Sugar, Sugar ...Are you smarter than a 5th grader?

Yap came home from school the other day and asked if he could play a game on the computer that his teacher had shared with him at school. It's called Sugar, Sugar and now I'M addicted to it! It's a fun physics problem solving game for kids, suggested ages 3rd to 5th grade,  but, really, I have wasted sooo much time on this game. But I can use the excuse that it's making me smarter than a 5th grader! 

The premise of the game is this; as sugar falls out of the comma, you use your mouse to draw lines to funnel the sugar to fill up various cups on the screen. The first few levels are fairly straight forward. 

The higher up the levels you get the more difficult it becomes by adding color filters the sugar has to pass through before it gets to the cup and an anti gravity button that when pressed allows all the sugar particles to rise up. 

It took me a couple weeks before I finally mastered all 30 levels.
Some of them took quite a few tries and lots of thinking before I finally figured out the solutions. This game also teaches you a lot about the force of gravity too. 

Yesterday afternoon Yap and I were chilling on the couch, he had a fever, DR, Yip and Yahoo went for a drive. We spent a lot of time on Sugar, Sugar. It was a great way to spend a sick day. 

Super Croc!

The little museum in our town, the Stauth Museum right across the street, just got a VERY BIG exhibit! SuperCroc!!!

SuperCroc, or Sarchosuchus (that's such a fun word to say) was discovered in 2000 in the Sahara Desert in Niger. Only about 50% of the original skeleton was found but by studying living crocodiles scientists were able to recreate the total skeleton.

Super Croc was 40 feet long, as long as a school bus! That's twice as long as the largest living crocodile on record. The skull itself was 6' long! Amazing!

Yahoo wouldn't even be an appetizer for this dude. In fact scientists believe that this prehistoric crocodile would wait submerged at the waters edge and catch dinosaurs coming to drink. Then eat em'! A crocodile that ate dinosaurs. Yip and Yap were amazed by that little tidbit of information...and so was I.

I love this photo of the scientists who made the discovery lying down in the desert behind the skull to recreate the length, or what they guessed, the croc would have been.

That is one mighty long, strong tail and just check out the size of those teeth.

Of course there is more to the exhibit than just the giant skeleton. There's models of what scientists believe SuperCroc's eggs and babies would have looked like. There are side by side comparisons of SuperCroc's bones to modern crocodile and alligator bones. There is a National Geographic video documenting some of the work scientists did on SuperCroc. There is audio of modern reptiles sounds and those of what scientists believe SuperCroc would have sounded like.

Though it's small, all around it is an absolutely amazing exhibit for such a small town of 900 people to have the chance to host. If you are in the area it would be well worth your time to detour to check it out. The exhibit will be up til March and I have a feeling the boys and I will be checking it out often...we've already been there 3 times!

Yep, we are pretty blessed to have such an amazing museum for our neighbor.

I homeschool my kids...sorta

I homeschool my kids....sort of. Let me explain.

As a former public school teacher I have seen first hand the downside of public schooling. Teachers can't give individual attention to the students who need it. There are too few resources in schools. The social aspect, especially as kids get older, is distracting to learning. I had thought about homeschooling Yip and Yap and had discussed it with my husband. But he was against it. Of course, I may not have argued very convincingly.

In my heart I am a teacher and I would love to return to the classroom someday. As well as seeing the downsides of public schools I also recognize that there are many positive aspects of public schools. Teachers have experience and resources most parents don't have access to. Sometimes students will listen to their teachers before their parents. (Yes, really!) There are lots of great teachers out there and there is so much students can learn from different teaching styles and personalities.

The boys' birthday is at the end of August and the cutoff date for kindergarten here in Illinois is September 1st. Technically, we could have sent them to kindergarten. (Our school system only offers full day kindergarten by the way.) Wisely, our preschool teacher advised against sending them. They would be the very youngest in the class and they just weren't ready. They were still immature and would rather play than sit and work. Go figure? Sending them to all day kindergarten wasn't going to work...yet. We decided to hold off a year and send them back to preschool.

