The folks at Science Weekly sent a bundle of their leaflets to different TOS Crew members to review. We received the “fractions” topic edition to evaluate. We received a copy of each of the six levels (grade level editions) as well as the teacher’s edition/answer key of the leaflet. Each edition is a color paper 11″ X 17″, folded into four pages. The levels start at “Level Pre-A” (equivalent to Kindergarten) and go through “Level E” (equivalent to grades 5/6). You can preview a sample edition at each level on the topic of coral reefs here. The higher the grade level, the more involved the leaflet is.

Topics in Science Weekly for this past school year were:

I was glad that we had the opportunity to look at all the levels of the leaflets. I felt like the value of a subscription was much higher at the higher grade levels where there was a significant increase in content, despite the consistent page length. The upper levels had great experiments, vocabulary and relevant information in the issue. The lower levels were colorful and engaging, but the pricing seemed steep for what appeared to be a few Kindergarten worksheets. Science Weekly has done a great job in creating age appropriate content, but having the pricing be the same across all levels seems odd for what you get.

Science Weekly is available for $19.95 per year for 15 issues for an individual student. Classroom orders can be placed for $4.95 per student with a minimum of 20 students. The individual subscription includes one level of the leaflet as well as a teacher’s edition. You have to select the specific level that you want to subscribe to. A classroom order can include multiple levels, plus one teacher edition per 25 student editions.

Science Weekly also has a new section of leveled interactive activities that we really enjoyed. These electronic versions are similar to the leaflet that I received, but they can be used online or downloaded (see page 8 after you choose a topic) for later use. The teacher’s edition can also be downloaded on page 8 of each topic.

Overall I felt that the Science Weekly materials were well thought out and interesting for both children and teachers. We didn’t do a lot of formal science this year and I’d like having leaflets like these to base some of our schooling on, though I’d probably order a grade level up for Tornado Boy. He really enjoyed the combination of math and science that several of the issues seemed to have.

If you’d like to see what other TOS Review Crew members think of Science Weekly, you can visit our Crew blog.

Thanks so much for reading!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Disclaimer: I am a member of The Old Schoolhouse Review Crew for 2010-2011 and receive free products and services in exchange for a thorough and honest review. Though I am compensated with free products, I am not compensated in the form of cash for my reviews. My reviews will always reflect my honest opinions, findings, beliefs and experiences with the products and services that I have received.

As part of being a member of the TOS Homeschool Crew, we had the opportunity to review a CD-ROM from Digital Frog software that contains three virtual field trips.

Each field trip has a “Quick Tour” which is an audio-visual explantion of the different ways that you can navigate through the tour. The main concept is a virtual walk-through of the ecosystem where you walk between numbered posts in the area. Each post has a 360 degree visual of the area, and then may have a slide show or additional video content to support the information of the native plants, animals and information about the terrain.

There are also other ways to navigate if you’re looking for specific information about the ecosystem, rather than just a general walkthrough. You can search by keyword, or you can use a web-like “map” of the information available on the disc to visit screens by specific topic. Here’s a screenshot of the map for the desert trip:

Web-Map for the Desert

Each disc is filled with a large amount of scientific information. I’d estimate the best ages for the discs are in the 9-13 year old range. They were definitely above Tornado Boy’s head. They require extensive reading and aren’t quite as interactive as he needs to remain engaged. The discs are developed to be a real scientific tool and they are successful in that goal. They are truly packed with a wealth of information.

The three field trips are available individually for $60 each, or as a set of three trips on one disc (CD or DVD) for $125. You can also preview each field trip on the Digital Frog site. You can also download demo versions of any of the field trips on the Digital Frog site. Digital Frog also produces other contents like frog dissection discs that look fascinating. Tornado Boy saw one at a science museum and he really enjoyed that a lot. I never thought that I’d see a 5-year old virtually dissect a frog and ask to do it again.

If you’d like to see what other TOS Review Crew members think of this product, you can visit our Crew blog.

Thanks so much for reading!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Disclaimer: I am a member of The Old Schoolhouse Review Crew for 2010-2011 and receive free products and services in exchange for a thorough and honest review. Though I am compensated with free products, I am not compensated in the form of cash for my reviews. My reviews will always reflect my honest opinions, findings, beliefs and experiences with the products and services that I have received.

