the northern lights

This afternoon we started a little study of the northern lights.

As a light start to this study, we read this book...Aurora: A Tale of the Northern Lights by Mindy Dwyer

It was a nice, light whimsical story... however, this is the author's story, not a regional folk tale. It was a great story with beautiful illustrations though. The kids both seemed to enjoy it.

We also looked at the photos is this book from the library...
Aurora: The Mysterious Northern Lights by Candace Savage

I checked this book out solely for the photographs but there is a lot of good information in there also. I wasn't planning on it, but we read several sections as we browsed our way through the book. I might have to pull it out again and see what else might be fun to read aloud.

Then we come to this book...
Arctic Lights, Arctic Nights by Debbie Miller

When I requested this one from the library, I was expecting a book on the Northern Lights. I was disappointed at first to see that the Northern Lights were only mentioned once in the whole book. But then, I really took a look at the book....
This is a story about how drastically the amount of daylight changes in Fairbanks, Alaska, near the Arctic Circle. Since Alex had just covered graphing in his last math book, I saw a potential project as I looked through the book. First of all... we looked up Fairbanks and the Arctic Circle on our map of Alaska. Then, using my graph paper I mentioned in my previous post, I had Alex plot out the sunrise and sunset times.

After that, Alex and Clara connected the dots and colored the graph to reflect the amount of daylight versus night...
(the book runs from Summer Solstice to Summer Solstice)

The kids really enjoyed this and I think we may make bar graphs with the high and low temperatures next!

a good book and blubber

How's that for a post title? LOL!

After lunch we worked on our Alaska/Iditarod study again. This is our last week of this unit study. Next week we go to Missouri for Spring Break and when we return we'll be studying Hawaii (fun! I just picked up some books at the library today!).

So, today we talked about what keeps some arctic animals warm in such cold temperatures. To illustrate the usefulness of a layer of blubber, we made a blubber/crisco mitten. It was pretty fun for the kids to see the difference their layer of blubber made.

Here's Alex trying out the hand with the mitten... (the sink was full of ice water - I ended up dumping our entire tray of ice from the ice maker in there)


This is Alex pulling his unmittened hand out before it froze :-)
(if you're wondering why Clara is holding a bag of rubber bands in the photo above... well, your guess is as good as mine)

Clara takes a turn...
I guess these are out of sequence because we actually read this book first and we even actually read it right before we took a break for lunch...
Togo by Robert J. Blake
I have to say that this was by far one of my favorite books we read during our Iditarod study. This one I definitely had to stop a few times to compose myself before I could continue reading. I really enjoy finding good picture books with good solid information. Not fluffy simplified books where bad things are really glossed over. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a graphic, disturbing book... but it sure doesn't gloss over the hardships they went through either. It seemed to be the perfect mix for my two... enough detail for them to appreciate what it took for the teams to get to Nome but not so much that it upset them.

I think tomorrow we'll study the Northern Lights!

good clean fun!

Yesterday afternoon we got back to our study of the Iditarod and Alaska. After looking at some Inuit art sculptures online, we decided to try to make our own out of bars of Ivory soap.

Here's Alex working on his first carving...
Clara took a slightly different approach to "carving"...

Alex suffers for his art.... lol...
Look! A rabbit! :-)
Here's my polar bear...
This is Clara's. She said that it's a Buddha from the Art Institute... but I think it's this guy from the Field Museum...
Alex did a second carving, a baby polar bear for the mother polar bear I carved...
We also read this book...The Great Serum Race
This was a really amazing telling of the original race to get serum to the city of Nome. It is a picture book but the writing is amazing. It really kept me and the kids on the edge of our seats to hear what happened next. A really gripping tale.

Lance Mackey has made it to Nome so we're just looking for our mushers to make it in... but we still have lots of Alaska/Iditarod activities left to do so we'll keep on working on it all up until Spring Break and then, when we get back, we'll start a unit study on Hawaii!!! That way our trip at the end of April can be a week long field trip! :-)

Mush!

Things are getting pretty exciting here lately! The Iditarod officially started this past weekend so we check the status of our mushers constantly throughout the day. Current standings has Alex's musher (Gerry Willomitzer) in 3rd, our family's musher (Hugh Neff) in 7th and Clara's musher (Jennifer Freking) in 67th place. It's been fun to move our little dots along the trail.

