This week's simple machines

Today we worked on levers. True to form, Marley was only one step behind. She worked on her wheels in her maze. This she did all by herself.

After the girls were done with levers, Marley and I went on playing. Here we were checking out which made the wheel move faster and farther, the maze with blocks farther apart or closer together. I thought there would be more momentum with the blocks further away from eachother because they would fall harder. I was wrong. The maze with blocks closer together both times pushed the wheel further and faster. It was also the first maze to get to the wheel.

Pottery Day

Marley has been bugging me to take out the pottery wheel they got for Christmas from Brittany. So here it is. Messy mess mess and all! Getting their hands dirty. And the walls, and the chairs. And the table. And the floor. lol. Now our pottery is drying. Tomorrow we will paint.

Language Arts Game

So yesterday was a worksheet. Today is a game.

So here is my list of words. I cut them out and we display them in a random order next to the second paper.

So same set of groups, except we added "Possessive Nouns" to our definitions. There are 5 words for every box. Choose a word and put it in the right box.

English for the older girls

So these are all things that my girls have worked on. Plus Bret and I have been talking about classifying. I combined two in one. I had a list of words on one paper and asked them to classify each word in the right catagory. They have a notebook of definitions already so if they were to say I don't know what pronoun is, I would tell them to look it up in their notebook. They have the meaning of pronoun in their own words with applicable examples.

Don't like worksheets? Make it into a game. Write each catagory down on a big poster size paper. Then have every word on the list of words on an 8-1/2 x 11 sheet of paper and make it a human sized game.

Or take the premade game board as in the last post and make cards such as this.

"Which word is a contraction?
people try she can't"

How Marley is learning her ABC's

Iwant my girls to learn, but I want them to enjoy their learning? Is that too much to ask out of life?

So as many of you know, I used to help out with the Reads program at the local school. I would sit for half an hour, listen to a child read, look up a couple words in the dictionary, talk about what she/he read. If there was time left ver we would often play a learning game together.

This is a game board I made up from a set of games which all shared the similar board at Reads. This is just a generic board game for a multitude of games. Each plain colored spot is just a spot to land on or jump on. The holiday spots are go-agains. The rainbows are slides.

This game is one Marley made up, which works pretty much the same as mine, except that you can climb the ladder to skip all the start stepping stones. And I follow Marley to see how far I can move at any one time, since she pretty much makes up where we go and when. lol.

Here are three cards, one card of each of three different games that go with the board. One is a "Bb". This is a game where we recognize the letter. If we get the letter correct we turn the card over to see how many spaces we can move.

The next one reads "It snowed on the grass." Reading is not a requirement of this game. All we are doing is counting words. It gives her an understanding of how letters form words and how you can tell what a word looks like being separate from another word. Again, if we are correct we turn the card over to see how many spaces we can go.

The last card reads "pillow". For this game there must be at least one reader. The object of this game is to say the word and figure out how many syllables are in the word. So I would say pillow. Marley would clap pil-low and say 2. We would turn the card over. If two is the answer the card will tell her how many spaces to move ahead.

The first person to reach the end of the game wins and the exercise is over. You can do this with basically any basic english or math skill.

For a 4th grader, you might do a game using cards for affixes for example...

"Which means to pay again?
repay unpay copay"

You could use this game for times tables, or practicing addition facts. recognizing shapes, etc.

You could practice sight words.

You could work on history facts.

The list is endless how you could use a game board like this to make memorizing or learning into fun.

The library

Mr. C. would be so proud. Marley made a block library. She thought out all the things that a library needs. There is a bookshelf with books. There are two tables with computers. There is a front desk for checking out books. There are two tables with people reading. And the last thing we made was a door to come in and out. She hasn't figured out the roof issue yet, but everything else is there.

Oh yeah... The blue round blocks, those are people.

This week's word game - Compound Words

$0.25 for every 100 compound words they can find.

Brenda found a couple ideas. Googling compound words. And picking one word such as micro- and looking it up to see what other words connect to it...
microwave, microorganizm, microscope, etc.

The Shun Game

This week we played a word game. Competing for a $0.25 for who can make the most "Shun" (-tion)words. Brenda won with 45 words. Some good ones..

palpitations

dictionary

aspiration

abbreviation

declaration

fertilization

My Favorite Part

This is my favorite part of all our Service Unit activities, our huge Girl Scout circle. When we have 80+ women circling together to do our Girl Scout hand squeeze. This picture is maybe 1/4 of all the girls and women who joined to sing Taps with us and share the experience.

Thinking like a Junior/Brownie

No picture for this since I am Bret's troop leader. Maybe someone will send me a pic. But here is the letter we read from our Canadian Scout Family...

Sea Scouts
This year, C-- and I are in Sea Scouts (here, we call them Marine Scouts because we do not live near the sea)! Our Sea Scouts are for boys and girls that are between 9 and 14 years old. Sea Scouts are different from regular scouts because 75% of the program has to be related to water activities (swimming, boating, scuba diving, fishing...). In our scout association, there are only -- other Sea Scouts troops! There are two age groups for our Sea Scouts. The first one is for 9-10 year-old kids. We call that group "Louveteaux"* and their team name is Sea Lion, but in French it translates to Sea Wolf. The second group is for 11-14 year-olds. They are "Éclaireurs"* and their team name is Shipmates. C---'s in the "Louveteaux" and I'm in the "Éclaireurs" but both groups are together during the meetings. Because we're Sea Scouts, we play games like "Babord-Tribord"* that help us to practice marine vocabulary like "babord": port*, "tribord": starboard*, "poupe": aft* and "proue": fore*... Our troop has also bought a small sailboat which we will learn to sail. In a year, we have four camps: an autumn camp, a camp during which we say our oath, a winter camp and a summer camp. Sunday, the 31st January, we came back from our third camp (it was our winter camp). I slept out in a Quinzee, and C--- slept in a cottage. It was very FUN even if our mom wasn't with us (because she's in Sea Scout with us, but she couldn't come). For our first camp of the year, we slept in a cottage and went canoeing. This summer we may camp on an island. In our group, we're -- "Louveteaux", -- "Éclaireurs" and -- Scouts Leaders. That means that we're -- altogether. I know we're not that many kids but it's a new scout group... Our group is in ----, in ----, in ----, in Canada, in the world, on the Earth and in the universe! ;-)

Have a nice day, M-- and C--

* Louveteaux : Wolf Cubs
*Éclaireur : Scout (We're not sure how to translate Ééclaireur...)
*Babord-Tribord : Port-Starboard
*Babord, port: Left
*Tribord, starboard : Right
*Poupe, aft : Back
*Proue, fore : Front

(names and places have been bleeped out)

This is our Canadian scout family's troop at their parade, and in their quinzee (where they slept!!!)

Thinking Like An Older Girl Scout

Bonjour, je m'apelle Brenda. J'aime La Dame Gaga. Qui etes-vous? This was Brenda's speech for Thinking Day. Then we all sang Alluette together. Which come to find out is a song about plucking feathers from a lark.
French to english translation...
Alouette, gentille Alouette
Alouette je te plumerai
Alouette, gentille Alouette
Alouette je te plumerai
Je te plumerai la tete
Je te plumerai la tete
Et la tte, et la tete
Alouette, Alouette
O-o-o-o-oh
Alouette, gentille Alouette
Alouette je te plumerai

Lark, nice Lark (or Lark, lovely Lark)
Lark, I am going to pluck you
I am going to pluck your head,
I am going to pluck your head,
And the head, and the head,
O-o-o-o-oh

LOL.

"Thinking" with the Little 'uns

So every year Marley sits with her dad and watches her sisters present their countries. This year she one of presenters. Her job was to say that Mexico's flower is the Dalia (she remembers Dolly then adds an "ah" to it at the end lol) and that they sometimes wear and sometimes dance around sombraros. At first she was too shy to talk, but in the end all the girls did well. Marley's first experience with public speaking. She says it was hard to get up there and talk. I say she did fine.

Simple Machines Pt 1

Inclines and wheels. Yes Marley made her own and even told me, when I tried to help her design, that she would like to do hers alone. :-) Brenda's stopped only once, Bret's twice and Marley's went all the way to the end, although she used only inclines on her maze. She was the only one to have her maze veer off in two different directions.

Marley and Her Dad

Marley conned me into taking out the lego tub this morning. So here they are playing around with the legos together. Now she and I are building a castle. It is coming along slowly but surely. :-)

Simple Machines

The project was supposed to make a marble maze using simple machines. When we got there the project was different than what we thought it was. So the girls did have fun making their mazes, but we will be working on simple machines and producing a maze that will actually use a series of simple machines to work.

Check it out...

As homeschooling has been taking care of itself lately, and I have been knitting myself into a tizzie for the fun of it... I thought why not another blog for that fun and craziness...

http://loopsntwists.blogspot.com/

Girl Scout Day at Miami University Engineering Dept

Girl Scout Engineering Day at Miami University is like no other. Earn 4 badges in one day by going from one area to another learning new topics. The program sets up one Math ,one Computer ,and two Science Badges all wrapped up in a pretty bow. I took Brenda to this activity last year and she still talked of her experience fondly when I announced that I would take Bret this year. We made paper, learned about acids and bases, learned about and made our own cookie form of asphalt; learned math tricks, worked on Geometric Shapes, used problem solving to form words on calculators; learned about simple machines, made goop, checked out our finger prints. We learned about the machines that their school uses to design programs, make cars, stretch metal. We learned to use Windows Word. Such a day like this, all kids could have every week, they would not complain about school.

Also if you remember me talking about how Bret was bullied at summer camp this last summer by some other Girl Scouts who thought no one was looking... one of those bullies were there at Girl Scout Engineering Day. Bret pointed her out to me. I told Bret let that be a lesson. If you do wrong and think no one will ever find out... Someone always remembers.