Pearl Harbor

Okay... I'm finally getting around the blogging about the amazing event we got to be part of while in Hawaii. We happened to arrive at the USS Arizona Memorial just as they were getting ready to start a special program in honor of Junior Ranger day. I never imagined how "special" the program would be.

Before I get into the program, I thought I would add this quote that I found by Rick Kogan in this past Sunday's Chicago Tribune Magazine...

"History is, of course, available by many means. There are books, documentaries, Wikipedia. But history delivered firsthand is a rare commodity and it packs a punch that dazzles more than the flashiest Web site."

That was so very true that day at Pearl Harbor. No one read a history lesson to the children for that program, they didn't watch a film.... no, they heard the unfolding of the events on the day of the attack by the survivors themselves. It was almost too much to take at times. The attack on Pearl Harbor was something that was in history books... not sitting, living, right in front of me. An absolutely amazing experience. Survivor biographies are on the kids' page.

First the children heard the stories from the five survivors...
After the stories and a question and answer period, the kids received their Junior Ranger badges...
(Clara wasn't happy most of that morning because we had just found out our flight had been canceled and had no idea when we would be heading home... she decided at that moment that she desperately missed our dog, Friday)

Next, they got to have their Junior Ranger certificates signed by the survivors...
They received a packet of information about Pearl Harbor and an orchid to place in the water at the memorial.

Next we watched a short film and got onto the boat to go out to the memorial.

The USS Arizona...
The list of names was overwhelming...

After that we boarded the boat to go back to the visitor center. We made a brief stop at the gift shop to pick up this...
Graphic Library: The Attack on Pearl Harbor
Alex has the one about the Great Chicago Fire so he thought he would like the one on Pearl Harbor as well.

From there we boarded a bus with the other passengers from our canceled flight to be driven around Honolulu while they tried to figure out what to do with us. :-)

Hawaii Report #2

The next "educational" thing we did on our trip was a trip to the Maui Ocean Center. It is an amazing aquarium that gives you a glimpse into Hawaii's undersea world (like that? I got it from their website... LOL!). At first I wasn't sure about spending our time at just any old aquarium while on our trip. We have a membership to the Shedd here in Chicago so we're used to visiting an outstanding aquarium on a regular basis. But when we found out that this aquarium just focused on the marine creatures of Hawaii we decided to go.

We weren't disappointed either! It was a perfect complement to our coral reef study we had done the month before our trip. And it was a great preview into the coral reef world before our snorkeling trip.

Let me add the disclaimer to these photos that I really struggle with aquarium shots, so bear that in mind :-)

The first building was coral reefs...


Then outside in the courtyard were the shark and sea turtle tanks...
and a fountain...
The next building was focused on the marine mammals of Hawaii.

We were on a tour with the ship and thought it sounded like we had plenty of time to go through the whole thing... but we ended up losing track of time in the first building (coral reefs) and had to rush a bit through the last part in order to make it back to the bus.

the big "field trip" starts tomorrow!

We leave for Hawaii in the morning!

See you in a week!

she sells sea shells by the seashore...

My goodness... I can't even type that properly let alone say it out loud! Seriously, it took me two tries to type it right!

Yesterday we spent the afternoon studying sea shells.

We started by reading this book....
Shells, Shells, Shells by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace
I must admit, I almost didn't read this to the kids. I had requested it online from the library without knowing anything about it. When I picked it up on Monday, I almost returned it right then because it looked too simplistic to interest my two. Well, you know the old saying "you can't judge a book by its cover"... it applies here. The concept and the illustrations are simple... a bear cub and his mom go beach combing for shells... but it goes much deeper than that. We learned the terms mollusk, mantle, pigment center, operculum, and gastropod. We also learned the difference between bivalves and univalves. It was all done is such a gentle way that the kids really got it. And for an added bonus (especially for Alex) there is a smattering a corny shell jokes throughout the book. It looks like the author has a few other science related books that I may have to check out when we cover other subjects.

After reading the book above and looking at some of the reference books I checked out, we moved on to working with our shell three part cards...

