Attentiveness

Konos Unit: Attentiveness
Theme: General Attentiveness/Ears and Other Senses

Our next character trait that we will be learning about is Attentiveness. Boy, this is an area that my squirmy 2 year old and bouncy 7 year old could both improve in!

We started with a story from the Bible about Samuel and Eli. Nicholas just got a new Bible and he loves to read it as part of school.

Samuel keeps being woken up from sleep by hearing someone call his name. He keeps going to Eli and asking what he wants but Eli keeps telling him that he didn't call him. Finally Eli tells Samuel that it was the Lord calling Samuel and that the next time he hears the call, he should answer the Lord and listen to what He says. We dramatized the story and Nicholas just loved it when I played Samuel and acted totally startled by the calling.

We talked about the ear and sound. Nicholas used a dictionary and the website Dictionary.com to look up definitions to make his vocabulary cards of words related to attention, hearing, and sound.

We moved on to some materials from the library. The Magic School Bus has a great series of books that teach to children in a fun way as their magic bus shrinks down and gets inside of the craziest things. Of course, when I discovered that they have a book called, "The Magic School Bus Explores the Senses", I knew I had to get it. I also found a good book on the mechanics of the ear called, "What Happens When You Listen?".as well as a DVD called, "Physical Science for Children: All About Sound".

Nicholas The Ghost and Rachel enjoyed watching the cool demonstrations about sound on the DVD.

Nicholas immediately went to build a Lego demonstration of sound waves that ripple outward in all directions.

Here's a visual of sound coming out of his mouth....except that it would actually be much bigger if the size was determined by true volume of the sound emitted from his mouth.

I also read some younger children books about the senses to Rachel. This worked perfectly because I just learned that they are talking about the five senses at her preschool. It seems to be "the thing to do" and the beginning of the school year because that's when we covered it in our Bob Jones curriculum last year as well.

To feel sound, Nicholas felt the speaker on the TV.

But he also felt sound vibrations on his own throat.

We attempted to make our own otoscope to help us see into each other's ears. We used a small flashlight, black construction paper, scissors, and tape.

Nicholas started with making a round disc out of the black paper.

Then he cut a slit in the side of the paper and test fitted it around the lit flashlight to form a black cone. He cut of a small piece of the center (tip) of the black cone to allow the light to shine out in a directed beam.

It looks pretty cool now that it's done.

Here's the lit tip of the flashlight.

The eardrum is a light-gray color or a shiny pearly-white. Either we have unstraight ear canals or the homemade otoscope just didn't direct the light well enough because neither of us could find an ear drum when we looked in each other's ears. Of course, it was fun to just play with the otoscope too!

Stay tuned....next we are building a model of an ear!

Big IQ Kids Review

I haven't used any type of educational computer work with Nicholas' homeschool curriculum so far. However, we recently had the opportunity to try out BigIQKids and we are both pretty excited about it.

BigIQKids is an award-winning program for grades K-8 that is affordable and easy to use. It is an online site that offers FREE lessons in spelling, vocabulary, math, and U.S. geography lessons. Premium accounts are also available for math and geography. There is an easy chart available to help you see the difference in free vs. premium access.

I am most excited about the ability to customize lesson plans to control the difficulty and length of Nicholas' lessons. It's not just a cookie-cutter, one size fits all kind of program.

Each lesson has it's own little tutor that goes over the directions for the lesson and helps the student navigate the program.

Nicholas sits down at the table and uses my laptop for about 10-15 minutes of BigIQKids lessons each day. Some of the work is new to him like the U.S. geography program. It teaches state location, spelling, capitals, and abbreviations. Other lessons like math will be used more as a review.

As Nicholas completes a lesson, he gets rewarded with a game coin. He can then go to the game page where there are over 75 games to choose from, each costing 1-2 coins to play. There are lots of fun games like Krazy Kart, Cupcake Frenzy, Pirates Game, and Dress Up, just to name a few. Nicholas said, "The games are fun. It makes me WANT to work on school work!".

When Nicholas completes a lesson, BigIQKids sends me an email to let me know how he did. I can go online and check out his Progess Report which gives detailed information like how he scored on a particular lesson and other specifics such as average time to complete math problems for a particular lesson.

Since the lessons are customizable, it can grow with Nicholas and his skill level. There are even lessons that we can use years from now on Vocabulary Prep for the SAT which includes a spelling bee, synonyms, antonyms, and sentence completion exercises.

I can also see a benefit in having BigIQKids for Nicholas to work on so that I can grab a few minutes of one-on-one school time with my younger child.

But best of all, BigIQKids is offering a once a year bundle package right now where you can get access to all of the premium benefits offered for just $89.99/year.

For more information, please visit the BigIQKids website. You can also follow BigIQKids on Twitter.

Savor The Days was granted premium account access in order to write this review. There was no compensation for my time and the comments made here are entirely my own (and Nicholas'). Please check out what others on the TOS Homeschool Crew have to say about this great program.

Sayonara Japan!

Konos Unit: Honor
Theme: Japan

Wow! This study on Japan has been so much fun but it has been very busy. Lots of great books and activities. I haven't been able to keep up with putting it all on the blog. I've got some random pictures that I'll include here to try to wrap up this fun study.

