November already?

Ok so where did the year go?  One day it's the middle of term 2 and suddenly now it's the middle of term 4! I'm certainly not going to rehash every single thing Moomintroll and I have done since April. Just believe me when I say we're on track and learning every day, blah, blah, blah...
Right now she's on a filming kick. She uses Video Star non stop. As part of her English work she's been learning some Edward Lear poetry - so far she has The Jumblies, The Owl and the Pussycat, and The Table and The Chair down pat.  Her challenge was to present one of the poems somehow. She chose to make marionette style puppets and put on a show using the set she made in January at our ballet school's summer school.
I now present to you The Table and The Chair by Edward Lear.
Narrated by Moomintroll.
Puppeteer 1 - Moomintroll,
Puppeteer 2/camera operator - Moominmamma,
Set design - Moomintroll and Moominmamma.

Term 2 - Weeks 1 to 3

The past weeks have flown by so quickly that I've forgotten a lot of what Moomintroll and I have been up to. Thank goodness for the camera!
After our wonderful holiday in Indonesia it took us a while to get back to work. In fact it took us a whole week! But we're back on track now and after looking at the photos I am happy to see that we've actually done quite a bit.
Here's a summary:

Moomintroll's current passion is drawing and this is her new toy - Opa's old drawing board from his workdays.  She loves drawing on it and we've begun learning about technical drawing and design. I just wish we could fit in inside the house! Many hours are also spent on Minecraft and SketchUp creating buildings and homes.

Her first attempt at perspective drawing came out quite well. We followed a tutorial on this blog.
We also finally finished our Art in a Box. The items for this creation were collected on one of our geography walks last term. We painted them and the box with white paint, arranged them, then glued them onto the box.

Kitchen Chemistry 1.  Using vinegar and bicarbonate of soda we did the Dancing Raisins and Grapes experiment, then blew up balloons with varying amounts of vinegar and bicarb. We also did the Mentos in a Coke bottle experiment, much to the delight of Sniff who happily licked up the mess.

Kitchen Chemistry 2 - making a rubbery egg by soaking an egg in vinegar overnight.

Kitchen Chemistry 3 - Changing States of Matter.  Using resources such as Backyard Science, Study Jams, The Magic Schoolbus and Education.com  we investigated how matter changes. Here we watched ice melting - one cube covered in salt (below right), the other just left alone (our control).  Moomintroll was blown away to see the salted ice melting almost twice as fast as the control cube.

More chemistry. The best kind - the edible kind!  Making molecules with gum drops. Other edible experiments included baking bread and several chocolate cakes and brownies. All in the name of research of course!

Kinetic sand is getting a good workout this week. We finally took the plunge and mixed up the colours but not before making a few colourful mountains.  Kinetic sand is great fun and so versatile - art and maths in one session!

ANZAC Day was last week - we headed into the city to Fed Square to see the thousands of poppies on display to commemorate 100 years since the Gallipoli Landing, and in the Follow the Flag exhibition at the Ian Potter Centre we added a poppy each to remember the girls' Great Great Grandfather.

Moomintroll is reading a Nancy Drew mystery, Danny the Champion of the World, and Awful Auntie this week. I am reading another wonderful book by Barbara Kingsolver called Flight Behaviour.  I can't get enough of her books!

Weeks 7 & 8

The past two weeks have been all about sleeping and resting with the two girls both sick and feeling miserable.  The Snork Maiden stayed home from school for two days with a bad cold and fever, and once she was well enough to go back to school Moomintroll's cold took off and has ended up having a mild case of tonsilitis.  Happily now she's on antibiotics and is improving daily which is wonderful seeing as we leave for overseas tomorrow!  We're finally off on our long awaited Indonesian Adventure. Sniff and Hazel have gone off to their holiday homes and we're ready to go. One more sleep!

