he decided to try any of this.