After lunch we worked on our Iditarold stuff some more. First off was some work from our Hands of a Child Sled Dog lapbook. We learned about how dogs and mushers communicate. We had a lot of fun learning the terms mushers use to guide their dogs.

Here's Alex filling out a part of the lap book....
And Clara watching...

After the lapbook work, we sat together to read this book...Akiak by Robert J. Blake
It was such a great story! I don't know if it was just because I haven't been feeling well lately... but man, that story had me tearing up! I'm such a sap!

After the book, the kids set to work on building an igloo out of sugar cubes. I totally forgot to have something on hand to "glue" the cubes together so today they just worked on their overall design. I'll get them something to hold it all together in a day or two and then the real building will begin.


Well... that pretty much covers our school day today (well... except for our typical bookwork we did before lunch)! Hopefully we'll have more Iditarod fun before the week is over.

we have mushers! :-)

It took us several days of research (mostly looking for the cutest dogs... I must admit) but we have finally picked our mushers to follow during this year's Iditarod. We picked three but officially we have one musher for our family that we listed on the eIditarod site.

Here are the kids with their info sheet about our musher, Hugh Neff...

Here's Alex with his sheet about his musher, Gerry Willomitzer...
And finally, Clara with her sheet about her musher, Jennifer Freking....
(how do you like Clara's vacant stare in this photo? lol!)

I found some musher bio sheets on the internet but they weren't geared for current mushers. It had places to list death information and other stuff that didn't apply. It became too much to modify so I just typed up a quick sheet using StartWrite so they would trace the questions and have blanks to fill in their answers which they found on the bio pages I linked to above and had printed out for them (whew... that was quite the run-on sentence).

With our musher bios complete... we sat down to read...
L is for Last Frontier: An Alaska Alphabet

We had checked it out at the library a few weeks ago and had never read it, so we decided today was as good a day as any! We've read a few of the other books from this series and enjoyed them. This was a nice light overview of the state with more details in the margins for when we wanted to know more.

We also did a little more work on our Sled Dog Lapbook that we had gotten from Homeschoolestore. Today we learned about the actual sled team and the different positions within the team. I thought our sled team mobile from a few weeks ago was just for fun... but today it was a handy visual aid! We were able to identify most of the positions from our little team. The kids have also added a little lego musher on the sled. :-)

We're getting very excited about the beginning of the race!

TGIF!

Thank goodness it's Friday! Except for that means I leave tomorrow on a trip and have to get my act together and type out homeschooling instructions for my in-laws since they'll be here with the kids next week. Our schedule isn't that difficult to put down on paper... I'm just procrastinating! :-)

We had a good morning with no fighting at the table while we did our book work. The kids were extremely motivated to get along because as soon as their schoolwork was done they could get the lego kit back out again.

After our seat work was done, we worked on our Iditarod stuff a little. In the book, Dashing through the Snow, that we read a while back there was a list of what the Junior Iditarod mushers carried on their sleds. So, today we decided to pack our sled for the Iditarod. Not very fancy and not terribly accurate, but the kids had fun with it....
I had saved the packet of ads from last Sunday's paper for this project... but perhaps the most helpful publication for this project was the LLBean winter catalog (which I found by cleaning out a bin of Christmas catalogs I had forgotten all about). They got the basic idea, although I'm sure some of these things are very far from the actual equipment that would be used.
Like my fancy sled drawing? LOL!

After this they got back to their lego kit. We took a break to run some errands. And then they went back to the lego kit again... only for a brawl to break out a short time later which resulted in the legos being packed up for a while... sigh.

the field museum

The Field Museum offers free admission for the entire month of February so today we decided to take advantage of this.

I only had one section that we *had* to cover today, that was the "Arctic People" section to go along with our study of the Iditarod. Regardless of how I prepped them, the kids were expecting to see exhibits on the dogs, sleds and the race itself.... not a great big exhibit about the native people of that region. We did learn more about the people and the conditions in which they lived and saw the reasons why traveling by sled dog would be a good mode of transportation.

Here the kids are reading about the sleds....
... we learned that the basket sled came to be used only after Europeans came into that area.

An Eskimo dog...
An Eskimo dog on top of a traditional house of that region...
Some clothing....

Photos were tough... it was a very dimly lit room and the lights in the display cases were on motion sensors. So, if I took too long fiddling with settings, the lights shut off and I would have to wave my arms around to re-light the lights and then start all over again.