Despite all the sickness in the house we did manage to do some work. Moomintroll still has a thing for poems and is loving part of The Wind in the Willows which we call Toad's Song. It's the bit where Toad has just escaped from jail, stolen and sold a horse and is feeling very full of himself. Moomintroll can recite it by heart and now is carefully writing it out in her english book.
Our science theme for the week was deserts so we watched TMS All Dried Up and Eyewitness Desert which led to watching 'the making of' and then Eyewitness Arctic/Antarctic because, you know, the Antarctic is the world's largest desert as Moomintroll reminded me. Other desert related work included word searches, research on 3 desert animals, a desert poster, making a cacti garden and a trip to the zoo to see the gila monster and other beautiful desert dwelling reptiles.

cactus garden

a happy little desert dweller

science and maths work for the week

To finish off our term of maths Moomintroll did some word problems about the exploits of some fierce ninjas and a librarian with a pile of books, and did a little times table test which she handled very well.  She then went on to demonstrate her understanding of arrays by building an amazing underground house with interconnecting rooms in Minecraft.

By the end of the week both girls were feeling fit enough for their Just Brass end of term concert where they performed a duet together of Bengawan Solo (the same piece we played at Opa's 80th party). At the concert Dr Jim accompanied them on the piano.

Weeks 5&6

The Labour Day long weekend was so lovely and relaxing that I forgot to do my usual Sunday night wrap up of the week. Then yesterday P and I were in Bendigo for the day with band, sharing the spotlight with the local schools band in an afternoon concert.  It went pretty well despite the poor turnout. A band concert just can't compete with a sunny Sunday afternoon Collingwood vs Carlton clash at the nearby footy oval.

Week 5:
After a morning doing our usual maths, science and english, Moomintroll and I had our travel vaccinations, which led to another science lesson on vaccines and how they work.  All went well with no side effects, just tender arms for a day or so.
Our English work this week was learning antonyms and synonyms using various sheets from Education.com.
The rainforest was our science theme. Moomintroll made a comic called Into the Rainforest. Instead of finding pictures of animals on the web she decided to dress up as the animals herself and I took pictures of her climbing trees and eating frogs.

impersonating a coatimundi climbing a tree

  She also did word searches, word scrambles, and watched our Eyewitness episode on Jungles/Rainforests. After that episode she watched the 'making of 'episode and got quite interested in that. We may have to find an online computer animation course for her soon.
Maths continued as always with tables practice using various games and songs. I introduced the concept of factors to her. It took a little while to understand but she's slowly getting it. It's great to see when a connection is made; those "Aaah!" moments are priceless.  We use Loot the Pirate Ship and various worksheets to practice factors.
Art was fun this week. We made Before and After pictures using collage, painting and pastels techniques. I found the Before pictures at Dover Samplers.

She also used the same techniques to make birthday cards for K and cousin H.

To finish off the week's work we combined English, Geography and Science by writing a report on our visit to The Rainforest Gallery near Warburton.

Week 6:
A shorter week than usual due to the Labour Day holiday. We spent the afternoon at the wave pool where we all practiced swimming laps and riding the waves.
Coincidentally our science theme this week was water based - Coral reefs and Tidal zones. We watched TMS Takes a Dive and TMS goes to Mussel Beach. We reminisced about our holiday on Heron Island in the Great Barrier Reef, searched for images of plankton and barnacles, watched Eyewitness Oceans and other plankton videos.

 barnacle pop up page 

pretty plankton

She also did  many word searches on different habitats and made her own wordsearches using a blank grid.
I gave Moomintroll her first spelling test based on science words we've learnt over the weeks. She got 11/15 - a great result considering I didn't give her any time to revise!
We took a lovely walk at Wombat Bend along the river. Unfortunately the camera battery died so we didn't get any pictures but we saw many birds - cockatoos, magpies, lorikeets, kookaburras, fairy wrens and many others we couldn't see but heard.
Maths consisted of practical shopping maths; she wrote down on paper everything we put in the trolley then added it all up. She's getting the hang of carrying the tens now.
A swimming lesson and Club with K topped off a fun week before we all succumbed to the dreaded lurgy - sore ears, coughs, runny noses and headaches.  Right now the Snork Maiden is missing school for the first time this term, feeling miserable and achy. Poor Dr P soldiered on to school this morning - hopefully he's managing a bit better today.

