Earthquakes and Louping!

Wow, it's been nearly a month again since I've updated this.  Let's see....

We talked about:

*Poetry

*Hearts and the circulatory system

*Earthquakes and Plate Tectonics:  we read about them, the instruments that measure them, and other disasters caused by them (like fires, mudslides, tsunamis, etc.), as well as plate tectonics, in Wikipedia, watched some video animations on plate tectonics and some other videos on earthquakes and tsunamis, and talked about earthquake safety before, during, and after earthquakes.

I bought a book about a year or so ago called The Private Eye by Kerry Ruef, used from Amazon.com.  I LOVE analogies and use them heavily in teaching my children and others, so I thought it would be right up my alley.  Well, I finally got around to reading it recently.  I then bought some jeweler's loupes--five of them--and we've been having a great time ever since!  We've louped: flowers, buds in various stages, leaves, insects, insect eggs, rocks--especially largely crystalled ones, food, and more.  It's so much fun!  We carry loupes with us on our nature walks.  I was fascinated by a honey bee, especially by its pollen sacs! Will you believe I've never even noticed the pollen sacs before?!  Green leaves of various plants look stunning in bright sunlight!  Who would have thought things were so glittery and dazzling?  You can really see the hairlike structures of plant parts all the better with a loupe, too. Moss!  Insect eggs!  Crystals on rocks!  Oh, IT'S GREAT!!!!!!!!!!

Jaden William climbed a tree one day on our nature walk (he's always climbing trees), and he brought back down a very fascinating find.  They must be some sort of insect eggs.  They are COLORFUL, SHINY, AND THEY HAVE LITTLE SPIKES AROUND THEM!  They remind me of the sun with its rays, or the pagan statues with the spiked crowns depicting the sun (like the "Statue of Liberty"), or sea urchins.  Oh, they are SO NEAT!  So, so pretty.  We brought them in, and when I used a plastic tweezers to remove them for microscope viewing, I discovered that they BOUNCE! That must be what the "spikes" are all about.  I theorize that they're some sort of defense mechanism to protect them from enemies.  They just bounce away.

Some things that William has collected in his collection containers for viewing include a red wasp, some sort of insect eggs or pupae that he unearthed, and an unidentified insect.  Oh, and one day a few days ago he went to pick up a Frisbee that had been left in the yard, and there was a round worm on it!  Oh, wow...I never had seen one of those before!  It had to have been a male, because I read and found out the rear ends of the males are curved (and this one's rear was).  Creepy thing!  It looked like a nasty piece of spaghetti.

The mouth is the black spot on the left end.  It behaved like a snake.

Some of the flowers we louped were Henbit and Dead Nettle, and William pressed a Rue Anemone flower with his plant press, and we then louped it.  Do YOU know the difference between Henbit and Dead Nettle?  We have both in our yard....a beautiful purple carpet!

Above left is henbit, right is dead nettle; bottom is pressed rue anemone

William loves art, so I told him he ought to start pressing a lot of plants and make things with them, like cards or framed art.  I am planning to enroll William in a painting and/or drawing class sometime this summer.  He wants also to take a pottery class, but from what I can tell, ten years of age is the youngest anyone allows at a pottery wheel, so he'll have to patiently wait two  years.  Meanwhile, we're considering enrolling Trusten in theater.

One of the books we've recently read is Hummy and the Wax Castle.  I think we've only read it completely once before--two years ago when I first bought it.  It's an excellent book on honey bees.  A book I recently bought is It's Just a Plant, and we read it, too.  I was mostly pleased with it...except for including Halloween in it.  It didn't have anything to do with the point of the book.  It's about Cannabis sativa, one of the most useful plants on this earth but probably the most wrongfully demonized.  I love when we read books like these.  I get so burned out on the Berenstain Bears, all fifty-something titles we own.  I really also enjoy when we read our Ranger Rick and Your Big Backyard magazines.  We learned some fun things in those this past month, too, like the birds who build a house and yard decor to impress the females.

