Archive for the 'Fun Educational Stuff' Category
August 14, 2008 @ 7:52 pm | Filed under: Books, Family Adventures, Fun Educational Stuff, Fun Learning Stuff, History, Unschooling, homeschooling
Originally published in Februrary 2005.
It’s been a rough morning. Our wagon tipped over while fording a river, and we lost fifty pounds of salt pork and our only shotgun. Then Rose took sick—cholera, we think—and died before we could do anything about it.
My girls are undaunted by this stunning double tragedy. They push on across the prairie, estimating the number of miles to the next fort. Maybe we can trade our mule for a new gun.
“At least we still have the fishing pole,” says Rose. She seems to have accepted her own death gracefully.
“I don’t like wattlesnakes,” announces Beanie.
Jane cracks up. “Who does? Remember when I got bit, back before we crossed the Platte?”
We found ourselves on the Oregon Trail by way of a great read-aloud, one that vaulted unexpectedly to the top of our Family Favorites list: By the Great Horn Spoon
Our westward journey has occurred at a fairly brisk speed. After Great Horn Spoon deposited us in the thick of the California Gold Rush, there was much conversation about the many reasons and ways in which people migrated west. Our trail led to other books: Moccasin Trail
I don’t know what lies around the next bend in the trail. I’ve stopped trying to pave the road ahead of time. The best adventures, it seems, are to be found in the bumps and detours. We’re well outfitted for the journey with books and maps and eyes and ears and that burning appetite for knowledge that can make a hearty meal out of buffalo grass and brambles.
—Excerpted from an article appearing in the Virginia Homeschoolers newsletter.
August 11, 2008 @ 6:25 am | Filed under: Family Adventures, Fun Educational Stuff, Fun Learning Stuff, Games, Language Arts
Originally published in November, 2005 as “The Purple Cow Hula-Hooped Boisterously.”
This is a game we played in the car yesterday, all the way to town and back. I assigned each of the girls a part of speech: noun, verb, adjective, adverb (one girl had to take two parts in each round). From there it went something like this:
Me: Miss Noun, what is it?
Beanie: A giraffe!
Me: Miss Adjective, what kind of giraffe?
Jane: A hungry giraffe.
Me: Miss Verb, what did the hungry giraffe do?
Rose: It bounced!
Me: Miss Adverb, how did the hungry giraffe bounce?
Jane: Enthusiastically!
All together: THE HUNGRY GIRAFFE BOUNCED ENTHUSIASTICALLY!
Wonderboy: Huh?
Games, grammar, parts of speech
August 6, 2008 @ 7:32 am | Filed under: Curriculum, Fun Educational Stuff, Fun Learning Stuff, Unschooling, homeschooling
Excerpted from a Lilting House post I wrote in July 2006.
(Updated with suggestions for wee ones in the comments.)
Here is a list of Some Particularly Cool Stuff My Kids and I Have Learned a Ton From or Just Plain Had a Good Time With:
Settlers of Catan
Signing Time DVDs. Catchy songs, immensely useful vocabulary in American Sign Language. I trumpet these wherever I go. We talk about Rachel like she’s one of the family.
Prismacolor colored pencils. Indispensable. I was amused to see that Jane mentioned them in the first line of her “I Am From” poem. She’s right; they have helped color the picture of her life.
Uncle Josh’s Outline Map CD-Rom
The Global Puzzle
Set. It may annoy you that your eight-year-old will be quicker at spotting the patterns in this card game than you will. There’s a free daily online version as well.
Quiddler
Babble. Like Boggle, only online and free.
Chronology
Speaking of online games: the BBC History Game site is awfully fun.
And Jane was fairly addicted to Absurd Math for a while there. Need more free math puzzles? Nick’s got a bunch.
A Case of Red Herrings
Zoombinis Logical Journey
Oregon Trail
Roots, Shoots, Buckets & Boots : Gardening Together with Children
Wild Goose Science Kits. Fun experiments with a low mess factor. Best prices at Timberdoodle. Note to self: remember the Wild Goose Crime Kit come Christmastime.
A microscope. Sonlight sells a nifty set of prepared slides with paramecium and other fun stuff for the kids to peer at.
If the scope sparks an interest in dissection, there’s a way to do it online with no actual innards involved: Froguts! The site has a couple of free demos to occupy you while you save up for the full version. (Which I haven’t seen yet, but it does look cool.) HT: Karen Edmisten.
Klutz kits. Over the years, we’ve explored: knitting, embroidery, origami, magic, Sculpey, paper collage, paper dolls, beadlings, and foam shapes. Look under any piece of furniture in my house and you will find remnants of all of the above.
Which reminds me: Sculpey clay. Is it possible to get through a day without some? My children think not.
Usborne’s calligraphy book and markers.
But while I’m on Usborne, my kids also love and use at least weekly: Usborne Science Experiments Volumes 1, 2, and 3.
Muse
Classical Kids CDs. Beanie’s favorite is the Vivaldi. Alice’s daughter Theresa does a fabulous Queen of the Night impersonation from the Mozart.
Refrigerator poetry magnets. I gave Scott the Shakespearean set a couple of Christmases ago. Note to self: You are not as brilliant as you think! You were an English major, for Pete’s sake, with a minor in drama. Thou knowest full well old William was a bawdy fellow. If you don’t want your little ones writing poems about codpieces, stick to the basic version. But oh how I enjoy the messages Scott leaves for me to find and then pretends he doesn’t know who wrote them:
I am
so
in love
with my
delicate
wench.
And of course of course of course, Jim Weiss story CDs. I rave about these every chance I get because they have added such riches to my children’s imaginations. For years, they have listened to Jim’s stories after lights-out. Greek myths, Sherlock Holmes, Shakespeare, folk and fairy tales, the Arabian Nights, the Jungle Book: of such stuff are dreams woven.
A good source for much of the above (and lots more): FUN Books.
Tags: homeschooling, homeschool, unschooling, curriculum, education, educational games
January 30, 2008 @ 7:31 am | Filed under: Fun Educational Stuff, Fun Learning Stuff, Geography
In yesterday’s links I mentioned with some jubilation that the Journey North Mystery Class is starting this week. Tami asked,
Melissa,
do you know if it’s too late to join the Journey North class? In a
nutshell, can you explain it, and how much time it takes? Thanks!
With the caveat that I am incapable of writing the ‘nutshell’ version of anything (hee!), I’d love to take a stab at answering this. We (Jane and I—the younger kids have not yet been interested) have participated in the Mystery Class the past two years, and it has been delightful.
It is definitely not too late to join. Things are just getting rolling. Here’s how it works: Journey North has selected ten classes of schoolchildren in cities all around the world. Their locations are kept secret until the big reveal in May. These are the ten "mystery classes," and the game is to figure out where in the world they are.
You begin by figuring out their latitudes. Each week you compare your own local photoperiod (the amount of time between sunrise and sunset) to the photoperiods of the ten mystery classes. You graph this data on a chart. In just a few weeks’ time you’ll begin to see patterns and get a feel for where some of the mystery classes might be.
(It’s very exciting.)
Sometime in March, Journey North will release "longitude clues." By performing some calculations, you’ll be able to determine the longitude of the Mystery Classes. Now you’re really starting to have an idea where these classes might be!
Next come the cultural clues. Each week, as you continue to chart the photoperiod data, you’ll be given a set of clues about the culture and terrain of the ten mystery locations. This is when the fun kicks into high gear. You’ll be able to zero in on the specific towns in which the mystery classes are hiding.
In late April, you submit your guesses to Journey North. The following week, the answers are posted on the website and you can see how close you came. You may participate alone or as part of a group. All you have to do is register at the Journey North website (no cost, no strings). All the instructions and clues are there, along with a download of the chart.
The past two years, I led a group of online friends in the activity. We divided up the Mystery Classes so that each family was only responsible for calculating the data for one or two locations. (This is totally permissible and is in fact encouraged. Most participants are classes of schoolchildren who are usually divided into partner groups, each with its assigned mystery class.)
This year, I’m hosting a group of local friends. The kids in Jane’s peer group have been coming over every other week to read Shakespeare together (such a blast), and we’re going to set the Bard aside for a while to do the Mystery Class project together. We’ll be meeting weekly, more or less, to keep up with the data-sharing.
If your family was working solo and found the eleven sets of calculations to be too much to keep up with (ten mystery classes plus your hometown), you could easily drop some of the mystery classes and just work on a few. The registration with Journey North is largely a formality; there is no real interaction on the website except for submitting your answers at the end (which you don’t have to do if you don’t want). Of course, the JN folks love feedback, and they post lots of letters and ideas from participants.
It is amazing how much learning is packed into this activity: we have learned so much about geography, latitude, longitude, other cultures, math, etc etc etc. I cannot say enough good things about the project. I’ve been positively giddy about getting started this year. Jane too. Last year she worked side by side with the one local friend who was part of our online group, and those two eleven-year-olds had a wonderful time, let me tell you. So did their mothers. Right, Erica?
The project is just beginning this week, so it is by no means too late to get started. You calculate your local photoperiod every Monday—that is, you use each Monday’s sunrise and sunset times for the calculation. Here’s a website where you can look up the sunrise and sunset times for any date. Journey North releases the week’s new clues on Fridays, but the info is always up on the website for whenever you are ready to work with it. We’ll be doing all our work on Wednesdays, for example.
Working with online friends was great fun, these past two years. With hometowns spread all over the world, simply comparing our local photoperiods was fascinating. And I have to say, charting the increase in daylight time week after week really helped combat the late winter blues. (The first year, I mean, when we still lived in Virginia. Here in San Diego, last winter was a marvel of sunny days. This year has been quite a bit chillier.)
Tami asked about the time commitment. As you get started, it doesn’t take very long: a math problem on Monday to get your local photoperiod; and then however long it takes you to figure out and chart the photoperiods for the ten mystery classes—or however many you are responsible for. A half hour, perhaps? If you’re doing all ten? Maybe an hour for a younger child? I would say an hour a week is probably realistic, for the first six or seven weeks. The longitude day will take longer, but it’s fun, exciting work.
Later you’ll spend lots of time on Google and elsewhere, reading up on the tidbits revealed in the cultural clues. That’s fun time, detective time, and it flies by.
I told you it wouldn’t fit into a nutshell! Not even a Brazil nut.
Earlier posts on Journey North Mystery Class:
this one has a picture of our graph
this one was from last year
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December 6, 2007 @ 5:22 am | Filed under: Fun Educational Stuff, Fun Learning Stuff
Too many posts! Too many links! If you go through my Fun Learning Stuff archives, you find oodles and boodles of links to online games and things. But that’s a lot to wade through. Allow me to spare you the wading.
Free online word games:
Babble (a combination of Boggle and Scrabble)
Eight Letters in Search of a Word (both this one and Word Poker are "see how many words you can make out of these eight letters" games)
Scrabulous (online Scrabble, and yes, it is fabulous)
iSketch (like Pictionary) (beware the public rooms—create your own private room and invite friends)
New! Karen just reminded me of FreeRice.com, a charity-linked vocabulary game that devoured a thousand grains of my time last week
Puzzle/logic games:
History, math & science:
BBC History Games (a whole bunch of fun stuff here)
Ancient Greece game at Snaith Primary
Absurd Math (Jane’s favorite)
Test your reaction time with the sheep game
Geography games & links at Studeo
Music & art:
Art lesson plans from the Getty Museum
Mark Kistler drawing lessons on YouTube
and on his website
Not games, but cool:
Earth Album (a Flickr/Google Maps mashup)
Journey North (especially the Mystery Class project that begins in January—we’ve had such fun with it the past two years)
December 1, 2007 @ 8:28 am | Filed under: Fun Educational Stuff
Because it was Julie who introduced me to Scrabulous.
Online Scrabble. Free. You don’t even have to register. Need I say more?
Ah, but I will. Yesterday we had games going back and forth on our two computers: Rose vs. Mom, Jane vs. Mom, Dad vs. Mom. Everyone is out to get me!
There was also a Rose vs. Jane game on the living-room floor, the old-fashioned kind, not the virtual.
Rilla tried to make off with oxen, but we caught her.
October 19, 2007 @ 2:17 pm | Filed under: Art, Family, Fun Educational Stuff
Yesterday my three oldest kids went to a workshop at the San Diego Museum of Art. A docent gave a short talk about elements of art—line, shape, color, etc—and then they split into small groups and went to look at four paintings up close. Afterward, they did an art project focusing on copying details from the paintings they’d viewed. I missed most of the workshop, because I was outside with the little ones. The girls had a splendid time, and Beanie was especially impressed by the dead chicken.
"Huh?" I asked her, ever so articulately, upon receiving this report.
"A dead chicken! In a painting! I saw it, and I drew it!"
I do remember seeing a painting with a dead fowl in it when we first visited the museum. I think it was a duck, not a chicken: Merganser by William Michael Harnett. (I don’t know if that link will work—the URL says "index." I don’t think the SDMA site has direct URLs to the paintings. But if you’re really interested in seeing the deceased bird, you can click around to get there. Beanie thinks it is worth the effort. Me, I prefer a nice landscape with haystacks.)
During the workshop, a couple of the other mothers and I walked down to the Science Center with our little ones. There’s a kiddie room upstairs where a mama can park herself on a bench and watch her younguns play with all the interesting toys. Wonderboy loved the air chute made for putting balls in: whoosh! Up goes the ball and pops out the top of the tube. Rilla enjoyed filling the toy shopping cart with plastic fruits and vegetables. It was so easy and pleasant to sit there chatting with my friends while our toddlers and preschoolers bustled around. I remember when I thought tending two little ones in a children’s museum was a tiring day’s work. Now it’s a mini-vacation.
One thing I’m really enjoying about our proximity to Balboa Park is that we can drop by for short, frequent visits without feeling like we have to do and see everything all at once. We’ve barely begun to explore all the park has to offer. After I picked up the girls, we were strolling back to our car and we passed the little Timkin Museum, a small, free-to-the-public art gallery next to the big SDMA. Erica had mentioned that it’s an incredible collection. Jane and I noticed a huge sign advertising a special French Neoclassical exhibit, which is exactly the movement we’ve just been reading about in Young People’s Story of Fine Art, so that was a pretty exciting discovery. We’ll have to squeeze in a visit sometime soon.
Jane is also keen to see the Journey to the Copper Age exhibit at the Museum of Man—she wondered aloud whether her daddy could take a day off and take her. And I’d like to get to the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the Natural History Museum while it’s still there…but tops on the girls’ wish list is to go climb a certain enormous, low-branching tree they spotted on the way into the park. And when I was watching how happy my wee ones were yesterday in the kiddie playroom, I made a little mental note to remember that as important and wonderful as all this cultural stuff is, it’s even more important to allow ample time for Climbing Very Big Trees and Dipping Fingers into Fountains. Sometimes the dead chicken really is the best part of the art museum. Even when it’s a duck.
October 9, 2007 @ 11:35 pm | Filed under: Books, Fun Educational Stuff, Literature
Jane is reading some of the books on the House of Education’s Year 7 list this fall. House of Education, in case you don’t know, is the upper-grades companion to Ambleside Online. I’ve been drawing heavily from Ambleside’s booklists since Jane was five years old. Beanie, six and a half, is making the acquaintance of some of Jane’s old friends this year: The Blue Fairy Book (my childhood copy, actually, fearfully dogeared and dearly loved), Just So Stories, Nesbit’s Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare for Children. Writing these titles makes me almost giddy: I love this literature; I love living these books with my girls.
One of the HOE books Jane is reading—and I too, for it was new to me, and I’m doing my best to pace her these days—is H. E. Marshall’s English Literature for Boys and Girls. The stodgy title belies the fun inside this book. Marshall is the author of Our Island Story, a fat and lively rendering of the history of England, through which my girls and I have been slowly making our way in fits and starts, for oh, at least two years now. I enjoy Marshall’s narrative style: the colorful character sketches, the dramatic flair, the occasional intrusions of a twinkle-in-the-eye authorial voice. I’m encountering that same amiable voice in the English lit book, which makes my ‘homework’ a most enjoyable pastime.
Of course, by opening the book with several chapters about Irish and Scottish legends, Marshall had me at hello. Jane writes out most of her narrations these days, but I asked her to tell me the story of the Cattle Raid of Cooley (chapter two of Marshall’s book) for the fun of seeing how well she could spin a yarn. She did a bang-up job, with all the little embellishments that rope a listener in. I don’t know which one of us enjoyed it more: there’s a great satisfaction in telling a tale well, and an immense delight in being treated to a tale well told. We’ll have to do this more often. I needn’t be the only storyteller around here.
Both the Marshall books I mentioned (and a good many others) are available for free downloading (chapter by chapter) at The Baldwin Project, a site about which I have raved before. Some of them can be ordered in inexpensive hard-copy editions as well.
July 25, 2007 @ 8:50 am | Filed under: Fun Educational Stuff
Thought I’d share a quick link we made use of yesterday…Rose wanted to learn to make friendship bracelets, and we couldn’t find our copy of the Klutz book. This site has instructions for beginners, including a how-to from the very same Klutz book!
Meanwhile, did you see this on BoingBoing? A version of Tetris that uses the United States. We are soooo going to be late for the next thing we have to do. I must dash. I had no business turning on the computer this morning. The girls are eating breakfast but the boy is still in bed and did I mention we’re going to be late?
Karen understands so very well.
July 13, 2007 @ 6:29 pm | Filed under: Fun Educational Stuff
A smattering of the topics we have Googled this week:
Rattlin’ Roarin’ Willie midi. I have a thing for Scottish folk songs and I use online midi resources to learn the melodies.
YouTube Midsummer Night’s Dream Kevin Kline. I was hoping to find a clip of the Pyramus and Thisbe play-within-a-play from the movie made a few years back. Jane and I had just finished reading that scene, and I remember the movie version, starring Kevin Kline as Nick Bottom/Pyramus, being hilarious. The clip doesn’t appear to be on YouTube, but we found the Beatles version and watched that instead.
YouTube Modern Major General. I wanted to show it to the girls, and this clip, from a production of Pirates of Penzance starring—guess whom?—Kevin Kline as the Pirate King, with Linda Ronstadt and Rex Smith in the ingenue roles, surpassed my hopes. Priceless.
Chicken enchilada recipes. Thursday night’s dinner.
Office season 3 finale. Also: YouTube Jim Pam. What. I’m a total sap, what can I say? We’re watching Season 2 again, on DVD this time, and after the painful Booze Cruise episode I just really really wanted to watch the end of season 3. Instead, I watched about five Jim-and-Pam montages set to weepy music. Because I am not the only sap out there, not by a long shot.
Seals sea lions difference. Rose wanted to know. Turns out: ear flaps! Sea lions have ‘em, seals don’t.
USPS postcard postage. 26 cents for the little ones (what I think of as postcard size), 41 cents for big ones, in case you didn’t know either.
Boy do I love homeschoogling!
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