Week 4 - Bed School

Most of this week was spent doing Bed School, after Moomintroll was stung on the ankle by a bee. Usually when she gets stung it's sore for a few hours and nothing more, but this time her body began building up an immunity to bee stings. For almost 5 days she was in real pain with a hot, itchy swollen ankle. It reminded me of my swollen ankles in the last months of pregnancy!  Hopefully the next time she gets stung (and she will - she always does!) the reaction will be minimal. Well, that's what this article says anyway and it seems like the author knows what they are talking about.

Anyway, Bed School was quite fun. We arranged ourselves on Moomin's bed with pillows and blankets and worked our way through some reading comprehension sheets following the story of Jason and his appearance on a tv game show, grammar sheets and some maths sheets on arrays.  Our multiplication facts method is showing some good results now. By the end of this week Moomintroll was able to fill in another multiplication grid without too many hesitations and without using the red pen (meaning that none of the facts were considered 'sticky' anymore. Yay!). She even survived a grilling from her Auntie with a smile on her face :)
Multiplication.com continues to be our favourite site. The short stories and mnemonics work very well for Moomintroll's visual/aural style of learning.

The Magic Schoolbus episode this week wasn't as engaging as previous weeks. The topic was Urban Wildlife. She watched the episode twice, filled in the sheet and found some short videos on Splash and that was as far as we took it.  

We finally finished Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy. It happened as we sat nestled on the couch out on the deck during a rainstorm. Very atmospheric and really added to the excitement of the book's ending. We're sad it's come to an end.  Moomintroll spent most of the week thinking about a design for a book related T shirt and on Friday this is what she came up with.

Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy T shirt

A swimming lesson, 'Club' with best friend K, a spontaneous trip to the Eureka Skydeck, a successful school swimming sports for The Snork Maiden, a family BBQ at school, dinner out at an Indonesian restaurant and a lovely 80th birthday celebration for our dear Opa finished off another whirlwind week!

view of St Paul's from Skydeck

Flinders Street Station

Week 3

We started our week with a girls night out at Etihad Stadium to see these five lovely boys:

It was so much fun and the atmosphere was terrific! An amazing night out with lots of singing and screaming. All three of us needed Slushies from 7 Eleven afterwards to soothe our throats.

Monday started slowly after our big night out. We began with the next episode of The Magic Schoolbus - The Magic Schoolbus Gets Swamped.  As you can guess it was about swamps and wetlands and how important they are as habitats and as a natural flood control.  The video led on to watching other videos about wetlands on ABC Splash and Study Jams. Moomintroll's interest was piqued by more related videos on Study Jams so we then learned about Biomes. Happily the pdf I had bought on Teachers Pay Teachers had some interactive notebook pages on all the different biomes on Earth.  This pdf is really handy and well worth the $20. Moomintroll seems to enjoy filling in the foldables and decorating them, and I get a kick out of doing all the cutting and pasting. Everybody wins!

I bought another pdf as well for maths and we've been using the printables in Moomintroll's maths notebook to reinforce her times tables work as well as introduce the concept of division and inverse operations.  So far so good.

For our weekly Geography walk we visited The Domain Wetlands in nearby Templestowe. Here we also did a little science experiment which involved observing the wetland habitat, collecting pond water for our Pond in a Jar (from 365 Science Experiments) and getting wet, soggy shoes.  Moomintroll is the photographer on our walks and she does a great job of cropping and enhancing her pictures once we get home.

Manna Gums

young curious kangaroo

wetlands

wetlands

pretty plant

Pond in a Jar

weird burnt tree

Mullum Mullum Creek

In my quest for a more exciting English curriculum I have subscribed to Education.com.  This site has a wealth of information on all topics for all year levels and Moonintroll really seems to enjoy these as well.  This week she did a reading/comprehension exercise on The Happy Prince,  read and analyzed Jabberwocky, and learned about contractions (the grammar kind, not the other kind!).
Books we're reading are still the same as last week - Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy, various Mr Men books, Wind in the Willows.

Both girls are continuing with Just Brass this year.  They are working on Thriller at the moment!

The Snork Maiden had another happy week at school. She aced her English test, did heaps of maths homework and found a new friend to walk home with who lives just 2 streets away!

