High-Tech Homeschool Links - Gymnastics

Last night I wasn't just researching for Austyn. I also was looking up links for Zoe.

I typed up a Gymnastics page on my High-Tech Homeschool Links website. She wants to learn more about gymnastics. Who are the athletes? What is the history of gymnastics? I think she will like the links.

High-Tech Homeschool Links - Dinosaurs

After visiting our local museum a couple of times this month, Austyn has taken an interest in dinosaur fossils again. So, here I am searching for anything dinosaurs. BBC has some great videos available online for free!

I keep two links pages for my use and sometimes I share with others to help make their lives easier. The one website is Our Pace Links which is all of the main webpages that I want to keep handy for information or homeschooling. The other website is High-Tech Homeschool. It's a new website that I've not filled up with links yet. I only fill in the links that my kids get interested in. This week I filled up a page on Dinosaurs. High-Tech Homeschool is full of links that are more specific.

Our Pace Links would have the main links that may have the subject I'm looking for in it and High-Tech Homeschool is much more specific. So as my kids learn things online or are interested in subjects I fill in the links for it in the appropriate section. I'm hoping that I can more easily return to our favourite sites by knowing the direct link, instead of having to figure out the parent link and going from there. The title High-Tech Homeschool was inspired by the idea that much of what we are interested can be found on the internet and so homeschooling in this way is high-tech.

I hope Austyn loves his links and movies in the morning. They will go nicely with our library of books and his fossil collection that we can look more closely at.

We Love Science!

 We may not do math every day and we may not read... oh wait, we do read every day! Well, we may not do the traditional subjects that school kids do each day, but one subject that is a huge hit in our house is Science. I don't think it has ever been something that they dreaded doing. They love it and so do I! We sometimes follow instructions and our science may look pretty traditional some days.

 Some days it looks a little less traditional. We may even do something that just pops in our head that answers a question.

 Sometimes it looks like an interest or hobby. This is Austyn looking at rocks with his magnifying glass.

 We like to do experiments out of our books. We have gotten through many experiments and have come across repeats. When that happens I ask them if they want to do that experiment again or not. Sometimes we do and sometimes we don't. In this picture the kids are growing a mold garden.

 

Some experiments are fast and some take time. Sometimes it's a fast experiment, but we expand it into something else entirely. Here the kids are using their homemade hydrometers to compare the density of different liquids. 

 We grew our own sugar crystals. This is a repeat experiment. It's too much fun to not do again.

Plus, they get to eat the outcome!

Book of the Week - Can we Save the Tiger?

I know that the name of this book implies that it's only about tigers, but it is actually about many animals and about their vulnerability. It highlights some animals who are extinct, those who are endangered, the ones who used to be endangered and came back, and why each of them was/are in the state that they are. 

Can We Save the Tiger by Martin Jenkins is a nice introduction, with specific examples, to animal numbers and how we affect them. It really does give the feeling of how complex each situation is and how hard it may be to bring numbers up for some animals. Sometimes humans have to go way out of their way to help save a species.

Spelling and Writing

Zoe loves to spell and write. She has been going through a phase where she wants me to give her words to spell. She will either tell me how it is spelled verbally or she writes it in her notebook. This is something she is really enjoying! One thing that I think has really helped her is searching for things on the internet. She is required to at least start to spell the words she wants to search for. 

Austyn does the same except he prefers to do it verbally and he loves to do web searches on his own without asking how to spell words.