We have had the privilege of reviewing a collection of 8 Schleich animal figurines through The Old Schoolhouse Homeschool Crew during this past month. Tornado Dad was with us when we first opened the package and his response was “Wow, these are way too nice to be toys”. You can immediately see and feel the quality of the items. The figures are greatly detailed and have a significant “heft” when you pick them up. They are clearly a quality product. Each figurine was labeled 3+, but I was still a little nervous as Tornado Boy can be a bit rough on things. I’ve set them aside for now to be one of our “adult supervision” toys. We’ve used them for several lessons and overall he’s done a great job treating them with respect. They seem to be quite sturdy, but I might be a little concerned if he sat on one of the horses or other animals that have long legs. This has way more to do with my son’s tendency to be rough than it does the toys. They are very well made; far better than almost any other toy that I’ve come across.

You can click on the above graphic (the one with the curling page) to view an interactive version of the current Schleich catalog of figurines in a new window/tab. This is one impressive book! We got a paper copy included with our delivery and I think that Tornado Boy enjoyed it almost as much as the figures themselves. The catalog, like the toys, is a lesson waiting to happen. As we browsed through it, we noticed that a lot of the animals had both adult versions as well their young. That got us talking about how the babies of the animal world often have a specific name. We looked through the book and saw that many animal babies were called cubs or calves. We hadn’t talked much about this before, so I also played an old Sesame Street song for Tornado Boy called “What are kids called?” that is about animal babies. One of the other nice things about the catalog is that it gives a graphic representation of what continent each of the wild animals are from.

We received both an adult gnu and baby gnu calf. I never realized before I read the page on the Schleich website that a gnu is also known as a wildebeest. I always thought that they were two distinct animals. The website has a detailed description and some background information on each animal. They are well worth looking at if you want to purchase any of the animals for homeschool lessons. They also give information about the habitat, zoological name for the animal, whether or not it’s endangered and where in the world it is found. Clearly, a lot of work and thought goes into these products.

One of the funniest things that happened as a result of our Schleich toys is that Tornado Boy has a new favorite song. For some reason, the “Gnu Song” that was played many moons ago on The Muppet Show stuck with me, so I went in search of it on the Internet. See, this is why I can’t remember any new stuff, my brain is too clogged up with old song lyrics! Here for your pleasure, is the Gnu song. I’ll spare you Tornado Boy’s version – though it is very funny to hear him as he runs around the house giggling and singing it.

We also had some more “serious” lessons with the animals, including a bit of geography. I had printed out the sheets on each of our animals from the Schleich site and used them as a guide along with our world map. Tornado Boy helped me place each animal on the map based on where it was from. We did have two animals that are found worldwide – the donkey and the Dartmoor Pony. I told TB that donkeys can survive on little water and can sometimes live in the desert, so he put him in Australia. I checked, there are indeed donkeys there. The Pony didn’t fare so well. He ended up in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean since we couldn’t find an exact home for him. We had fun using the map, identifying countries and continents and placing the animals on the map:

Tornado Boy also took a little creative freedom and set up a battle between the animals – it was the four farm animals (two horses, a donkey and a pig) vs. the four wild animals (okapi, and elephant calf and the two gnus) vs. three Zhu Zhu pet hamsters. Pandemonium pretty much ensued as soon as the hamsters got turned on, but I’m pretty sure that the wild animals could take ‘em in the real world.

The toy figures are sold both online and in retail shops. You can use the locator on the Schleich site to find either type of shop. The prices have a wide range – from a few dollars for some of the baby animals to over $100 for some of the larger play sets. The figurines appear to be in a limited edition format where they’re made for a number of years and then retired. New figurines are introduced several times per year. I found several collector sites that featured pictures of “retired” Schleich animals. I really liked the Schleich toys. They have an heirloom quality feel to them and they really lend themselves to fun, open-ended lessons. If you’d like to see what other TOS Review Crew members think of this product, you can visit our Crew blog.

Thanks so much for reading!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Disclaimer: I am a member of The Old Schoolhouse Review Crew for 2010-2011 and receive free products and services in exchange for a thorough and honest review. Though I am compensated with free products, I am not compensated in the form of cash for my reviews. My reviews will always reflect my honest opinions, findings, beliefs and experiences with the products and services that I have received.

