Indiana History, day 1

We are studying Indiana history!  My plan is to do an intensive unit study about Indiana history.  I am not sure how long it will last, but the reason for the intensity is because because I am using library books. 

The books we are using are the following:

Singing Indiana History by Martha Chrisman Riley, Seeds of a Nation: Indiana by P.M. Boekhoff and Stuart A. Kallen, Carole Marsh's Indiana Timeline, Indiana History, and Indiana Jeapordy

I am trying to use Youtube to look up any songs that might be mentioned in the Singing Indiana History book. I am not one to think the music part is just something that should be required, but I do think it is fun.  Perhaps it will help the boys remember a little bit about Indiana history.

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 "Ah Si mon moine voilait danser!"

This song is said to have been performed by the French fur traders while paddling their canoes:



Women in old Fort Vincennes sang the song "Alouette" as they prepared chickens for cooking.  "Alouette" means "little lark: and the words are about plucking the bird's feathers from the various parts of its body. :-)



Military music was also heard in Indiana's French forts.
"Rigaudon" by Boismortier in 1730:

Update

With the move to our new house, the holidays (and all the craziness involved), it has been a little more difficult to update my blogs.

But I thought I'd take just a minute to update.

First of all I want to say how much I treasure the opportunity to home educate my children. To me, it is worth every minute of the time it takes. I treasure the time I have with my boys.

Even on the most trying days, I feel that those are opportunities for character development and relationship building.

Michael is doing a daily Character study with the family at lunch-time every day. It has been such a joy to sit back and watch him teach and lead our family!

The boys are still learning Scripture memory from the book of Proverbs.

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Justin is working with double digit divisors and long division, fractions, simple algebra, and converting English measures. In Language Arts, he just moved from learning about comma placement to possesive nouns.

Jonathan is focusing on improving his addition skills by going through Twin Sisters Addition workbook & CD. He is doing well; I just felt that it would help him move through his ABeka math more quickly if he can master addition. There is a CD with the workbook that is great for reviewing at bedtime.
In Language Arts, he is separating syllables and recognizing special phonics sounds.

Ryan is learning to read. We take it slowly and patiently. The patience is paying off because he is really starting to blend the sounds together. I don't want to rush through this. I want him to get it without regretting speeding through it.
He is not "there" yet, but he is getting there. I am so thankful that I have the opportunity to teach Ryan to read. I would not trade these memories we are making together!
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For Science, we are learning everything from insects to Creation Science (Debunking Darwinism).

The boys read history separately to themselves and then we also do unit studies. In our unit study, we just talked about the Indian mounds (burial grounds). One interesting mound that we talked about today was the "Serpent Mound". The picture in the book we are using is much better than this one:
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/archaeology/sites/northamerica/serpent.html


I had forgotten, but studying that reminded me of the place in Alabama called Moundville (near Tuscaloosa) that we visited on field trips when I was in school. We may just have to go there for a field trip sometime ourselves. There are surely a lot of Indian themed historical places around here as well. I am looking forward to finding them!

We haven't done many messy Science projects lately because of the holiday stuff. We are still meeting with Stacie and Anna weekly.
Sometimes we play board games. Other times we do easy crafts. Another week I had several children over. They ran around in the fields, got muddy, and then came inside and baked cookies. I plan on having more children over soon to do some Christmas cookies. I am also hoping to get back into regularly visiting the nursing homes. We have several from our church in the same nursing home (as well as Nana), so I am hoping that we can make that a more regular activity again.

Well that's it for now. I hope I can do better updating from now on.

An update on our Unit Study

Just a few pictures from our bee unit study. We are far from finished, but I thought it would be nice to document some of our activities with some pictures.
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*Playing a game about bees*
I read to them about how bees send "bee scouts" to find nectar, and then how they dance to communicate to other bees where nectar is found. Then we played the proboscis (bee tongue) game. We initially used party blowouts with velcro attached (to represent the bees' tongue), but the boys DESTROYED them!

Jonathan and Ryan were pretending to be bees. Justin was as well, but he wasn't about to let me take a picture of him with his tongue stuck to a flower! I don't blame him because I wouldn't want to share a picture of how I was showing them how the bees dance.
At least it was fun, and I hope it helps them remember!

Jonathan writing paragraphs about different types of bees... (yes, they doodle on everything!)

