Weekly Round Up - New Science

Here are the highlights of our week:

Monday Zippy and I took our first Nature Study walk in a long while.  I found the Handbook of Nature Study blog.  Using the Handbook of Nature Study - which you can read free on googlebooks - with some guidance from the blog we are starting again with the study of nature, once a week.  The book advocates exposing children to nature, letting them explore and find out  for themselves.  Something I wholeheartedly agree with, I just have a really hard time keeping my mouth shut and not guiding, so I took my camera along and got some great pictures.  

We just took 15 minutes around the neighborhood and I only asked her one question: what, naturally speaking, did you find interesting?  She had a whole host of questions and observations.  She noticed that we have a lot of tall pine trees in our neighborhood.  She picked up 2 different kinds of pine cones and some pine needles.  She wanted to know why they were different, why one looked similar to a lily pad flower, and why there were so many big trees in our neighborhood? Great questions to research.  I am excited to go out again next Monday.

This week we also started a new science book from Apologia (review coming in a few weeks).    Nearly every day at dinner Zippy shared some anecdote about something she learned in Science, which means she is engaged and learning {yay}.  Needless to say I am very impressed and happy with this new science book.   

Last week I started a new English program with Zippy. Nothing fancy or formal, I want her to have a good working knowledge of the English language.  That's spelling words correctly, and putting together sentences and paragraphs with some skill.  We are continuing to use All About Spelling for spelling. and last week we went over the basic parts of speech, Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives and Adverbs.  This week, and into the foreseeable future, part of her English will be doing a Mad Lib.  These are so much fun (part of my substitute teaching bag of tricks for years) and they are a good review for vocabulary and parts of speech.  Yes, there is an app for that!  I have the books but anything with technology is always more fun, right, and hey, it was free.  Zippy isn't the only one who likes Mad Libs though, we've played them several times this week during dinner.  Lots of fun, and a good laugh.  

Some photos taken with InstaGram.  I love InstaGram.  Follow me!  I'm hollyoshesky.

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