In addition to the Arctic People section, we also covered most of Africa, the What is an Animal section and, of course, Egypt (a definite favorite with Alex and Clara). We had a really nice time, but we were all tired. So, we didn't end up staying all that long... maybe 3 and a half hours or so. That's the beauty of living in the city and the fact that admission is free right now. We could go home, guilt-free, knowing that we could go back again without any trouble.

our sled team...

I googled my way across the internet yesterday and found this at the Crayola site. At first I thought we would do it just for fun... but now I think it might work for my activity I mentioned yesterday. I'll probably wait until next week to do it so we can see if there are any usable pictures from the ads in the Sunday paper.

Here's Alex coloring his team of dogs...
And Clara coloring hers...
And the finished product (please excuse the horribly shadowy picture)....
I did something a little different than they had in mind with hanging it. I wanted to use a clothes hanger so it was a little sturdier and portable. The kids really enjoyed making this. They even got out the dog book again so they could color their dogs like real sled dogs (Alex's team - in the back - has two huskies and one malamute.... with Clara's I don't have a clue... one has an orange head so figure that one out... lol!).

We also worked on our sled dog lap book as well. Tomorrow we'll do some more... maybe. Tomorrow may just happen to be field trip day... we'll see how the weather is when we get up.

Iditarod book

Dashing Through the Snow by Sherry Shahan

In the limited time I had at the library yesterday, I managed to grab the book above and a couple of books on Alaska. Today we sat down to read a little of each book. We started with Dashing Through the Snow. We couldn't put it down! We read through the whole thing and the kids were glued to the story. The book takes you step by step through the Jr. Iditarod. The photographs are wonderful and really tie into the story nicely. They aren't just random pretty pictures... but great illustrations of what is talked about on that particular page. On one page in the book it lists what each musher must have on their sled.... I think tomorrow we may do a little activity of "packing our sled"... if it pans out anything at all like I have it in my head, I'll post it here. The book appears to be out of print... but if you see it at your library... its definitely worth checking out.

more iditarod stuff today...

Today we started our Hands of a Child Sled Dog lapbook we got from Homeschoolestore (it was their free lapbook a few weeks ago). The kids were so excited to get started after we spent some time over lunch looking at musher profiles on the Iditarod site. A lot of mushers have websites where you can see their teams. I have a feeling that Alex and Clara are going to follow the musher with the cutest dogs... LOL!

Oh before we got started on the lapbook, we did the Alaska map worksheet I found on Enchanted Learning. The kids did pretty well with it.... it was good practice with map skills. We also got out the globe (as you can tell in the photo below). Slight rambling ahead... I LOVE globes! I have started (unofficially) collecting them. It's amazing to me that you can buy them for about $10-20 at antique stores. I know they may not be completely accurate, but they're close enough for what we use them for. And with having them scattered throughout the house, we use them quite a bit.

Okay... back the lapbook.... this is our second official lapbook project. Last time I think I overdid it. We did too much the first day. Today we just did the first two sections... the history of sled dogs and the main types or breeds. Much more manageable... plus it gave us the opportunity to follow some "rabbit trails".

So, today we got our older version of the book below...DK Encyclopedia of the Dog

The kids love to look at it anyway... but it has great color photos of the different breeds of dogs we talked about today (oh... except the Alaskan Husky... which isn't in this book but was in our lapbook). We took quite a bit of time comparing the different the dogs... how they were alike and how they differed.
We looked up where they originated from on the globe too. It was a good little project.

Thank you Tracy and Alice for the book suggestions! I have the following books in my Amazon cart... but I haven't done anything with them yet...

Woodsong by Gary Paulsen
Dogteam by Gary Paulsen
Togo by Robert J. Blake
Akiak by Robert J. Blake
Balto and the Great Race (we have a Balto book but this is at a higher reading level)
The Mystery on Alaska's Iditarod Trail by Carole Marsh (just for fun since Alex loves mysteries right now... however, I'll have to convince him that it is okay to read book #8 without reading any of the ones before it... sigh)

Alice, also thanks to your suggestion, I have PBS Nature: Alaska DVDin my queue at Netflix (this is the disk that the Sled Dogs episode is on). I wasn't able to find the other DVD on Netflix, but I'll try the library next.

Thanks again for the wonderful suggestions! :-)