Update on my wounded relative who is a Marine

 Another quick update: R had surgery (one of many, many he's had in the past week) a couple days ago to attach the muscle to the bone. Apparently it was very painful.  That coupled with the fact that they found a blood clot in his lung, R is having a tough time.  My prayers, love and hugs to R.
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I wrote a short post about my cousin's son who was wounded in Afghanistan two weeks ago today. He lost his leg below the knee when an IED exploded. His leg was amputated out in the field. In fact to make this story all the more impressive ...  when his medic froze, he actually helped guide the medic through the steps needed to cut off extra bits/tie off the wound, etc.  Fortunately no one else in his unit was wounded, but our heart still goes out to him for the recovery and adjustments he'll need to endure in the coming months. He was evacuated first to Germany and has been back in the US for about a week.  The kids, hubby and I were finally able to go visit him this weekend and are amazed at how good he looks.  He, his wife and his Mom (my cousin) have been very impressed by the care he has received.  He's fighting fungal infections (because conditions in Afghanistan are so poor), but is making good progress (though he's been in and out of surgery).  We are ever so proud of his courage and strength.

He was awarded the purple heart this past week and was honored to receive it directly from President Obama.  He has had the support of those in his unit, his friends and family -- but to know that his country truly honors his courage and sacrifice... is a comfort as well.

Garden Science, Food in America & a Raisin Bar Recipe

I have been reading a lot of books about gardening and food.  Oh my, I've learned so much about our food sources...  I went on for so long, I pushed my thoughts/rants down to later in this post.

Anyway, I told LD that he could have his own plot in the garden and he could choose whatever seeds he wanted to plant. He is SO excited and wanted to start immediately.  We've been talking about how to get the garden ready, fertilizer and so forth.  We saw in a book from the library, Kids Garden, that we could create our own worm compost right in the (plastic bin in the) kitchen and LD was all for it. That was right up the kids' alley! So, we dug up a bunch of earth worms, put shredded newspaper down at the bottom of the bin, and mixed some kitchen scraps with dirt.

As you can imagine, we've then studied the earthworms, looked online as to how worms move, grow, and help the soil. Lots of earthworm learning!

One thing we learned is that earthworms are not native to America and that they take some of the nutrients deeper than some of the native plants can use (they showed a picture of ferns, but I don't know if they meant ferns specifically). It has altered the way native plants grow in the undergrowth. Since we live in the woods, I found this particularly interesting.

 Now back to what I've learned lately...  I was reading a number of books about gardening and organic gardening.  From there I learned about GMOs.  Having lived abroad, I didn't may the debate about genetically modified foods much mind. (That and I was busy with infants, you know how that goes!!)   If you haven't seen 1) The Future of Food, 2) Food Inc. and/or 3) Food Matters, they sure make compelling arguments as to why we should be concerned about why our food is not labeled as genetically modified. (These movies are available at Netflix and I watched them while running on the treadmill.)  Over in Australia (and also in Europe) food has to be labeled as Genetically Modified (GM), but here the large corporations have managed to avoid having to do that. That, despite the fact that these foods include slices of genetic material from viruses, bacteria, and other organisms (pigs, etc.). Now the majority of American corn and soy beans are GM (and that trickles down to mean that at least 60% of the products in our grocery stores were made with GM foods).  Did you know, the safety of these GMOs are tested by the companies that make and develop them (not our government or a government agency!!)??!!!   These movies also show how many government officials in FDA and Dept. of Agriculture posts have been taken straight from companies such as Monsanto which develop and produce these genetically modified seeds. As recently as couple weeks ago I saw in the New York Times that the government re-approved GM alphalfa despite calls for further study as to the safety of these seeds which had halted planting.

Anyway, that's what I've been doing -- trying to read up and be aware of what our family eats.  I mentioned some months back that I also have done some reading about the problems with high fructose corn syrup (I have a couple links to some videos here)... The thing that I remember most about that video was that drinking a can of coke is as toxic to your system and makes your liver work as hard as a can of beer.  Having had a close relative die of alcoholism -- and knowing that her liver was probably destroyed by alcohol it sent up huge warning bells for me.  YIKES! 

In an effort to know what ingredients are in the (junk) food my kids eat I've been trying new recipes.  These raisin bars are so good!! My kids absolutely loved them... even more than the Homemade Nutrigrain Bars that I've been making.