Just two of the great educational books we have

A while back we got a cool map in the mail.  I trimmed it and kept it until we could get it laminated (who can have too many cool maps around the house to use?).

I finally got around to getting it laminated at Staples.  The woman behind the counter let William go back there to see how something is laminated (besides using the laminating sheets I do at home) and then trimmed with a cutting board.  I snapped a photo with my iPhone while we were there:

It is just about time to get some flowers to put in my front porch pots, and I am determined this year to have a butterfly garden to further increase our butterfly visitors.  My dad bought me a great book a couple years ago about attracting butterflies and hummingbirds.  My plan is to let the boys help me create a butterfly flowerbed SHAPED like a butterfly:

Doesn't this sound great?!  I'm so excited!  I still haven't decided on all the flowers I'm going to use.  I will use the ones they list as a guide, but at least one thing is being changed, I think.

Look at this beautiful Zebra Swallowtail!  I LOVE butterflies! 

So do the children.  The following pictures include two of Liv squatting to get a closer look at some butterflies:

The third picture is Liv bringing me a flower. :-)

We haven't read any from Mystery of History in the past month.  We'll get back to it at some point to see what happens next.  ;-)  William enjoys counting his money and purchasing things, and I ask him questions when we're working together in the kitchen, to get him to practice measurements.  For example, I'll use the 1/2 cup measuring cup sometimes and tell him, for example, that the recipe calls for three cups of whatever, so how many 1/2 cups would that be.  He'll learn most of what he needs to know math-wise in this real-life manner.  I did buy a couple neat math word problems workbooks by Evan Moor.  I got the "2nd grade" and "3rd grade" (I don't even call my kids by some "grade" but rather just their age), and William is already halfway through the first one.  He mostly thinks it's fun.

He hates writing and was so upset about his journal writings, so I stopped enforcing it.  I now nicely encourage it, and today he even said, "Writing in my journal is kind of fun..."  He just hated my correcting everything and making him writing it again.  It took the fun out of it, so I stopped doing that weeks ago.  I do not want him to hate writing.  His spelling is what I'd call poor at times, but he reads a lot, so he'll naturally come around and spell better, and when he's ready to write for whatever reason, he'll write.  He just doesn't have much of a need for it right now, as far as he's concerned.

We were looking at the back of the math workbooks, and the company has some workbooks for editing/proofreading.  Well, he LOVES that (just doesn't like having it done to him, I guess), and he actually asked me to get him some.  I haven't yet, but I'm waiting until we have more money, as it's just that time of year when we don't have a lot of extra.

He is reading Charlotte's Web right now, each night.  He is still reading his Cul-de-Sac Kids books when we drive somewhere.  Oh, and he LOVES the PS3 Jeopardy now (guess it's actually PS2, but our console is a PS3).  Nathan and I play nearly every night (except Sabbath--Friday--night, and then we watch lectures).  William thought it was stupid at first, but I guess the curiosity got the best of him.  He'd lie awake in bed every night listening, and he realized he knew some answers.  So then he started asking whether he could stay up and watch us.  Sometimes Nathan lets him.  He has played with us twice, but mostly he only gets to watch.  He's a smart boy.  He answers a few questions during each game.

William has been very busy lately with this and that.  He's either painting something; building something with wood, hammer, and nails; fixing something (oh, he's a GREAT helper, as he's getting good at fixing things); hoeing grass; picking up limbs and rocks; washing something; reading something; and all sorts of things.  He really doesn't stop.  He's also recently been able to watch and help his daddy redo our main bathroom:

It will be done soon!

Trusten busily counts things now, and he's still always wanting to watch some movie.  They've watched a lot of our Blue Planet and Planet Earth series lately (that we originally watched over two years ago), and they've both really enjoyed that.  Trusten has also practiced folding and cutting.

Well, to conclude the blog, here are a couple pictures of my two sweet boys playing the PS3 on their game day and William picking up Liv in her play box (whatever it's called...she climbed in it):

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND ANYONE READING THIS TO BUY SOME JEWELER'S LOUPES AND GET TO LOUPING!

Until next time...