Week 3 Heart of Dakota Update

Well, this week was pretty good. Our hick up was Math for my son. You see my son hates math. Probably somehow my fault in the earlier years, but none the less, he hates it and therefore is about 6 months behind his "grade" or "age".

(Just FYI, I figured out how to do a gallery of pictures, so I now have all the pictures at the end of the post on my Blog at http://nutbugs.com/heart-of-dakota-week-3/.

Not sure if I like that better becasue I can not put captions under the pictures, but if you hover over the picture it will give you a caption.)

I got an opportunity to try out Aleks math online for 2 months free through Old School House. Well, I just figured maybe their explanation of each type of problem might be better then how I explain it and maybe it would not be as intimidating to him or be more helpful!

The first couple things that went wrong with this was the fact that he had to answer 30+ questions to help place him in the right level and have the computer understand what he knows and does not know. Of course, some he had no idea of because we had not covered it yet. That was very stressful for him! Then there was the learning curve of figuring out how to work the computer program and the last thing was there is not a teacher talking like I thought. The student has to actually read each of the explanations, questions etc.

So I ended up having to sit with him each day. Not because he could not read it or understand it, but because there was the intimidation factor and the lack of confidence in himself with math! It was stressful for him and for me to go through this. But once we got that done it was done and it went much better as the week went on. The program is pretty good and I think he has got the hang of it, but we will see.

I will say on the brighter side of it that the stuff we are covering right now is great and actually beyond what we are learning currently in Abeka. So when (if) we do go back to Abeka, it should be pretty easy for him to understand what is being taught! He is getting it and the explanations through Aleks are really good! I want him to try this for a couple months. Too bad they do not have First grade math for my daughter. (LOL) I signed her up thinking they did have 1st grade math, but since they do not, I decided to do the college math for myself for 2 months. UUGGHH! Much I do not remember!

As far as all the other subjects, fantastic as usual. This week in History we learned about John Smith and Henry Hudson. I actually never knew how the Hudson River got it's name and I never knew that Hudson was the one who landed in New York. Seems you are never too old to learn new things! Of course Pocahontas was my daughters favorite because she was a princess. Plus they loved the idea that she was a "savage" in a sense and still a princess. The one thing my kids asked was why Pocahontas stayed in England and never returned home. The books really never gave an answer, but I figure that she really like the high life living where she did not have to run around in the wilderness and decided that this was the life she wanted to lead. Plus I am sure she wanted to stay where he husband was and be a good wife.

Geography was very simple and my son actually helped my daughter learn this. He already knew his directions, so we chalked out a compass on our driveway and placed North in the correct position as well as all the other directions. Then I shouted out direction for each child to move. "Move four steps SE then 6 steps NW." My son helped my daughter when she was confused. It was very sweet and a lot of fun to be out front of our house at 9:30 am doing school! We also learned about the different parts of a river as you can see here in our drawings.

In Science learned about tide pools and the rocky beach. Our project was to make a beach and see what kind of things make the seashore change. This was a fun experiment, but a little too short and easy. So....Once again, we went to the beach, Corona Del Mar beach, CA with my dear friend Shannon and her children, (which she has a smile box account with even more pictures of our adventure) to check out these rocks and tide pools. Shannon and I are both doing HOD and both doing BIGGER together. She is just 1 week behind us. So it is nice to have a friend doing the same thing as you!

OK, well, we could not have a better day to go. There were hundreds of dead squid all over the beach and sardines. Ewwwww! OMGosh, it was unreal. So according to the OC Register paper (in short) "Squid have washed up on Orange County beaches. The Orange County Register says the squid washed up on the beaches Wednesday night or Thursday morning. Ty Gevas of Davey's Locker Sportfishing and Whale Watching in Newport Beach says the squid are most likely Humboldt squid, also called jumbo squid. He says they've been seen in large numbers of the coasts of Orange and San Diego counties over the past few days. Cleanup crews worked Thursday to remove the carcasses. A state Fish and Game warden tells the Register the squid most likely died after spawning, a natural occurrence." There are so many interesting creatures in the sea.

So like any good homeschool mom, my girl friend and I ran down the beach to see all the dead squid and fish so we could have a chance to teach our children about them. You know us homeschoolers never skip over an opportunity to teach. Oh and later on in our trip to the tide pools a seal got washed up on shore. Yes he was dead. There was a puncture mark on one side of him so I think maybe a shark may have attacked it. As far as I know we do not have shark nets along our shores.

My son asked me, "Why there were so many animals that looked weird and are they very useful? My answer was, "Each creature that God created was made for a very specific reason. We may think them ugly or weird or not useful, but each one has a purpose and without them other things could die or over populate. An example is the honey bee or the spider or even a roach." He understood exactly what I meant and was very satisfied with that answer. Whew! Even my girlfriends kids got it too!

We actually had several experiments this week. The first one was to see how rain and other things effect the sea shore. We got out our sand and blew water on the shore line, then dripped water on the beach to see how a river is made. The our second experiment is an on going one. One plate had just H\plain water in it and the other as salt water. We are to ask what will happen to the water and what will happen to the salt. We will write about the conclusion next week.

Man o' man, am I ever glad I live in California. Whenever we start to learn about forest I can travel there, beaches, no problem, winter wonderland, no problem. We got it all here. I said this before. I really thought that the science was way too light in HOD when we started, but I am glad for the way Carrie has put this together. It really is fun and exciting. So as you can see by all the pictures we had a fun, exciting and full of learning week. Thanks HOD!

Week 2 Heart of Dakota Update

As suspected, we had another wonderful week. Currently we are learning about things on the sea shores and I finally thought to myself on Monday after school. "Self,' I said, "You live in Sunny Southern California, why the heck are you sitting in the house to learn about the sea shore. Take the book, a magnifying glass, colander, bucket and a shovel and get on down to the beach." I have to say here for those who are reading and do not live around me. I am only 15 miles from he beach. Yea, silly me! Anyway, that is exactly what we did. We headed down to Newport Beach, CA., parked the car and started right in to finish up our science for the day. You see we learned about the strandline, high tides, low tides and all the animals that live in between all those areas.

Not only was I able to teach my children out of the box about the sea, but there were some other children there listening to me teach and they hung around to hear all the wonderful things I had to say. It was fantastic.

We also learned about the birds on sea shores and their beaks. How they use them, why they are shaped the way they are, and which beak is used for what. In the following pictures you will see our experiments.

So here we are trying to pick up rocks and cereal with different household objects. This was a way for the kids to see how the beaks on seashore bird work .

Here are their Science Notebooking entries. OK, I admit, I helped my daughter with her bird drawing (on the right). She was having such a hard time with the outline. All the rest is hers!

One of the other projects we did was to see how and why animals float so well in the ocean. ie a huge whale. As well as knowing what dense means. Our experiment was to have 2 glasses of H20. One with salt in it and the other plain. They were amazed at the egg floating in the salt water (right) and sinking in the fresh water (left). Hmmm, which water do you think in more dense?

I know there are a lot of pictures, but as the saying goes, a picture is worth a 1000 word. So there you go!

And this poor Sea gull lost its wings. yes, that is all that was left...wings !

We did get to see a sand worm, but the picture did not come out too well. It got away before we could get a really good picture of it.

This is a mussel we found that had been eaten by a bird. Look at the close up shots of the barnacles that have made a home (hole) on the outer shell.

Here are great pictures of how mussels attach themselves to piers, boats and even whales.

In the pictures above you can see the byssus of the mussels as they attach themselves.

The picture upper right is of the typical barnacle you will see holding onto pier etc. The first picture lower left, is of a barnacle that my son pulled off so he could see the inside. Unfortunately he killed it, but you can see the backside of a barnacle.

The above right, below left as well as right are of coquina clams. Some are just an 1/8 of an inch and others are over 2 inches. Of course the one of bottom right is the inside of one. We ended up feeding this one to a bird.

Here you see on the upper and lower left more of those baby clams with some mama clams. They dig themselves into the sand during low tide. you can see in the pics above that they will go straight up and down so they can reach wetness in the sand.

The insect on the right????? I actually sent a letter to a marine bio with a picture, so maybe we will find out. If you know what it is, please leave a note.

This is a sand crab. You can see how big this one is. Most we find are maybe an 1/8 of an inch. This one is a good inch.

Here you can see us digging for clams on the left and on the right as my son said , as a joke, "Sea Duck foot prints." But of course we know they are sea gulls.

Ok, well, you got to have some fun at the beach. All work and no play? No way!

Here, on the bottom right, is the strandline. It has been blown away a bit, ( it was a windy day) but you can see the line up of seaweed. On the left is a great shot of a wave line. This is where the wave had been coming in as low tide went out.

Last but not least we dove into our history. Of course last week we learned all about Columbus. But this week we went into Cabot's journey too. Here you will see the maps and timelines we are keeping for History!

Trying a New Curriculum: Week 1 Heart of Dakota

This year I am trying a whole new curriculum for History, Geography, Timeline, Notebooking, Poetry, Bible and Science etc. Heart of Dakota. A friend showed me this curriculum at the beginning of last year and after a ton of research and the fact I LOVE the Charlotte Mason approach, I fell in love with it. Now, we are still using our own curriculum for Math and Reading, but everything else is through Heart of Dakota. The main thing I loved about this was it was a complete open and go curriculum. No downloading and researching like I had down in the past. That is my kind of curriculum. Yet is stays in with the Charlotte Mason style of teaching

My first week went really good. The first day was a little longer then I had planned, but that was due to "old habits die hard" attitude in teaching that day. I found the rest of the week if I just followed the teachers' guide I was able to get it done by 12:30 or so everyday starting at 9:00am or so! As I said before, I am doing a different Reading program and Math program for each child then what HOD is asking us to do because Raquel is not up to Bigger's standards. She is still learning to read and Vincent is above it the Bigger guides Math standards. The main reason I chose Bigger was so they could learn all the Non-Academic subjects together which is what I have been doing all along with them!

They both said they had a great time this week. The only thing was, we are so use to Apologia Science (which we LOVE) which has always been about 25 minutes each day or so that HOD science seemed REALLY light. But today we were talking about the beach and tides and waves and my daughter told Daddy all about how the tides work and how the waves wok etc. My son chimed in with his $.02 too. That told me I was doing the right thing! The science was not light, it was just perfect!

On Friday I started playing Jeopardy with the kids. In a nut shell each day I pick 2 or 3 facts from the reading and mark them down on index cards. Each day we go over the previous days cards and then add more cards. On Friday I have a board with numbered index cards starting at 10 going to 160 (counting by 10's)and as the numbers get bigger of course the questions get harder.

They each take turns calling out a number and trying to answer the question. If that child cannot answer then the other child gets a chance to steal the question and answer it. Each correct answer gets 1 M&M. In the end the person with the most M&M's get a prize. The prizes are no more then a $1.00 item from the dollar store. Today they both got 6 out of 16 question. YEA! Not bad. That meant Mommy got a few M7M's too! Yea me! And they each got a prize...Yea them! Great way to end the week! They were having so much fun with this that Daddy had to come downstairs to find out what all the commotion was. He was absolutely shocked to see them screaming and yelling answers and having the time of their life answer school questions!!!!!

This week is our first week starting Heart of Dakota (HOD) and we have had a blast!

We have learned more about Christopher Columbus and his adventure to North America.


Leif's Journey

Columbus' Journey by Vincent

Columbus' Journey by Raquel

We learned about what makes the Waves vs. what makes the Tides. In one week we have learned so much more then I could ever imagine. And since I placed my kids in the same book...Bigger Hearts for His Glory...I am happy to see my daughter doing so well! This is one of the reasons I decided to do my own reading and math program. Because the math in Bigger was to easy for Vincent and the reading was too hard for Raquel and I wanted them to be learning the non-academic things together. This is working well so far.

Anyway, here are some pictures showing us learning why things sink vs. floating

Balloons Float


Empty Cans Float but full ones sink


Coins Sink


Raquel's floating diagram and Vincent's sinking diagram

Also we learned where the continents and the different oceans are. So we got a balloon and made the kids write out the 4 oceans and 7 continents and place them on the balloon. Raquel was a little off on the continent the first time through, but she got all the oceans right. Vincent, he got them all right!


Vincent placing his continents


Raquel placing Africa. Just a bit off! Good try babe!

Also we learned about how the moon makes the tides and the wind makes the waves. We used a blow dryer to make waves and see how the wave erode the sand on the shore of the beach.

Homemade beach in a baking dish


Raquel's rendition of Low and High tide!


All in all I can honestly say we had a great time this week and I can see that this year will be a great year for learning for both children! My goal is to takes pictures each week and post about it on each of my kids blog as well as my own. Lets see if I can keep that up for 36 weeks. We will try!!!!