We were recently given a trial membership for Time4Learning to review as part of my participation in the TOS Homeschool Crew. We already have a Time4Learning membership, but for review purposes, I was asked to take a look at the Pre-K to Kindergarten curriculum. I was curious how my son would react to it since he was already using some of the higher level Time4Learning modules. I was pleasantly surprised when he really enjoyed it. The Pre-K1 section – that my son calls “Time4Learning Bags” due to the look of the interface – is divided into topics such as “Feelings”, “Colors”, “Shapes” and Tornado Boy’s personal favorite “Vehicles”.

The Pre-K2 section (shown above) continues with more in-depth treatment of several of the PK1 themes, plus adds more advanced topics such as time and measurement. Each topic typically contains a story or interactive content such as a song along with activities such as matching, painting and making choices. Tornado Boy particularly enjoys the topics that have a music component, like the “Wheels on the Bus” song that’s part of the PK1 Vehicles activity.

The games in the PK1 and PK2 have minimal interface and instruction. This is typically good for a pre-reader, but I found it frustrating when TB wanted help doing something and there were no tool tips for me to work with. In general, a preschooler only needs basic mouse skills in order to use the Pre-K levels of time for learning. The content is fun, educational and easy to deal with.

The Kindergarten curriculum is significantly different from the Pre-K modules. There is a lot more walking the child through the modules and introductory instruction in understanding and using the interface that was absent at the Pre-K levels. The process can be quite tedious, especially if the child already has good mouse skills. One of the things that frustrated me is the “this (ring) means that you have assignments” on the launch page (see above graphic). I wanted to be able to assign certain modules to my son and send him on his way, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to use the feature. It took extensive digging in the background Parent area of the site to see that the feature is not currently in use. I really wish that it would not display. It’s confusing to both parents and students.

The Kindergarten content is divided into Language Arts, Math and a few introductory Science lessons that are actually intended to be part of the 1st grade curriculum. One of my favorite things about Time4Learning is that while there are suggested sequences of lessons, the children are not required to follow that sequence. In several instances, we started with the “test” section of a topic to see if the individual lessons were worth spending our time on, or if we should move on. Also available for the Kindergarten units are extensive lesson plans and worksheets in pdf form. They are in the parent login area of the Time4Learning site under the “additional resources” header. I like having this type of resource for the content because I can review the content in advance and select items that match things that I am teaching in our homeschool. The worksheets typically use the characters that are in the animated T4L sequences online, so they’re familiar to the student. These enrichment materials are not available at the PK1 and PK2 levels.

One of the things that I really like about Time4Learning is the score reporting system. I typically sit with my son as he completes lessons, but I do like that I can easily review what he’s completed and see if there are areas that require review. To access the reporting, you’ll need to click on the “bookbag” labeled “My Portfolio” on the assignments/”launch” screen. From there, you can select reporting by category and time range. The report is displayed on-screen, but can also be saved to a pdf file for printing or later review. Each lesson, quiz and test is shown in detail. You can link to the individual lesson to see the content that the student was shown. The quizzes and tests actually display the student’s answers on the quiz as well. The student can review any content at any time. I love the level of detail that the reporting affords. I feel confident that I can easily identify areas that my son needs more work on.

A parent can opt to allow their child to play on the “Playground” after their lessons are done. There are time settings in the Parent Login area that allow the parent to set the minimum lesson duration and the maximum playground time, either for today or for all sessions going forward. The Playground is the part of the site that I have the biggest beef with. Many of the activities are not at all educational. There is also access to commercial sites like PBS Kids that I want to control my child’s access to. I also don’t want him to waste a half hour playing “Asteriods”. It seems like this section needs to some work.

Some suggestions to improve Time4Learning:

• Offer “tool tips” (pop-up text) for lesson content in the parent areas and the reporting. There is an icon guide, but I can’t easily view it and the reports at the same time.
• Allow parents to constrain “Playground” activities by type, or perhaps select only specific games to access.
• I think that there are a lot of resources on the Time4Learning parent site that aren’t that easy to find. They really do add a lot of value, so it might help to do more to “feature” them.
• The science section doesn’t have the same feel and presentation as the other sections. The tests are harder to take and require more specific mouse skills as the answers require selecting a small radio button rather just touching the object beside it to automatically select the radio button. This can be problematic for small children. I also found several “resources” linked in the science area that were dead links to Internet content external to the Time4Learning site.

