Hawaii Report #1

We're back!!! What a fabulous experience for all of us! It was great to see in person so many of the things we had been studying for the past month.

Our first full day in Hawaii was spent at Hilo on the Big Island. Our excursion that day was a trip to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. We drove up to the Jaggar Museum on the edge of the Kilauea Caldera. It was amazing to see....
In addition to learning about the volcano, we also learned a Hawaiian myth. There was lots of stuff about Pele in the museum, but Alex asked a park ranger specifically about that tree you see in the middle of the photo above. He told us the legend of Ohi'a tree and the Lehua flowers. I couldn't find the exact version that he told, but here is the closest one. The park ranger was happy to tell us this legend as it was a special one to him... he had Lehua flowers on his wedding ring.
After we left the museum, we stopped at the volcanic steam vents...
It was actually a cool day so the kids enjoyed warming up in the steam.

One of my favorite stops was at the Thurston Lava Tube....It was dark in there... but really cool. It was amazing to walk through a tunnel that lava used to flow through.

But I think my favorite part of this stop was walking through the rain forest on our way down to and back from the lava tube. It was so lush and green and you could hear birds everywhere. Here's a pic of the kids in the rain forest after coming out of the lava tube...
I think that pretty much sums up our volcano day. My plan is to post the majority of my trip report on my other blog, but I'll post more detailed reports about our outings that were a little more educational here on this blog.

Okay... I'm fading fast... we just got home at 5:15 this morning and I'm sleepy!

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!

quiet time...

Another new experiment in our house... quiet time. It's just a half hour of free (with disclaimers...lol) reading right after lunch. The disclaimer on the "free" is that they have to choose books to read from the stack I provide. The don't have to read every book from the stack I choose but their book has to be from the stack. So far, so good.

Here are a couple of shots from yesterday...

I haven't really worried about Alex's reading because at night he's barreling through the Harry Potter series (which on Book Adventure is listed as around 6/7 grade reading level). He's currently about 400 pages into book four. But, I felt like he needed exposure to other books without taking away his free reading time at night. So, I pulled a bunch of books from our various Sonlight cores and let him pick something to read during quiet time. They're not all big challenging chapter books... just a variety of quality literature for him to choose from. I think in order for this to continue to work, I'm going to need to have a stack of books on hand at all times. The library isn't an option for this (at least for me) because I don't want to have to worry about taking the books back before he's through with them or even before he picks them. I would love book suggestions and/or links to good quality reading lists. I tried to find a few on my own yesterday and didn't fair so well. The ones I found seemed to be more of what you could read versus what is worth reading... if you know what I mean. A friend from our homeschool group has been giving me some suggestions that look fabulous, but I would love to have more suggestions!

The challenge with Clara is keeping enough books around. She's at that level where she needs the "level one" books but she can go through 4 or more in a sitting. I don't want to buy anymore so I guess I'm stuck hauling home bags of books from the library each week :-)

The quiet time is working well for us... lets just hope we can keep with it!

thank you Shannon!

I just checked out the site you recommended and it looks really cool!

In case you missed it in her comment, she recommended a site called Math Worksheet Wizard!

Looks like one I'll definitely be using!

Thanks again Shannon!