Tuesday, November 16, 2010

The First Thanksgiving « Videos « The Skit Guys

My daughter's youth group is going through a series of lessons from The Skit Guys.  She likes them and we find their videos to be moving or hilarious.  Sometimes both.  Have you seen these guys?  Here's a little Thanksgiving treat for you:

The First Thanksgiving « Videos « The Skit Guys

It's kind of addictive.  Once you watch one video, you can't help but watch another, and another, and well, you know what I mean.  So we got kind of carried away and when dd told her youth group leader that she loves the videos and she's been watching them online, he said we couldn't watch them anymore.  They still have a bunch in the series to do and he doesn't want her to be bored in class because she might see one ahead of time.

That's very thoughtful of him.  But I'm not sure he knows us well enough.  We can laugh at these guys over and over and over!  But we'll behave.  We haven't gone back to their site but we did agree that we could watch each week's episode at home after they have already seen it at youth group.  It's hard though.  Self-control isn't one of the easier fruits of the spirit to come by.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Haiku

Family
by DS 8yo

Respectful children
Delightful love for others
Regularly love

Autumn
by DD 6yo

Lots of leaves fall down
I like to jump in the leaves.
I get to rake leaves.

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Waltzing Matilda

I fell in love with this Rolf Harris YouTube video of Waltzing Matilda.  The video itself is a slide show of Australian animals which my children were very excited about after studying Australia for two weeks.  We had to watch the video several times because the firs couple times they were so focused on the animals that they hardly listened to the vocals. 

The audio behind the slide show is of Rolf Harris giving a description of the terminology used in Waltzing Matilda and then a rousing rendition of the famous song that many think should be Australia's national anthem.

Sadly, I have not been able to get a YouTube video embedded in a blog post since I switched to Blogger so I'm going to just have to settle on giving you a link.

Waltzing Matilda - Rolf Harris

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival #26

Welcome to this November edition of the Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival. 

First we're going to stop over at All Things Beautiful.  Phyllis and the family have been busy this month.  She is sharing three posts with us including The Plague Spreads in which the kids get an excellent visual in a hands on activity, In Circles filled with fabulous fun math and I enjoy watching how the kids really get to think things through in her post Separating a Mixture.

Next Amy shares a science experiment in her post Fun Science Experiment With Bubbles at Begin Homeschooling.

Eddie presents Science - Brains and Eyeballs! posted at The Usual Mayhem. She says, "This is a summary of a couple of weeks of human body science lessons I've been teaching my daughter and her cousins. We've been having so much fun!"

NerdMom presents Cosmic Mysteries in Your Kitchen posted at Nerd Family.

Too much left over candy?  Go see how you can put it to good use with Pamela who presents Sweet Science posted at Blah, Blah, Blog.

"After observing a tarantula and drawing in our nature journals, we made our own spiders!" Marcia presents SPIDERS ARE COOL posted at child in harmony.



Jimmie joins in with some history too: "This is my post over at Heart of the Matter where I show our Egyptian Cartouche Potato Stamp craft."

Melissa will be hosting the Hands On Carnival next month.  Be sure to visit and bookmark her blog now.  This month she says, "While there are lots of versions of a shaduf out there for making history come alive...here's our go at it!"  I loved this post and the video makes it all so wonderfully clear for those of us who might not know exactly what a shaduf is.   Been Shadufin' Lately? posted at Bugs, Knights, and Turkeys In the Yard.


"This is a fun way to teach cups, pints, quarts, and gallons using a fun little "gallon man" to use as a visual aid. My kids loved this!" exclaims Elle.  She shares her Weekly Tip: The Gallon Guy posted at Homeschool Rescue.

Debbie presents Day to Day, a Hands on Homeschooling day-to- day. Here's what happens when you let your hands decide how to homeschool posted at DANDELION HOUSE HOMESCHOOL.

Allison presents The Child Friendly Kitchen Cabinet (Video) posted at Modern Montessori Mama.  I love videos late at night when I want to peruse he blogs but my eyes are tired.  This is a great one, and I'm also a Montessori fan so I thought you'd all enjoy this little clip.



Thanks for hanging out with us this month!