Overall, my son loves the site. He was just as happy playing around with the Pre-K content as he is learning in the 1st and 2nd grade areas. In my opinion, the content is typically well-developed (especially with the extra resources available at the Kindergarten level and beyond) and it seems to be a lot of fun for my child. I really appreciate the flexibility that Time4Learning offers. I like that you have access to 3 years of lessons at any time. I like that we can do the lessons in the sequence that we choose and repeat lessons as desired. I wouldn’t use Time4Learning as my entire curriculum, but it’s worthwhile as an enhancement, especially if I pick and choose the lessons in advance to coordinate with what we’re already working on. It also has helped me to “catch” a few things that I hadn’t thought to teach my son yet, so that was valuable as well.

Time4Learning has varying costs depending on the number of people in your family who want to use the program and typically offers introductory offers as well as lesson demos on their site. The program is entirely online, with no additional software needed. You can access your account from any computer with Internet access. If you need to adjust the grade level (PK-8th) for your child, it is easy to contact T4L and have them make the adjustment for you, keeping three grade levels of content available at all times. There is a great Hints & Helps page here that gives great insight into using the site.

If you’d like to see what other TOS Review Crew members think of this product, you can visit our Crew blog. Different crew members reviewed Time4Learning affiliated products such as Time4Writing and Spelling City, so you can check to see if any are of interest to you as well.

Thanks for reading!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Disclaimer: I am a member of The Old Schoolhouse Review Crew for 2010-2011 and receive free products and services in exchange for a thorough and honest review. Though I am compensated with free products, I am not compensated in the form of cash for my reviews. My reviews will always reflect my honest opinions, findings, beliefs and experiences with the products and services that I have received.

This week, I’ve done a lot of this:
Planning, planning, planning. It is exhausting. This week I got the finalized plans for Tornado Boy’s enrichment classes for the fall (think parent co-op). I got to visit the class site and meet with some of the parents and teachers. I am really, really excited for the fall. TB will be doing a Lego class, a once a week, multi-age kindergarten class and also studying with Five In A Row at home and with the co-op. I’ve got my volunteer duties arranged with the group as well.

We also went to our first homeschool gym class – LOVED it. It was well run and Tornado Boy had a great time. He seemed to be engaged and involved. There were a lot of kids, but they did a good job breaking into groups and keeping them occupied. Today we went to sign-ups for a local homeschool group. They do so many trips, tours, exchanges and other activities. I was completely amazed at what they had to offer. I finally feel like we’re becoming part of the homeschool community here and I’m really excited for the upcoming year.

I’m trying to figure out how to incorporate my plans for the year with the classes and group activities. One thing that’s become abundantly clear this week is that we are going to be spending a lot of time in the car – probably 3-4 hours per week. I need to figure out how to leverage that time and use it for car schooling time. It actually works well for us because Tornado Boy is strapped in, so he can’t go anywhere. I can play educational videos or audio books. He can also do some lap work, but he’s still prone to dropping things, but he’s getting better about that. I just need to make sure that I can set him up with activities that are independent so that I don’t get distracted. I am trying to figure out how to leverage our existing curriculum into unit studies that we can incorporate car components into. It will be interesting to see how it all goes.

Camp/Science:

Tornado Boy puddle jumping on his way into camp.

Tornado Boy was at science camp this week while I was hard at work with all my planning and errand running. He really enjoyed it and his absolute favorite experiment that they did was the mentos in Diet Coke explosion. He drew this picture of the experiment:
Evidently the top thought bubble says “camp” and the left one is him exclaiming “Ooohhh!”. The exploding bottle has “DC” for Diet coke. He was so cute and animated when he explained the experiment to us. Tornado Dad says that we can re-create the experiment at home this weekend if Tornado Boy is good, but we’ll see. Listening and following directions has been a huge issue this week. It’s been wearing me out.