They're a free printable from the Montessori Materials website and you can find them here. The kids not only worked on matching the label to the photos, but they also sorted the shells by univalves and bivalves. It was a nice little exercise to bring home what we had read earlier.

sick day

I've finally rejoined the land of the living! :-)

The bad thing about being a homeschooling mom is that you can't really take a sick day. However, the kids were great and we managed to do quite a bit of school even though I never really left the couch all day. :-)

They did their seat work on their own and then played some of their school computer games. After they fixed themselves lunch and ate, Clara came over and asked if it was okay if they had quiet time so I could take a nap. Sure, twist my arm! So they read for 45 minutes or so. Alex finished the Boxcar Children book he was reading and Clara read through her whole stack of readers that I had just picked up from the library on Monday... sigh. I just can't seem to keep enough books around to keep her happy. Hopefully she'll be ready for longer books soon.

After that I sent them out to the back deck to play for a bit since it was nice out. They came in after a bit and asked if they could hang out with me and watch school movies. I just happened to have a couple from Netflix.com that we hadn't watched yet. So we watched the following movies...

Reading Rainbow: Ocean Life
The kids really enjoy the Reading Rainbow dvd's. The first episode was about whales and they go on a whale watch. The kids were beyond excited since there's a chance that we might see humpback whales on our trip. They really enjoyed the manatee episode as well.

The Living Sea (IMAX)
The IMAX movies are always good for gorgeous visuals... although they're usually light on actual information. The funny thing about this particular movie is that I can remember seeing it at the Museum of Science and Industry while Jeff and I were still dating.

Again, it wasn't what I had planned for the day as far as school but for me never really leaving the couch, we did okay! :-) Today I'm fine (it was just a food reaction the other night) so hopefully we'll be back on track and can start our sea shell stuff today so we can do volcanoes tomorrow!

our coral reef...

Yesterday the kids had the itch to play with their craft supplies... so after quiet time I gave in and told then that they could get out whatever craft supplies they wanted as long as they used them to make a coral reef. So, after I found them a cardboard box, they set to work making a coral reef!

Here's Alex's sea urchin....
(needless to say... we have no toothpicks left in our house now that are not part of a sea creature)

Here is a shot of the reef...
and the floor of the reef...
I walked away from this one and let them do it completely on their own. They had access to a stack of library books, and the internet. They did plenty of goofing around but honestly, they worked really hard on this project. They worked on it from around 2:00pm until dinner at 6:00. They sat and read the books together or would get lost for 20 or more minutes at a time on websites with gorgeous color photos of coral and the creatures that live on the reefs.

The scuba divers came from the Crayola site and you can find them here (link to the pdf file). The odd lumpy things on the floor of the reef are sea shells... they worked on those forever. There is a manta ray swimming with the divers in there too.

It was a lot of fun! They're still thinking about what they can add to it, so apparently this is a work in progress.

Thank you all so much for the reading list suggestions!!! I'm definitely going to check them all out! My plan is to compile all of the suggestions into a post here in a day or two! Thanks again!

catching up on our hawaii study...

Wow... I've been really behind on posting week! We have actually been doing school... I promise! :-)

I went a little crazy now that I can request books online at the library and now we have a big towering stack of books to read!

One we read this week is...

DK Eye Wonders: Ocean
Lots of text but not so much that it overwhelmed us... we were able to get through it in one sitting. However, it did begin to skip the pages about the arctic ocean near the end. The photographs are beautiful! The kids really enjoyed it!

And since I'm rereading my copy of this...

A Charlotte Mason Companion by Karen Andreola
I got out the art supplies (the good colored pencils and paper) and let the kids draw while I read the book to them...



(sorry... when I went to label this drawing, I didn't realize that I had it upside down until I was almost done... so keep that in mind...lol)
I guess the next step is to have them do the labeling... I totally forgot about that... baby steps, baby steps. :-) I thought they did a good job though! They really seemed to enjoy it.