Ryan's page. He colored the bee picture, cut it out, and pasted it along with some flower cut-outs I provided. He wrote the word "bee" as I told him how to spell it.
Another one of Ryan's project. It says "Buzzy Bee: Tulips are sweet"
Jonathan's
Jonathan drew this bee free-hand and labeled the parts
Justin's notebook. We use sheet protectors for each page (thus the shine on the pages). They are imperative for creating nice, lasting notebooks.
Justin's page about "carpenter bees" (Jonathan is doing the same paragraphs)
.... and bumble bees
Justin's drawing of a bee with its parts

I still have several pages of things to do and read to them as well as going through their notebooks and helping them to correct mistakes. Hopefully I will have more pictures to post soon!

Bee Unit Study

The boys were really excited the other day when Pa-pa & Grammy gave them a bee's hive. We ended up keeping it for about a week, and then it started to mold so we had to throw it away. It was so fun to study it!
It was very fascinating because the queen bee was right on top of it, and you could see eggs and worker bees on and in it as well. Unfortunately I didn't get a good picture of it but it looked a lot like the one here----> click this link.

Because of this experience, Justin told me he wanted to do a study about bees. Great idea since this would epitomize life-integrated learning!

I decided we should do it in note-book (scrap-booking style). We hope to including copy-work, work sheets, essays, pictures, dictations, art work, and whatever else we decide to add. I have already collected a lot of resources to use throughout the upcoming weeks.

Justin said he is making TWO of them (One that is directed by me and the other to make "however he wants it".) :-)

Today we read an introduction to our unit study, and then we proceeded to create the covers and artwork for their notebooks.

They drew & cut out several pictures before a decision was made on the final product. You can click any of them to see a closer picture.


Ryan enjoys cutting and pasting. Of course he is at the perfect age for this.
You gotta hold your mouth just right. I caught him sticking his tongue out a couple of times, but couldn't get it on film fast enough.
He animates just about everything he draws. If you look closely, you can see smiling clouds and a smiling sun.


Justin did not want to use the bee the other two boys used (too cutesy, I think), so he drew his own bees.

Here Justin is drawing a "killer bee" for his very own "separate notebook." (you can click the picture to see his drawing up close and the copybook nearby.)


I am looking forward to seeing the final products, yet I am anticipating enjoying each moment as we learn together.

Bending bones

I meant to post the results of what happened to the bones soaking in vinegar.

The chicken bones obviously bent, but the deer bone only softened. It would probably need quite a bit more time to soak since the deer bones were so hard.
The reason this works is because vinegar is an acid, and dissolves the calcium and magnesium in bones. You could actually see powdery stuff in the bottom of the bowl at the end of the week. Fun experiment!

Unit Study: Skeletal System

Since I have decided to take a more relaxed approach these days, I want to do some fun unit studies. This one is about skeletons.
We will just let them flow and not plan how long each one takes. The more information and ideas I find, I will just add them in. When we feel like we've learned all we need, we will move to another subject (or even a related subject... like right now we are learning about skeletons and it made Justin interested in fossils... so maybe that will be our next unit study).


Yesterday we started with a hands-on project. We placed a big deer leg bone and a chicken leg bone into a bowl of vinegar. The plan is to let them sit for a week and then check and see how hard they are and compare them with one not in the vinegar. I am hoping to post the results of that experiment when we get there. We also watched a couple of helpful YouTube videos about the skeletal system.


Today I made up a song to help us learn the bones easily:

"Help me Learn the Bones"


My head has skull, maxilla, mandible
Go down to Vertebrae, clavicle
Scapula, humerus are in my arms...
Help me learn the bones!

My arm has radius & ulna
Hand my carpal and phalanges
Tickle ribs; crack your vertebrae
Pelvis and sacrum

My leg has femur & patella
Tibia, fibula,& tarsals
Metatarsals and phalanges
We've learned the bones!"


I also got some other great ideas I printed out at this site including several poems about bones & skeletons, as well as the idea to sing the "hokey pokey". Instead of saying "Put your right hand in", you say "put your right phalanges in" and instead of head you say "Skull", etc. You can replace whatever body part with the name of a bone. Lots of fun!

On the site I mentioned above, I got the idea to do a Qtip skeleton. This was too cute and they liked it.



Deer bone and chicken bone. I think I am going to transfer this to something with a lid... vinegar is just a wee bit smelly :-)

They liked this game. It was very easy to make. I found the clipart on microsoft.com and just cut the skeleton into parts and glued onto the construction paper.
They rolled dice, and picked up whatever number they rolled. When they picked up the piece they were to say the parts. After everyone picked up a piece, they put the skeleton together. I am keeping this game in an envelope to keep playing until they learn all the parts.
I told Michael if I would have thought ahead, I could have waited until after Halloween because of all the skeletons they sell. Oh well, we had already started when I thought of this so I just went ahead with it.