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!
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!
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.
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 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
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.