Submit your blog article to the next edition of hands on homeschool blog carnival using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Clip art copyrighted by Bobbie Peachey

Monday, November 1, 2010

Australia Begins

Today is the first day of our study of Australia in our KONOS Inquisitiveness unit.  (It's actually a sub-sub-unit:  Inquisitiveness - Earth - Australia.)  I have put together a collection of resources that I thought might be useful to other KONOS users or anyone planning to study this fascinating part of our world.  This is what I'll be using besides our KONOS Volume II.  I did not include your basic general info books you can find at any library.  These are a given.

One of my favorite resources are the Top Secret Adventures from Highlights.  They offer a free first kit if you think you'd like to join the club.  Not a bad collection for a geography class.  I happened to find a box full of them at our annual used curriculum sale a couple years ago and I snatched every one of the kits up for a fabulous price and have been saving them to use whenever I can.  Highlights also has a collection of similar puzzle kits for the U.S. States called Which Way USA?  Oh, I bet you can get them used online for cheap too.  But be careful.  These are consumable so make sure you are not getting copies that have already been written in.

Something else I picked up at our last used curriculum sale was Australia: An Interdisciplinary Unit.  I generally like to keep these kinds of books around for a resource but never use everything in it.  This one is filled with an assortment of maps and info including a sky chart, a brief timeline with more detailed historical info on the following pages, an Aboriginal folktale, directions for making a boomerang, a recipe for Mulligatoni soup, animal classificaion charts with extras about Australian animals and the ecosystems found there.  So all in all, a nice assortment of subjects.  Upon searching for this online, I had a little trouble.  It is put out by TS Denison in their Instructional Fair Living Geography line.  Perhaps they're not printing them anymore?  A similar line of books is put out by Teacher Created Materials called Thematic Units but I'm not sure if they have an Australia themed book.  They do have a very small section devoted to Australia in their Trip Around the World Extended Thematic Unit which I used a few years ago with my older daughter.

Both of my younger kids will be giving an oral report on one Australian animal at next week's co-op.  DS will be reporting on the Tasmanian Devil and I didn't have any trouble finding resources for this animal at the local library.  I did however, have trouble finding a book on bandicoots, the subject of dd's report so I did a google search and found this great site with all kinds of Aussie info including an entire page on bandicoots among other interesting Australian fauna.  Another spot for fabulous photos of Australian wildlife you can check out OzAnimals.com  (More online resources are listed below.)

Given my love for games, I can't help but pull out anything I can on the land down under and I just happen to have the Mayfair game of Australian Rails.  It's a long drawn out game reminiscent of Monopoly but I do believe I'll be able to convince my 8yo to play with me! He always wanted to play when we first got it but it was too intense I thought, for he was so young then.  I would just let him be our banker and he was sort of happy but never quite satisfied.  Australian Rails is designed for the 10 + crowd but I think ds will be able to handle it if he can handle the length of time it takes to play it.  I reviewed this game over at Games for Homeschoolers once upon a time and it's still available for you to read if you're interested in finding out more about it.

Lastly, just for fun and to get my kiddos in the Aussie mood, I popped in a video of Five Mile Creek tonight.  If you've never seen the series, it's kind of like Little House on the Prairie only with less kids, more shooting (no bloody scenes) and lots of Aussie accents.

Additional Online Resources:
  • Scroll down About a third of the way to find a section on Time Zones.  Studying Australia is an excellent time to address or re-address time zones and seasons.
  • A time zone brain booster for you from Discovery Education.
  • Sheppard Software is a veritable geography goldmine loaded with games and tutorials for the kids.  Click here for a brief Australia info page and here for games focusing on Oceania and here for info on marsupials.  On the top left of this page you'll find a quiz to do after reading al about marsupials.
  • Another trivia quiz game site that I love because it has everything, no matter what we're studying it seems - Purpose Games.
  • Listen to the sounds of the Kookaburra then sing the song Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.
  • We'll also be making a salt dough map of Australia during our co-op sessions.  Here's Jimmie's Squidoo lens to show how you can too.
  • If you get to spend time on Australia's natural resources you'll more than likely discuss bauxite.  Here is a Five minute video on how aluminum is made by Fish Chris.  Who knew that our everyday aluminum foil started out as a red rock in Australia?