Over the summer I worked with them a bit here and there on their numbers and letters, things like that. But I kept having the nagging feeling that I should be doing more. They may not be ready for full day kindergarten but why should that stop them from learning the basics? So in the fall I decided I would start teaching them at home; reading, writing, math. I didn't invest in any big curriculum or drop a lot of money on educational books and supplies. The resources I've used have been mostly free from the library and the internet. So far, it has been working fairly well.

Every morning after breakfast, we have a short math lesson and then a writing lesson that lasts about 30 minutes, sometimes longer. Later in the day, usually when the baby is sleeping, the boys have one on one time with me when we work on reading. Usually we only do this for about 15 minutes each. I don't push it more than that unless we are reading something the boys are really into. Sometimes I'll tie in these lessons with books the boys have been reading or a holiday. We've made quite a lot of progress, but I'll get into that later.

The rest of the day we'll work on craft projects, do science experiments,read, play games or just play. We bombard our local library once a week and pick up anything the boys may be interested in. Pirates, trains, space, snakes, spiders, human body, where babies come from, presidents, holidays, cowboys and Indians...we've checked out lots of different books!

During the next couple weeks I'm going to have a separate post for math, reading and writing and talk a bit about what the boys and I do here at home. The first post, math, will be coming up on Monday. These posts, of course, won't cover everything that we've done over the course of the year but it will hit the highlights and some of the more successful methods we've used.

So there you go. I homeschool my kids...sort of. We plan on sending them to public school next year and I am confident that they'll do great! I don't know what the future may bring. I might return to teaching; I might not. We might move and end up in a terrible school corporation and we might think again about homeschooling. Who knows? But for now, this is what we are doing and this is what works for us.

In Like a Lion and Out Like a Lamb - Constellations with Kids

Welcome to Marker Monday. (Okay, it's Tuesday but this post got bumped by yesterday's post.)

Have you ever wondered where the expression, "In like a lion and out like a lamb.", referring to the month of March, came from? I always assumed it referred to the weather from the beginning to the end of the month. But no, it has its basis in the stars. Rather than explain it to you I found this great cartoon, Stargazing with Jack Horkheimer, wasn't he on PBS? He explains it much better than I ever could. Enjoy!

From the cartoon at right:

If you go outside on March 1st at 8 pm, and look above the western horizon, you'll see the dim stars that make up Aries, the ram or lamb. But if you look almost opposite at about the same height above the horizon in the east, you'll see the constellation Leo, the lion. So, the lion is rising into the night sky at the beginning of March, which supports the fact that March usually begins with fiercer weather. One month later on March 31st at 8 pm, however, the lion will be almost overhead and the lamb will by smack-dab on the western horizon. Now, we all know that usually the weather at the end of march is milder than the weather at the beginning of March. So the lamb setting indicates that March is going out like a lamb! So perhaps long ago someone tied all this together and decided to poetically link both constellations to the weather coming up with that old phrase. Whatever, may you always have clear skies in March for viewing the lion and the lamb, which is easy if you remember to keep looking up!

















Of course I thought this would be a good time to introduce a bit of astronomy to the boys. Laying out tonight looking at the stars isn't an option unfortunately...too much snow. I found these illustrations and talked to the boys about how people long ago didn't have TV, (what a tragedy) so for entertainment they would use their imaginations (what a concept) and would connect the stars to make pictures (constellations).

We talked a little bit how the sun and stars stay put in the sky but the earth moves around the sun. For a hands on explanation we spread out in our kitchen representing something different in the sky. The boys were each a constellation, the baby in her high chair was the sun and I carried the globe around the sun as we talked about the seasons.The constellations will be in different parts of the sky according to the seasons.( The baby tried taking a picture of this but her photography skills have much to be desired.) This may have been a bit advanced for the boys and I'm not sure how much they understood but it's a start. After this I gave them each a star map and they connected the stars to make new constellations.






We were lucky to find this book later that day at the library. It does a nice job helping to visualize the personalities in the constellations as well as telling the story behind them.



Hopefully we can sleep under the stars in a few months and enjoy constellations first hand!