After that we read a fun book I found at the library...Surprising Sharks by Nicola Davies
Fun, fun living book about all kinds of sharks that we'd never heard of before. It also went over the parts of a shark and what makes a shark a shark. I have a feeling that we'll be reading this one again.

Then we worked with our parts of a shark three part cards...


They're a free download here on the MontiMats site.

Yesterday we read this book...
Magic School Bus On the Ocean Floor
I have always had a love/hate relationship with Magic School Bus books. I love how accessible and interesting they make science for kids BUT there is so much going on on every page that it makes me batty trying to read it all. HOWEVER... yesterday that all changed! Clara is now a strong enough reader that she could read most of the extra dialog that's scattered around the pages with Alex! I read the main text and the "reports" and the kids did the dialog. It was really a lot of fun. Woo hoo!

Okay... I think that pretty much catches us up on what we've done beyond our basics so far this week!

brief summary of our day

I vegged on the couch too late tonight and now I just want to get to bed! :-)

Today was a good, but tough day. After her stellar day of reading yesterday, Clara got overconfident in her reading ability and insisted on reading things well above her level. It's good to have ambition but you've got to have some patience too. The more she insisted on reading, the more frustrated she got. I finally made her stop, gave her some new Dr. Seuss books to work on and dealt with the fallout a bit. But at bedtime she was happily reading through her stack of Dr. Seuss again.

We had a really low key day since the first part of our week was so hectic. This afternoon we read a book on coral reefs and watched the Reading Rainbow episode that went with it. It was cool that I was able to find both the book and the DVD at the library the other day... however, the DVD was so scratched that it caused more frustration than anything else.

After that we read a book on Sea Turtles (this is the book that Clara insisted on reading and got frustrated with). It was a beautiful, well written book... fabulous illustrations. I'll have to add the title and author tomorrow if anyone is interested. They also used the book to figure out which type of sea turtle our plush puppet is... its a green sea turtle. :-)

For something new I'm trying, I gave them each a list of terms related to our Hawaii study and had them build the words with our alphabet cards. Alex enjoyed it and did both his list and Clara's. Clara had a bad attitude by then and barely made it through her own list....

The last thing we did was watch the IMAX film, Hidden Hawaii. I had gotten it from Netflix.com. I love Netflix for all of the educational dvds that they have and the fact that I can get almost all.. if not all of the IMAX films from them. I must say though, that the reviews were right, this was a dull one. Alex seemed mildly interested in it... Clara fell asleep. I have a couple more IMAX movies in my queue for our Hawaii unit... I'm hoping those are more exciting.

Okay... for a brief summary, this has gotten rather long! I have to go and post to my other blog real quick so I can go to bed!

wednesday

How's that for a creative and descriptive post title?? Sorry... I've got nothing today! :-)

This is my favorite scene from today....
Clara was on a reading rampage today! She even took quizzes on several of the books that she read on Book Adventure.

After lunch we worked on Hawaii stuff again.

To begin we started with this fabulous book...
The Last Princess
Such an incredible story of a very courageous young woman who fought to save her island kingdom. History of the state of Hawaii that I'm sure I had never heard before. The kids were enthralled as I read it aloud. Gorgeous illustrations. It led us to some really interesting discussions over dinner tonight.

After that book, we moved on to reading about fish...
Hello, Fish!
This was a fun, light book that made for a good introduction to life in a coral reef. We frequently referenced the Hawaiian Reef Fish ID Chart that I had downloaded and printed from the Snorkel Maui site. Beautiful little chart if you need a chart of Hawaiian fish for any reason.

After that we moved on to learning about what makes a fish a fish...
What is a Fish?
This book is information heavy so we're taking it slow and reading a section or two a day.

After our introduction to fish, the kids moved on to playing with our new Parts of a Fish nomenclature cards...
I purchased them from Montessori for Everyone and you can find them here.

All in all... it was a very good day! :-)

(we even had a little bonus lesson in small appliance repair as our vacuum died today and the kids and I opened it up to see if we could figure out the problem! LOL!)