Week 2

We had a quiet week last week with The Snork Maiden going away on her year 7 camp.  Moomintroll really missed her sister the first two days so I tried my best to keep her occupied with lots of fun activities.  The best by far was going to her friend K's house for their 'club' which mostly consisted of playing Minecraft. They were both so engrossed in their play that they forgot to eat the snacks she brought along!
Moomin's swimming lesson was also a highlight. She's moved up a class and is enjoying the challenges there as well as lots of time for 'free swimming' with bestie K.

On the workfront we were quite productive, however my plan to follow The Essentials of English  kind of fell by the wayside. At the start of the week we read a poem and discussed it together stanza by stanza. It worked well but was kind of, well, boring. In the days following I considered continuing with the book but really I was finding it hard because it seemed contrived and the language slightly condescending, so for the remainder of the week Moomintroll practiced her cursive writing, revisited our book Smelly Spelling and continued with our read aloud Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy which really is a marvelous book - funny, scary and mysterious all at once.

Our science topic was Habitats. We watched The Magic Schoolbus episode Hops Home, filled in the related worksheet, read about frogs and sea turtles.  Her task for the week was to create an informative comic strip on an animal of her choice. She chose the Sea Turtle and wrote about its diet, habitat, characteristics, etc.  She also went on a little field trip with her Grandma to the Melbourne Aquarium to see all the different animals and habitats.

As Moomin loves Minecraft so much I asked her to create a habitat in her land. She chose to build a rabbit habitat with lots of trees and bushes for the rabbits to hide under, carrot and dandelion patches for food, a pond for water and a lovely big warren to live in.  She was so into building this on minecraft that soon she was building a scene from Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy, complete with Boy, Snow Queen, monsters to evade, and special quests for finding secret keys.  Minecraft is awesome - so many possibilities!

Our times tables project is coming along well.  Every day we did some practice filling in multiplication grids, using the Honey cards for really sticky facts, making up hand clap routines and using more pop songs, such as 2x9=18 to the tune of Let it Go and 8x3=24 to Love is an Open Door (from Frozen).

The Snork Maiden returned from camp happy and relaxed and begging to back to camp!

Learning Timestables with Moomintroll

Over the holidays Moomintroll and I worked our way through the book "Multiplication Facts in Seven Days" (by Dr Carl Seltzer).  It seems like quite a nice system to learn the tables from 0-9.  We filled in a grid first with what we knew, and used the caculator for the rest.  We then drew some multiplications as boxes on grid paper (eg. 2x5 is a box 2 across and 5 down).  This was good to show that 2x5 and 5x2 give the same size box, just turned sideways, both with 10 squares within them.  It also showed that anything times zero is zero - you can't draw a box!  And anything times one is the same number.

As a result, we crossed from our table all the x0 and x1 results, as well as the repeats that were reversed.  It felt like progress already!

The first day of facts was the squares - so we highlighted them in red.  It was good to practise with the Honey Cards Snorkmaiden had made from Life of Fred.

The grid paper was useful to draw the squares, and see that in fact they really were square boxes.  Once she felt ready, Moomintroll worked through the 50 questions on squares from the book, using her times table sheet to help her.

Day 2 focused on the seven 2 times facts.  Day 3 had four 5 times facts.  Day 4 had six 3 times facts.  Day 5 had five 4 times facts.  Day six had the remaining six 6, 7 and 8 times facts.  Day seven was revision.

We've all been going over them fairly regularly.  Tan and Moomintroll drew a heat map to see how it was going.  Still some sticky facts in red to keep working at!  There is also a great site called www.multiplication.com that has a lot of free games, and a mnemonic system that uses pictures and stories to help the facts stick.

Meet Orbi the Garden Spider

In the last days of the Christmas summer holidays we had a visit from Orbi, a garden orb-weaving spider who'd set up her web next to our lemon tree.  Her scientific name is Eriophora transmarina.  We watched her over a number of nights create her amazing web, which took her almost 2 hours and started in the dark about 30 minutes after sunset.

When she was done building she would sit right in the centre of her web, her red warning colours evident at the top of each leg.  Each leg would monitor a separate radial line for any trapped insect.