Geography:
At home, Tornado Boy continued to be interested in learning more about the United States. We used this neat PowerPoint presentation that I found on ABC Teach. If you’re a member, you can find it here. The interactive map allows you to click on the question mark to reveal the name of the state and capital city. TB enjoyed this activity and was able to name about a quarter of the states and capitals based on knowing the outline and location of the state. For the ones that he didn’t know, I would give him clues – either the name of the capital city, something that the state was known for (i.e. potatoes for Idaho) or something like the state starts with ‘O’ and has 4 letters for Ohio and then he would take a guess. I like that this document could easily be used independently by the child, if desired. Good stuff!

Language Arts:
We did some work on identifying parts of speech this week. We talked about nouns, verbs and adjectives. We used the demo for Destination Reading, Course II to reinforce some of the concepts. We also used a Venn Diagram for the first time to talk about adjectives. We read a story and then Tornado Boy used the Venn Diagram to place adjectives that described two different characters in the story. I found a nice resource for some graphic organizers. They’re in pdf format and you can type directly on to them if you choose. On a technical note, if you use Firefox with the “Download Them All” add-on, you can download them all at once – it’s a huge time saver.

Physical:
Our fun activity of the week was bowling. Trying to get a picture of Tornado Boy bowling was close to impossible. Talk about always in motion! I think that this was the first time that he’s gone “big ball” bowling. We did candlepin last year when we went to New England, but we haven’t been since. They had gutter guards up, so he did okay when he wasn’t totally lobbing the ball. We had fun, so we hope to go again soon.

If you’d like to see what else happened this week, check out the “Weekly Wrap-up” at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

We went to a great drop-in science class this past week. I posted this picture earlier of Tornado Boy holding a balloon with a wooden dowel passed through it. Here’s what you need to pull that off:

• A small balloon – one with some ‘give’ to it. Don’t blow it all the way up.
• A wooden dowel stick with a pointed end.
• A jar of vaseline.

First you blow up the balloon and tie it off. Make sure that it is not full stretched, it will need some slack. Dip your finger in the vaseline and carefully coat the dowel stick all over with it. Pass the stick from the middle of the top side of the balloon (the dark spot where the rubber is thickest) to the other end of the balloon right next to where it is tied off. It helps to work with your child to slowly twist the stick in order for it to get through the balloon. It’s like magic! The balloon will slowly deflate once the stick is through, so take your pictures right away!

Station 2 had earthworms to observe. The instructor had schematic drawings of earthworms to help the kids identify their different segments. She also had some photographs of an earthworm dissection that she had done with an older class of students so that the kids could see what the different organs were inside of an earthworm, and to compare them to their own bodies. The kids could scoop the earthworms out of their dirt container and observe how they moved on a plate.

The third station that we visited had a microscope and lots of different things to look at. I wish that we had a microscope at home, but I really don’t want to make the investment yet. Tornado Boy can be pretty rough on things still. He did have a great time looking at different things under it, though. They had salt crystals, crayons, pencils, playing cards, rocks, Lego blocks, feathers and other objects to look at. Tornado Boy enjoyed this a lot. Since I don’t plan on buying a microscope any time soon, I looked up virtual microscopes and I found a couple of possibilities: Kbears Interactive Microscope and for older kids, Discovery Education has a Virtual Electron Microscope.

Station four was a sense of smell experiment. There were six small film containers (remember those?). Each was capped and contained something for the kids to sniff. There were blindfolds to use if the kids would let you (no way!) so that they couldn’t peek and were truly only using their sense of smell. Tornado Boy had a really hard time with this one. The items that I can remember were coffee, bread, and laundry detergent. Each container sat on a piece of paper that had the answer for the item written on the back of it. For non-readers, you could put a picture of the item on the card.

The final station that we visited went way over Tornado Boy’s head, but he enjoyed watching the reactions. The experiment started with three containers of purple cabbage juice. To each container, the student could mix in a different item and watch the juice change color. They had lemon juice, dish liquid, sugar, Dr. Pepper and vinegar. The juice reacts and changes color depending on if what is added to it is an acid or a base. There are more instructions if you want to perform this experiment here.

This class was really fun and had a great mix of experiments that can be done with children of various ages. We were really glad that we went!

For more fun science lessons and activities, check out Ticia’s Science Sunday post at Adventures in Mommydom!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

We were on the road for part of this week, so our “official” school time was pretty limited. We did a lot of “car schooling”. I posted earlier in the week about our wedding trip to DC, Canada and Detroit, Michigan. The photo to the left was taken in Maryland during our trip. This mosaic sculpture was outside the restaurant where we had breakfast. Tornado Boy saw it from the window where we were sitting and wanted to go investigate after we ate. Unfortunately there wasn’t any sort of plaque on it and I couldn’t find any further information on it. The tile work was really neat, though. We’ve done foam mosaics and we once participated in a group mosaic tile at our local gardens, but we’ve never done a full tile pattern. I think I’ll put that on the bucket list for this school year. I’ve seen craft kits for them at Michael’s before. I’ll have to put a note on my to do list to save one of their coupons for it.

Science:
We attended a drop-in science class this week that was really awesome. I’ll post more about it on Sunday, but this photo is Tornado Boy holding a balloon that we were able to pass a dowel through without popping it. They had so many cool experiments set up for the kids to try out.
We also got a neat impromptu lesson in animal camouflage when we saw this Katydid on our door. If he was on the right plant, he sure would blend right in. His wings have veining identical to a leaf. We’d still hear him though, they make a tremendous amount of noise. Between the Katydids and the frogs around here, it is loud with wildlife at night.

Reading:
We turned in our Summer Reading program sheet at our local library this past week. Tornado Boy is super excited because he now has a “Star Reader” sticker on his window of the car. Unfortunately we didn’t get to Barnes and Noble yet and Borders was out of most of their free promo books, so we’ll have to try again later to complete those programs. I’m glad that we had participated in What We’re Reading for several weeks because it made it really easy to log the books that we had read on the worksheets – all I had to do was look at my blog posts.

Math:
Tornado Boy is working on memorizing his addition and subtraction facts. He can do some in his head, some on his fingers and for some others it helps to use the Math-U-See blocks. I had him do this Toucan worksheet this morning to try to evaluate where he was. He seems to know all of the +0, +1, +2 and doubles facts for addition. The remaining facts he is typically using a manipulative to solve. He taught himself subtraction, so we haven’t learned them in “families” of facts.
I’ve sort of put Math-U-See on hold for the moment and we’re mostly working on writing fluency at the moment. He can write the numbers, but he will sometimes reverse seven and the rest still require a some thought to print. He got the answers correct on this worksheet, and then I scanned it into the computer and we used the computer to do the color by number part.

Playtime:
Tornado Boy had fun doing a puppet show for me in the new studio at our Children’s Museum. They have a great selection of puppets, but he was disappointed that there was not a curtain for the stage.

He also visited the art studio for a bit of painting time. In the first one he was just experimenting with mixing colors – green, blue and yellow. In the second, he asked for my help in making a rainbow. He picked the colors using the ROYGBIV mnemonic – except that as usual, there was no indigo paint.

If you’d like to see what else happened this week, check out the “Weekly Wrap-up” at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

After our quick overnight in a very stormy D.C., we flew on to Michigan. One of my goals in life is to see all 50 states. Tornado Boy is getting dragged into this goal, somewhat by default. Thankfully he seems to love to travel as much as I do. This past weekend we flew to Michigan to attend my cousin’s wedding. While we were there, we took a side trip into Canada to have dinner – simply because we could! This trip brought the number of states that Tornado Boy has visited to 12 – they’re shown in green on this map. The trip to Canada brought his total countries visited to 3 – Bahamas, The United States and Canada.

We didn’t do any “formal” schooling while we were gone, but we definitely learned and saw a lot of different things. Tornado Boy got to learn about passports and the process involved in leaving and re-entering the country while we crossed the border into Canada. We were on a cruise ship for the Bahamas trip and it was long enough ago that he didn’t seem to remember much about it. Canada didn’t look much different than the U.S. – the first thing that we saw when we crossed the border was a McDonald’s! We selected a restaurant for dinner that looked kid-friendly. Not much was different there except that we saw that the bottles of ketchup and the like on the table were labeled in English and French rather than English and Spanish like we’re used to. We were in Ontario, but I explained to Tornado Boy that a large number of people in Canada, particularly in Quebec speak French.

I wanted Tornado Boy to be able to see what Canadian Money looked like, so I asked our server to show him a Canadian dollar bill. She told me that she couldn’t. I haven’t been to Canada in about 20 years and I didn’t realize that they had done away with the dollar bill in the interim. She did show him five and ten dollar bills, though. He was able to see that unlike U.S. money, Canada uses different colors on their bills. We also learned that they have $1 coins that they call “Loonies” and $2 coins that are called “Toonies”. Money has some interesting copyright issues, so rather than including pictures, you can see photos of Canadian coins here and Canadian bills here.

This was the first wedding that Tornado Boy has attended. Ironically, I was also five when I attended my first wedding, and it was the parents of the bride for this wedding. I have no good pictures of my son in his suit at all. I know that my Mom took some and I’m hoping that they’ll be decent. As much as I enjoyed going and seeing my family, it was stressful having a very high energy boy at an elegant wedding. Thankfully the Leapster helped occupy him for part of the time. I was disappointed that we didn’t get to dance, but it got too late and we had to leave before Tornado Boy turned into a pumpkin. Tornado Boy really enjoyed himself and he kept saying that he loved Lauren (my cousin, the bride) and that she was so pretty – which she was!

The day after the wedding we drove up to Ann Arbor with my parents and visited the Exhibit Museum of Natural History. This place was pretty impressive. They have a great collection of fossils including these huge Mastodons at the left. They also had many dinosaurs, including the Edmontosaurus above. The rest of the fossils were in glass cases depending on the classification of the plant or animal that had been fossilized. The upper levels of the museum had a huge collection of Michigan wildlife – stuffed and mounted fish, birds and animals. There was also a section on geology and anthropology. I could have spent a lot more time looking at the exhibits, but someone was getting restless after a couple of hours!

One of Tornado Boy’s favorite exhibits was this one on DNA. Try to bring that topic down to a five year olds level! I think he was fascinated mostly by the helix pattern.

We got a real surprise after we left the museum. We saw a herd of buffalo on the side of the highway! I had to look that one up when we got back because that just didn’t seem like a random occurrence. Evidently they are on the property of the Domino’s Pizza headquarters along with a petting zoo. You can take a hay ride out to see them – or you can nearly cause an accident driving down the road! LOL I was really excited. I don’t think I had ever seen a live buffalo before.

After the buffalo sighting we drove out to get some of the best gluten-free pizza that we’ve ever had at Buddy’s Pizza. I really wish that it wasn’t so darn far away! The crust is so light and fluffy – unlike any other gluten-free crust we’ve had. Tornado Boy was in pizza heaven. They say that the dough is made of a combination of potato, rice and tapioca flours. I’d love to know how they make it. It was so delicious!

Overall we had a fun trip to D.C., Canada and Michigan. I really wish that we could just snap our fingers and travel anywhere. I love to do it, but that return day of driving, buses, flying and then driving some more to get home is always so exhausting!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Wild Turkey image from Wikipedia Commons

Just moments ago:

Tornado Boy: Mom, there’s a turkey on our deck.
Me: Ha, Ha!
Tornado Boy: No, mom there’s REALLY a turkey on our deck.

Sure enough, there was a huge wild turkey walking on the rails on our deck. Unfortunately he FLEW AWAY before I could get my camera turned on. I had no idea that wild turkeys could fly and he flew up pretty high into the trees behind us. I also didn’t know that TB could identify a live turkey, so kudos to him. You learn something new every day!

Find out what other kids are saying, or link up and post your own story at Tiny Talk Tuesday at Not Before 7.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Our week in pictures:
Spelling:

Playing with homophones

Spelling - before FIN became FUN!

Science:

Touching Horseshoe and Spider Crabs

We observed a praying mantis on our house.

Tornado Boy predicted a hurricane would hit Colorado

Physical:

He built a pyramid - then took a rest

Practical:

He worked on cutting and taping

Playtime:

He built several big Lego buildings with Tornado Dad

Legos have really given me hope. Tornado Boy and Dad are playing with them nearly every night for very long periods of time. They made a tower that was nearly 5 feet tall the other night. Tornado Boy was on a ladder to put on the finishing touches. I’m really thrilled that he’s found something that he will pay attention to for long periods of time. He’s growing up!

To see what other families are up to this week – hop on over to Homeschool Creations.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.