I must have had at least 50 books from two different libraries. Some were fictional Japanese folklore, some were more factual and textbook-like. We poured over most of them. Some I read to Nicholas, some he read to himself, and some he read to Rachel. I love being able to bring Rachel into our homeschool studies!

These were some of Nicholas' favorite folklore books.

One time I gave Nicholas three books about Samurai warriors and the cultural history of that time. He was told to choose one book to read and then report back to me about 5 things he learned.

He called me to his room a while later and I found this.

What are you doing, Nicholas?

He said that he was a Japanese farmer fighting to defend his land. He was lying in the tall grass of a rice field (legos) and the yellow and white blanket was his camoflauge in the grass. The paper on his head is supposed to be a straw peasant hat. Wow! And I just wanted a few sentences about what he had learned!

Nicholas learned about Haiku poetry and that it is nature-themed with only three lines. The first line has 5 syllables, the second line has 7 syllables, and the last line has 5 syllables. Nicholas was excited to write his own Haiku!

He wrote:

Golden leaves in Fall
Red, orange, and yellow too
They all come in Fall

Nicholas made a paper fan in which each of the slats of the fan was a vocabulary word from the book we read, A Pair of Red Clogs.

This vocabulary fan was part of a lapbook that I found online for this particular book. Here Nicholas was coloring and cutting out a picture for the lapbook.

We watched this great video from the library. It is a great way to show kids some of the cultural differences between our two countries. One thing Nicholas thought was really interesting was that people in Japan are so crowded and short on space that very few people own pets. However, there are stores where you can go to rent a pet. Yes, you can rent a dog for an hour, a day, or a week or more!

We also read some children's non-fiction books about Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. I read these to Nicholas so that I could talk about some of the issues before we read it and then monitor his understanding or shock as we went along and adjust my reading accordingly.

This particular book about Pearl Harbor was really well written and seemed to really peak Nicholas' interest. He really got absorbed in the story and made several comments about it on his own.

These two Hiroshima books were written by Japanese survivors. Hiroshima No Pika was a bit abstract and we just kind of skimmed it. My Hiroshima was very well written. Although Nicholas had a good grasp of the devastation caused by the bombing at Hiroshima, he did not like to read the personalized parts of the story in My Hiroshima. He felt connected with the little girl in the story (which is what an author wants to have happen) so he didn't want to hear about how scared she was or the aftermath for her and her family. He would wince or ask me to skip that part so I read the rest of the book with editing on the fly. These two books were a bit too real for a 7 year old although he was amazed by the more factual books that we read.

My Grandfather's Journey mentions the war but it is mostly about Japanese immigration to the United States so it was a great way to bridge into a brief discussion about immigration and our great Melting Pot.

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I was really excited to find Shipwrecked!

Lapbook on Japan

Nicholas made his first lapbook for our study on Japan. I think we will try to complete a couple more lapbooks this year.

A lapbook a way to gather and present material learned. Typically what I've seen used are simply manilla folders to hold the information.

I helped with the foundation which is just two red manilla folders. I opened each folder then folded each side inward about half way. This makes for a back piece that is about 8 1/2 x 11 with two smaller flaps that fold together in front. I made two of these and glued one set of flaps together to connect them. The back piece now shows the original fold in the folder so I covered this on both folders with just a piece of yellow cardstock. It made for a neat way to present some of the lessons we had worked on along the way.

For some videos on how to make lapbooks in various ways, please check out Homeschooling On A Shoestring.

You can use a lapbook to put together information that you create or you can find lapbook templates online. The lapbook is usually made up of lots of smaller presentations or mini-books. The templates may have a cover page and then the child writes in something in the following pages or cuts out cards to put in a pocket or some other small project like that. Nicholas really enjoyed these. He would make a mini-book after studying or reading about that particular thing. By working on each mini-book as soon as he learned about a subject, it helped to reinforce and strengthen what he has just learned. Making a lapbook is also a very hands-on way to reflect back what they have learned in a kinesthetic way which Nicholas responds well to. We found 2 lapbook templates online that corresponded with books that we had read. One was for A Pair Of Red Clogs. I purchased the digital version of this lapbook online at Hands of A Child. It was a great lapbook but we wanted the lapbook to represent more of them things he had learned about Japan so Nicholas picked a few projects from this lapbook and a few projects from a free lapbook that we found online that corresponds with the book, Look What Came From Japan! by Miles Harvey (another great book about Japan). He put all of his mini-books and projects together to make his first lapbook!

Each of these little pieces has a flap to open or removeable cards or something fun like that!

Nicholas included his Haiku poem.

He made a pocket titled, "Animals of Japan" and cut out cards with pictures of the animals on one side. He wrote a brief description of each animal on the back side of the card.

Here are some vocabulary word flaps. You open it up to see the definition. Here is "discipline":

The vocabulary fan hangs from the second folder along with lots of little tabbed cards with facts about Japan.

Here's an example of one of these facts as Nicholas compared the number of people in Japan and the United States.

Lapbooks are a fun way to preserve a memory of what your child learned but it is also fun for them to make the mini-books and of course they love to flip through all of their little creations. This makes it a great tool for reinforcing learning, especially for a "hands-on" type of learner.

Glow Stick Photography

Stuart has created some really cool pictures with glow sticks in the dark. Here are some of his latest creations with the assistance of his little helper.

This next one is Nicholas' favorite!