Here is a video from the first night we found her (after almost walking into the web when going to water the lemon tree.  By the way, if you do walk into a web, apparently the best way to get out is to stop, reverse and walk backwards the way you came.  The web should just peel away.  Good luck holding your nerve with that one!)

Snorkmaiden's iPad has a timelapse function, so we tried to capture Orbi on another night.  2 hours have been condensed into about 30 seconds!  Although you can't see the web, you might catch the end of Orbi spiraling anti-clockwise from the centre to the outside laying down non-stick silk.  She then spirals clockwise back to the centre laying out sticky thread using the first spiral as a reference.

There's a very nice animation on How Spiders Work which steps through the web-weaving process.

Thinking that it would be great to get a photo of the completed web the next morning, we went out to find it completely gone!  Well, not quite completely.  There was a single line - the bridge line - connecting our rosemary bush to the neighbour's apple tree.  We had to spray the line using Moomintroll's spray water bottle to catch it in the photo.

After some research we found out this was normal behaviour for orb weavers.  Often the web is damaged by the night's hunting, so it is taken down and rebuilt the next night.  Orbi took her webs down around an hour before dawn.  We never saw her do it (perhaps all her secretive night time activity protects her from attack by birds).  Orb weavers spend the day concealed near one end of their bridge line.  After a bit of hunting we found her hiding place, cleverly concealed at the end of an apple tree branch.  Can you spot her?

To see a spider taking down her web, have a look at A Spider Takes Down Her Web, where an American barn spider kindly waited until the sun came up to pack up for the day.  What takes around 2 hours to build can be packed up in a few minutes!

So, when you come across a spider's single bridge line in your garden, think of the spider hiding near one end of it and of the busy night ahead!

The times are changing

The snork maiden started year 7 this week. She's having a great time with her new 

friends and meeting and working with her new teachers, most of whom she likes a lot.  The routine of getting up early really hasn't been too difficult - she knows she has to get up and out the door by 8am so she just does it without any bother. It's great to see her so confident and responsible. She's grown up so much in the last few months.

The days are quieter without Snork Maiden around but Moomintroll and I have been keeping ourselves busy with the new work plan that I have put together.  

Our maths goal for this term is learning the times tables but more about that soon from Dr P who spent his last week of holidays working through a course with Moomintroll.  

I am doing the follow up games and activities with her to help reinforce what she's learned. Our favourite games so far are Tableland (a super find at an op shop several years ago and it's so old and apparently rare that I can't even find a webpage about it!), our variation of

Island Conquer (downloaded from here), and inserting certain 'sticky' tables facts into her 

favourite songs. Uptown Funk with Bruno Mars is perfect for remembering that 6 times 9 

is 54!

Using Island Conquer for revising times tables as well as teaching area

This week we began our geography course. We are going to be exploring and keeping a record of the interesting walks in our local area.  First we began by confirming where we 

are in the world by making a Geography Circle (kind of like Me on the Map).

getting the 'classroom' ready at our local park

Geography circle

Our first walk was at Currawong Bush Park where we saw mobs of kangaroos feeding in 

the early morning. The walk is called Ready Aim Click. If you click here you will find a listing of all the walks together with brochures and audio guides to download.

Later in the day Moomintroll created a lovely Word document with photos describing our walk.

Our science this term will be using The Magic Schoolbus. This blog here has very comprehensive plans on many topics/episodes.   Our first topic was ants; we've watched videos on ants, observed ants on our walk, learned the German word for ants( Die Ameise) and thought about collecting ants for an ant farm but then decided it was far too mean to 

keep them in a  jar.

We're loosely following Essentials of English:Lower Grades by Henry Carr Pearson  for our English component. It's full of beautiful poems to read and discuss, dictation practice, and has some nice writing prompts as well.

Moomintroll enjoys photography and filming so I'm trying to incorporate those skills into her English work. After reading a short fairy story on how umbrellas were invented, she made her own comic strip using Strip Designer. It's a great app but not so good on an iPod as the screen is way too small, so I've also downloaded Comic Life onto my laptop. We'll definitely use that on a regular basis.

Books we're reading this week: various Mr Men and Little Miss books, Wind in the Willows, Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy.