France ~ Madeline

We are visiting France with our micro-school friends over the next few weeks so I hope to be able to share a few glimpses of some of what we all get up to.

First off for my group was Madeline with the younger kids.

No visit to France is complete without the reading of Madeline.

I decided to look online for an audio visual as opposed to me reading. In the end I went with this one I found over at You Tube.



I put together a quick and simple sheet for us to chat about the book and for the kids to record some of their thoughts.

You can find the download link for this at the end of the post.

We had some interesting discussions about what life might be like in a boarding school and found it quite funny how Madeline's hospital stay was for ten lengthy days!

I found a cute, simple little paper craft activity to do.

Whilst we coloured our little Madeline's we watched this longer animated version of the book. It's quite cute and pretty funny!


   

We only had an hour having fun with Madeline and could have most definitely spent a great deal more time reading about and watching all of her adventures.

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Would you like a copy of our reading response sheet? Please use this link to download a copy for your personal use.

Happy Homeschooling
Kylie

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Off The Shelf - From Our Bookshelves To Yours

~ Bear In Underwear ~ Those Darn Squirrels Fly South ~ Who Wants A Dragon ~

Off The Shelf is an opportunity for me to share with you some of the books we've been reading here in our home, especially those books that may not fit into a current theme or topic we are looking at. Those random books, the ones we read just for pure pleasure and no other reason than that!

This week's Off The Shelf is brought to you by my 5 year old, who chose all of these books himself from the library.

Goodnight Underwear is a silly, rhyming book that will have your kids giggling with laughter.

Bear in Underwear and his friends head out camping for the evening and of course nothing is smooth sailing with these guys.

They need to overcome several obstacles, such as mosquito bites, frights, noisy night time creatures and even rain, before being able to settle in for a good night's sleep.

Seasoned campers will get a laugh out of these pages. However, this may not be the best book to read if you are heading off on your first ever camping trip with young children, this coming weekend.

Finally though, Bear in Underwear and all of his friends enjoy their night of camping.


Thoughts From A 5 Year Old: "It's cool because the animals wear underpants, it's funny and made me laugh!"

Those Darn Squirrels, since reading this and laughing at all of the antics these little squirrels get up to we’ve found out that there are actually other books about ‘those darn squirrels’.

The stark contrast between the very grumpy Mr Fookwire and the pesky, little squirrels is really what makes this story such a delight.

The illustrations are bold and capture the personalities perfectly and the writing is humorous even if the story doesn’t always make sense.

We will definitely be keeping our eye out at the library for the other, "Darn Squirrels" books.

Thoughts From A 5 Year Old: "The squirrels are really funny"

This simple story with rhyming text and whimsical illustrations,

begins quite sadly, as the little dragon tries to find someone that wants him.

Of course there is really one creature that can fill those shoes.

Thoughts From A 5 Year Old: "The little dragon is so cute"

I hope these books bring as much enjoyment to your home as they have to ours.

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O is for Owl

We recently spent time learning and having loads of fun with Owls. The kids really got into this topic, considering that seeing an owl in the wild for us here is pretty rare, they were really very engaged.

We read the delightful story of Owl Moon on several occasions. Heading out into the moonlight on a snowy winters night is not something that my kids will get to experience any time soon, so this was quite a magical way for us to experience this through the story.

We completed some of the lapbooking activities found over at Homeschool Share. I hope to post on that one soon.

I found these super cute Paper Plate Owls online and knew we had to make some. They look great hanging from the ceiling and would have to be one of the simplest crafts we've done.

Owl Babies by Martin Wardell, this is a truly delightful story and whilst aimed at the younger crowd I'm fortunate enough to have an 11 year old that can still see the beauty in such a story.

This fabulous little guy is thanks to my delightful friend that played with us as we learned about owls. Once again a simple craft, found via google, but very effective. Although the help of a glue gun for this one is quite useful!

They each researched an owl of choice using the internet. Generally after a little looking around we tend to always come back to our favourite sites for animal research, Wikipedia and Animals A-Z.

I have been very pleasantly surprised as to the level of enthusiasm the kids have with these research documents. It's wonderful too watch.

We read Owls by Gail Gibbons. Yet another informative and interesting book by Gail. A couple of the pages focus mainly on American Owls, which is expected, but thought I should mention for any Australian readers. This book is full of facts and information presented with great illustrations.

Each of the kids water coloured an owl page and gave a brief narration on some of what they learned about owls. We still have some work to do on narrations, but they are improving and making progress in this area.

I purchased an Owl Puke kit for each of them to dissect. This was a little bit gross, but a whole lot of fun too! I would have to put it up there as something every child should do. The oohs and ahhs were running hot during the dissecting.

Whilst we have completed the dissection and found what creatures were devoured by our owls, I would love to reconstruct the skeletons. It's a big job as the pieces are so tiny and fine. Will see how we go.

Finally we rounded it all out with some art, as we always try to do with our units.

Fairy Princess 8 was very proud of this piece and so am I. Not necessarily for the finished product, but for her stamina and perseverance. She spent a great deal of time working on this, made a huge effort when it came to filling the entire page and finished with a smile. Often her art attempts end up in tears as what she has in her head isn't replicated on her paper. We've been spending a great deal of time talking about this and I think those discussions are starting to pay off.

Owls are such interesting creatures, we all learned so much from our time spent exploring them.

>>> Check out my Owl Themed Pinterest board for lots of ideas and links.

>>> Download the Animal Notebooking pages by clicking here.


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Book Adventures: The Glorious Flight

We recently spent some time learning about the History of Flight.

In particular the first man to fly across the English Channel, Louis Bleriot.

This is an interesting story, although it didn't have the kids on the edge of their seats. It's slow and methodical but we all learned a great deal about flight, perseverance and Louis Bleriot.

We completed several of the lapbook components found over at Homeschool Share. A huge thank you to all that contribute over there. It is a fabulous resource.

When Lego Lover saw what the younger crew were up to he was fast to jump in and ask for his own copy of the lapbooking materials. He has always had a keen interest in flight so I wasn't surprised when he asked to do this one.

Here's a closer look at some of the mini books.

We found and labeled all of the parts on an airplane.

We had some fabulous discussions about trying your hardest, 'getting back up on that horse' so to speak and perseverance with the pack of quotes that are included. We found many ways to relate these quotes back to ourselves so now when someone looks like giving up we jump in with a reminder about Louis Bleriot and his perseverance.

We found France and England on the globe, looking at the English Channel and coloured a small map to go along with that. It took Bleriot thirty six minutes to cross the channel back in the early 1900's.

The kids used google image search to find various images of "ways to travel'.

You simply cannot read this story without looking more closely at the History of Flight itself, this timeline is included in the lapbook materials.

I found this short clip on You Tube - The Animated History of Aviation. It is very well done. Albeit very short and you need to be watching very carefully to see all of the details.

This You Tube Clip is done by a boy for a school project, it's not too bad for covering this in just a few short minutes.

Our cute little popstick plane magnets were a hit and oh so simple!

One of the books we used along with The Glorious Flight was How People Learned To Fly put out by Lets Read & Find Out Science. This covers the history of flight from a scientific viewpoint but is aimed at and written for children. As always with this series it was a great addition to the theme.

Once again I displayed whatever items we have on hand to go along with the current topic/theme. The kids did a quick run around and found any planes we had, which wasn't many so they decided to put one together with bristle blocks.

Whilst not one of our most exciting Book Adventures we sure did learn a great deal.

Please visit my Pinterest Board for all of the links to the printable materials, crafts and other Glorious Flight activities.

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