Raisin Bars:

Here's how I made them:

3/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup whole wheat (wholemeal) flour
1 1/2 cups quick-cooking rolled oats (I used the non-instant oatmeal I had on hand)
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp baking powder
3/4 cup butter (softened)

FILLING:
in a saucepan combine 3/4 cup water, 2 Tablespoons of sugar and 2 tsp. corn starch. Add 1 1/4 cup raisins. Cook and stir until thickened and bubbly. (I wasn't sure how long and I did mine for nearly 10 minutes.)

Press a little more than half of the oatmeal mixture into the bottom of a greased glass pan.  Spoon on the raisin filling. Then sprinkle more oatmeal mixture on top.

Adapted from Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book

2nd Grade Math: Clock Work & Other Math Work

I saw this wonderful clock idea at Suddenly 2nd Grade -- http://mrsnielson-2ndgrade.blogspot.com/. The blog appears not to be up and running any more.


Anyway, LD has been working on time in intervals of 5 minutes.  This idea and the clock printout made by Mrs. Nielson is  great.  She has the bottom sheet available to print out too, but when we made it I felt it'd be better for LD to write the numbers himself.

You can make telling time worksheets at softschools.com.

Someone asked me what workbook we use for math these day and whether we still use Right Start Math.  I love Right Start, but this year we veered away from it.  We only use it occasionally. Instead we went through Spectrum Math. He is just about done with the entire book, so as we finish that up he also works through a lot of worksheets that I have printed out from the Internet.

We continue to use the free Montessori based addition and subtraction worksheets (for adding or subtracting numbers up into the thousands) that I came across. See the picture below.

And we also use multiplication sheets that practice skills through the 6 times tables.
Here's a photo of what he works through most days:



Montessori Subtraction Sheets:  (pictured to right)

Montessori Style Addition Sheets:

Multiplication Worksheet Generator from Soft Schools (pictured to the far right in the photo)

Skip Counting by 3s and 4s -- Active Math Game

LD continues to work on his first multiplication tables from 1s to 6s -- with lots of skip counting along the way.  Today I had him working on 4s mostly. It has been quite a long time since we've done active math games outside and we had a reprieve in the weather. So we set up a chalk math snail again. LD had to multiply each number by 4.  DD had to add 2 to each number. And I helped ED shout out each number as she jumped from square to square.

I got this idea from a very old book published in Australia called 100 Playground Markings and Games by Rhonda Farkota.  It was so old (c1986) and beat up that the library where we used to live in central Australia let me buy it for a dollar but it has great outdoor games!

I was just messing around with embedding a google document. This is just a simple skip-counting worksheet I had LD do today. I doubt anyone would much be interested because it's not especially sophisticated, but I've learned a bit trying to work this out. The numbers get all mashed together in this small window, but as you can see it just has him write the missing numbers. The simple skip counting worksheet is located here.

Just sending love to my family and other wounded Veterans

Goodness, I've been completely stumped on a title for this posting. Maybe I should have just left the title blank because that doesn't seem quite right.  

I  have always been extremely close to my cousin.  We're three weeks apart in age and that made us have a very special bond/connection growing up and on into adulthood. She had her kids at a young age and I had the privilege of watching her kids grow up through the years.

My cousin's son, R, is in the military (Marines) and is stationed in Afghanistan.  We found out last night that R lost his leg below the knee when an IED exploded. He's in good spirits and has been in contact with his wife and his Mom/Dad/brother/sister. R and his wife have two young children (almost 2 and almost 3). He'll be transferred to Germany before returning to the US.

How Castle Walls Were Built

 We've been reading bits of Castle by David Macaulay aloud together.  It is a very detailed account about how a castle and the adjoining town were planned out and built.  One section talked about how the castle walls were built.  We tried to design our own walls to be as strong as possible.

The drawing from Castle shows how thick the castle walls were constructed. We tried to do the same...

The first time round, the rice made our wall buckle (and break). We learned the importance of mortar in binding the rocks together!!

LD and DD designed this wall.

And we reworked this wall with double rows of bricks and rice in the middle.

Both castle wall designs were destroyed equally as easily by our spoon catapults, but the kids really listened, looked and learned a lot about how castle walls were built. Not to mention that they had a blast destroying the walls!!  I could add in another 10 pictures of the new walls that were constructed and destroyed, but will leave it with this!!

The Four Alls (Learning about Feudalism in the Middle Ages)

A place for everyone and everyone in his place:

We have been studying the Middle Ages.  We've read lots of books or snippets of books about castles, knights, the Church, and feudalism.  This is an activity suggested in one of the books we checked out from the library.  It's called the four alls and talks about some of the roles people had in the Middle Ages. These roles were 'fixed by God.'  We did one diorama box for each of the four groups in this saying:

The peasant who worked for all
The knights who fought for all
The priests who prayed for all
The king who ruled all

ED loved making the stained glass windows for our Church scene.  She did the ones on the outside doors and then continued to make more Church windows daily! In the lower scene with the king's throne, DD decided she hated her tapestry and wouldn't hang it up, but we talked about how tapestries were not only made for their beauty, but also helped insulate and keep the castle room warm

Activity idea from: Knights & Castles: 50 Hands-on Activities to Experience the Middle Ages by Avery Hart & Paul Mantell

I'll be sharing a few more of our Middle Ages activities next week.

Earth Science: How Fold Mountains are Formed

The most common types of mountains are fold mountains. Some fold mountains include the Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, and Alps.

This activity showed how plate movement creates folded mountains.When the two continents collide, the plates wrinkle and fold.  Here's our activity to show this happening.  It's the same principle as the damp graham cracker we did a few days ago, but this shows the "layers" of the earth folding/wrinkling.

Here's an example of a fold mountain in the Alps in Switzerland (image from wikimedia commons)

Earth Science: Plate Movements, Pangaea

We were still talking about plate tectonics on Friday. We talked about how scientists theorize that the continents were once connected as one giant super-continent, Pangaea. I cut out South America and Africa and asked them to fit them together as best the could. When they didn't fit together perfectly I asked the kids why the continents wouldn't match perfectly after 250 million years? We talked about erosion and the power of water (waves, storms and such--like the poor people who endured the cyclone in the Cairns region of Australia in the past week or so).

Next we did a little activity to show how continents could move without some giant hand pulling them apart.  This was perfect for the kids, since it let them "see" the continents move without our touching them.  I cut the continents out of foam.  The kids folded construction paper.  First we set the continents close together with a piece of playdough to weight the continents down.

As the kids pulled each side of the construction paper, they could see the continents move apart. We got this idea from Robert Gardners" Earth-Shaking Science Projects About Planet Earth.

The red paper represents the mantle and the next experiment helps the kids understand how and why magma flows.

The mantle is hotter than the crust. This is a terrible picture, but it helped the kids see that heat rises. We took ice cold water and poured it into a jar.  We dyed some water green and heated it up. Then LD sucked the hot water with a turkey baster (but I think a eye dropper might work better) and slowly let out the hot/green water.  The kids could see the green water streaming upwards toward the surface.  This helped the kids understand why magma/lava from the mantle would move up/out of the crust and/or shift about to affect the earth's plates.

Earth Science: Plate Movement, Earthquakes

We looked a bit more closely at what happens at fault lines where slight shifts in the crust cause earthquakes.

First the kids all made their own layered crust. ED especially enjoyed this!

Then we placed an index card in a larger container and created layers on both sides of the paper.

We moved the index card back and forth and watched as the grains of rice shifted and moved.

The kids really found it fascinating to see how much the rice shifted around. Of course, as you can imagine, the earthquakes became a bit violent as they moved the index card back and forth. We had to reinsert the card a couple of times.

Wonderful Valentine's Day Math Activities (for K or 1st)

I've come across a number of beautiful Valentine's Day math activities that I plan to use this week with DD. They are so pretty and well done, I just had to share in case someone else might want to incorporate them into their week! I wish I had the time (and health!...I still have a vicious cough from the pneumonia.) to be making such beautiful things, but at the moment I just have to be grateful to those who have shared with the wider world. Thank you SO much!!

This first one on the above and below is an addition sorting game from the beautiful Valentine's Day unit made by Michelle at Musings of Me.  The packet has 154 pages of gorgeous activities.    And, she shared this with us for free! I'm so grateful for her generosity!

ED just got this cardboard playhouse that she can color for her birthday. It has a cute "mail slot" and I thought I'd "mail" these addition problems to DD. I think that'll be a hit!

