Mosquito Pox
My baby has come down with a bad case of Pox:
Mosquito Pox!
Today is…Tuesday June 28 2011
After breakfast dishes were cleaned and put away, the boys escaped to their room to read:
They came out dressed and ready to play…Crazy Eights!:
We had our Gospel Lesson. We talked about how everything testifies of God:
Then the boys examined the book on Nature Experiments while they munched on trial mix:
Our experiment entailed two secure containers…
…and “leaf litter.” For our experiment we went poking around the dead leaves by our back steps looking for little critters:
Ettin wasn’t exactly into it:
We brought our critters inside (…ick).
We examined them through our nifty bug viewer, which magnified the bugs and let us look both above and below them:
Giant looked at the critters and drew them, adding any details he noticed:
“Worm”
“ant”
“spitdr” (spider)
“senepib” (centipede)
And the one he spent the most time on, “Wood bug”:
Did I force my boys to work on this? Insisting that they observe and write at their young tender ages?
Nope, actually I kept trying to get them to play with some very cute friends that had come to visit:
But they declined and begged me to keep fetching bugs for them to examine!:
I guess that is the awesome power of self-directed study!
After lunch they settled in for another read:
Made forts:
Coloured (and examined more bugs found in the house—a lady bug here):
And played games:
Making Minions…Preschool Style
It’s Robot Building Time!!!
Giant is 4. But he really loves building robots with daddy. So today for our Math time, we worked on building a Castor Bot from nxtprograms.com. This is a awesome site with easy to understand instructions and great bot designs!
What better way to practice real math? I should add that we played a Go-Fish game where he matched up numerals and the names of numbers, and did a lot of counting to check the matches—I do think it’s valuable to practice (in FUN ways) needed math skills. However, it is so powerful to use that learning right away in a real life application! After we build, I hope to program it with Giant using Daddy’s programming tool: Enchanting.
Building used a lot of basic math skills:
Counting (such as how many parts were needed, or how many holes long a piece should be:)
Comparing and contrasting. Like when he tried to find identical building pieces…:
…and like when I had him put pieces together just like I did (there were a lot of complementary components, which enabled some great scaffolding as I helped him see how to build something without just doing it for him):
It was a lot for a 4 year old to focus on. We adopted a lego dude as our driver, and we pretended we were building an awesome robot race car for him. Whenever Giant started to loose focus, I’d get the driver to tell him how amazing the robot race car was looking and ask Giant if he was finished yet. Giant would giggle and get back to work:
Our driver, ready and waiting.
Mathematically speaking, the project also lent itself to discovery of how connected parts related and affected one another:
And he explored how that relationship changed as more parts were added or altered:
While salvaging parts, Giant was delightedly sidetracked several times by a Whirly-Gizmo Daddy had built earlier:
I was quite impressed with both the instructions on the NXTprograms site and with Giant’s ability to look at the great diagrams and copy them:
Often it was him scrolling down and telling me what we needed next or how we’d be putting parts together—the instructions were that simple!:
Thankfully my limited ability to explain where a part should go (“Now stick that little black thing with the slits on it in the middle of the five hole long part under that L connector thing.”) was overcome by the easy to understand diagrams (“There.” Pointing.)
Giant plugged it in:
And, 1.5 hours from when we started, Giant stuck the ever-so-patient-and-encouraging Driver on:
And showed it off to his brother:
…Then he sat back and played with Daddy’s Whirly Gizmo some more.
I’m looking forward to Enchanting this Minion to life with Giant. However, I think for our next robot project math lesson, we’ll build something with a bigger impact for a 4 year old…like a Whirly-Gizmo thing ;). Perhaps we need to get a Pico-Cricket kit (like the ones Daddy uses for his Summer course) for ourselves!
Today is…Monday June 27 2011
After saying our good byes to Grandma and Grandpa (*sniff*—they are on their way back home to Texas) and our Daddy Bear (he’d only left for work), the boys helped clean up breakfast (the new routine) and then settled in for a good read:
(just don’t tell the librarian I let my baby flip through all our books).
I gathered them together for a Gospel Message on Gifts of the Spirit, from D&C 46:28-33. We talked about what we could pray for help with, and how we’d need to act if we wanted help from the Spirit.
Did I mention I was teaching this to the Tin man and his side kick?
Kooks.
After snacks, I had Giant pick a book with something he wanted to learn about. I’ve kind of dropped off the forced themes, feeling that I was putting out a lot of energy into something he wasn’t that into. Talking to some friends over the week, I got this idea of letting the kids pick the book/topic and going with it. So…
He found “175 Nature Experiments”, and picked his experiment:
He wanted to put leaves in dyed water and see them change colour. I think we’ve done this before…but not with Ettin.
So we hunted for leaves:
Sorted our finds:
Taped them upright in a container:
Carefully added some food colouring:
…and some water for the leaves to drink:
Cool!
Then we did some art work.
We tried leaf rubbings….
(Galoot really wanted to colour too! But mostly he just ate the crayons 😉 )
Leaf hammerings:
Wow!
And Giant made a label for our experiment:
“red water levs” and “Making leaf skeletons” (theoretically the green will rot away, at some point, leaving the veins intact).
Tah Dah!
After lunch we outside to play:
(Don’t they look so well behaved out there? Just for the record, I hauled them in few minutes later when they were all scaling our small mountain of dirt beside the shed. Yes, all (I may have a climber on my hands with Galoot) ).
After lunch (and cleanup) and the little ones were sleeping, Giant and I started out with a game of go fish with number cards:
And then we spent the next hour and a half building ROBOTS!!!
(daddy let us play with his lego 😉 )