These cute owl addition problems were from Oceans of First Grade Fun. Sorry the picture is blurry. I printed out two pages on each sheet (but haven't had a chance to cut them apart yet.) The game is called Hoo Loves You and you can download it and print it out for free.  Thank you so much Ms. A!  I thought we might use these with a homemade board game that DD enjoys playing and if someone gets the "Hoo Loves You" card they'll automatically win!

In this board game, the player draws a card and move forward that number of spaces (3+4).  You continue round the track (following the directions on each square such as "Go Back 1 space," "Double Move" (so with the 3+4 card, you'd move 14 spaces)  or "Draw Again" until you can't move anymore (such as a blank space, "stay put" or "lose a turn"). Then it's the next player's turn. The first person to land on one of the "Win" spaces wins the game.

You can see our board game is pretty wrinkled and beat up.  It's been a huge hit this year! This board game idea came from Peggy Kaye's fantastic book, Games for Math.

I thought these sequencing cards would be good practice for DD. It's an activity she can easily complete on her own when I'm wrapped up with the other kids.  I'll just have that in her workbox for her.  This is yet another activity from Michelle at Musings of Me from her Valentine's Day Unit.

These bingo cards are from The Idea Room.

Some of LD's Activities (2nd Grade)

Science: Obviously we're working on our Earth Science Unit and that will probably continue for at least another month.  We are also working through the Real Science-4 Kids Chemistry book Pre-Level 1.  I really like these books and recommended them to my sister (they homeschool) back a couple of years ago. Her kids are older than mine and she went through the Pre-Level one books and then continued on with the upper levels she and her kids liked them so well. I know they're using them this year, but didn't ask her what levels/subjects they are on. (Her kids are now 9, 12 and 13.)

In talking about how molecules react, we talked about some of the science experiments we did last year that show that two chemicals reacted. Of course, just talking about the Bubble Bomb wasn't enough so I promised we could do that again.

Here are the ingredients, in case you haven't done this with your kids.  Baking soda, vinegar, a ziploc bag and a tissue. Pour the vinegar in the bag, zip it most of the way.  Pour baking soda on a tissue, fold of the ends and hold it in one corner.  Zip the bag closed, drop the tissue into the vinegar, shake, drop it and watch it POP!

Math: LD has nearly completed his 2nd Grade math workbook. He continues daily practice on addition and subtraction (multi-digit... so often working problems such as 621-388, for example). As you may have noted he is just beginning to work on multiplication (2s through 6s).

Language Arts: This semester we are taking a break from our daily work with Handwriting Without Tears  (we'll do it once or twice a week; he works on cursive) and instead are doing some daily language arts work. He does two pages a day and it covers things like compound words, f sounds (gh, ph), syllables and things like that. He hasn't done any work like this and it's been a good addition to our curriculum. It goes over some good spelling/phonics rules.

Read Alouds:
LD and I still read aloud together even though he reads 4-10 chapters on his own each day. We are currently reading two novels; we're about half-way through each of them. We're reading Charlotte's Web because we will be going to a theater production of Charlotte's Web in a few weeks.

We've also been making our way through the wonderful Magic Shop Series. We are on the last one, but LD would heartily recommend them! He has thoroughly enjoyed them all.

The Monster's Ring is the first in the series. 

We are currently reading Juliet Dove.

Music: LD continues to learn the piano. Once we're healthy enough we'll resume our world music classes with friends (we're on Europe), but we've all been so sick that we've haven't had classes with our friends since December!!

Geography: Having been a history teacher and having enjoyed living and traveling abroad so much, geography is just a natural part of our life/curriculum.  Last semester, we had a world map place mat and I often asked the kids where certain countries were as they ate breakfast or lunch.  Ever since we had company, our world place mat has gone missing.  I've searched high and low, but have been pleasantly surprised by LD's passion for finding the 50 states.  As I'm cooking and he's waiting or eating, he'll demand I quiz him.  In fact, today he said it wasn't challenging enough so I'm asking him what the capital of Arkansas or whatever is! 

Going along with our study of the Middle Ages, I've had LD identify and locate some of the physical features of Europe -- seas, mountains and a couple of rivers.

I've been considering buying this wooden map of Europe for the longest time.  I decided to go ahead and get it since we're studying Europe with our world music class and because we're studying about the Middle Ages. I am really impressed with the quality of the map. I love the size. And things the labeled control map really adds a lot to this.  I bought ours from Kid Advance (Montessori materials shop) online.

I'll be doing separate postings about our Middle Ages unit sometime soon.