Local Wildlife Hike

We took a walk at a nearby lake to observe our local wildlife and take pictures of any plant life that interested us. We found a white bird with long legs wading in the shore that we had never seen before. An internet search revealed the bird to be a snowy egret. We also observed geese and rabbits.
We found an unusual plant that we had never seen before. It has bunches of small round balls that have spikes all over them. We tried hard, but still haven't been able to identify it. We hope to someday soon!

Pretend Store!

To reiterate what we were learning about coin values, we decided to set up a pretend store in the playroom, where Lola was the shopkeeper and I was the customer. We used all the play coins from another money game that we have and Lola used her cash register. I pretended to purchase a toy and she would tell me the price. Whatever the price of the toy, we came up with as many different formulations of the amount as we could. For example, if the toy cost 60 cents, we would count out 2 quarters & a dime, or 6 dimes, or 12 nickels.

Internet games

We had Lola's aunt & uncle come into town for a visit this weekend. They brought with them some gifts for the girls. One of Lola's gifts was this stuffed animal (a deer, maybe?) that is part of the Littlest Pet Shop. They have a website where she entered her code that came with the toy and she was able to start playing all these games online. She hasn't really done that before and it was amazing how well she picked up learning how to navigate the laptop. She played games that allowed her to win coins and then take her coins to their little online "shop" and pretend buy items for her pet. It was great to see her evaluate the amount of her coins versus the amount of the item for sale that she wanted to buy. When she didn't have enough for a particular item, she would go earn more coins from playing the games and then go back to the "shop". She was so enthralled, she must have played all day!

Sewing!

Lola has been begging me to learn how to sew. Today, we took our first crack at it. She took to it right away and didn't seem to have any difficulty, but she soon bored of it. She still hasn't finished the plastic mesh star that she started! We talked a lot about how important sewing is to our society and so many others too. Sewing has been around since the paleolithic times and even appears in history before weaving.
We plan to revisit sewing (and also rug hooking) next month.

Money Bags

Lola's class has been working on coin value, a subject that Lola has been having some trouble with. It's hard for her to remember the value of the coins and to add them up. I got her this game for Christmas, so we decided to play it today.
Last month, when I was asked by our independent study coordinator to estimate what our focuses were going to be for this month, I knew coin values would be one of them!

The consumer reviews were really good for the game and Lola had a lot of fun with it. It has a feature where you have to assemble a particular monetary amount without potentially being able to use certain coins...for example, you might be asked to assemble $0.50 without the use of quarters. This was really helpful in regards to truly understanding value (as opposed to just memorizing what certain combination of coins add up to).

Sorry, I didn't think to take any pictures while we were playing. I wish I had. Although I have another math idea that I am going to use these coins for and I will take pictures of that.

Moon Sand...

Oh boy, this one was a doozy. I'm not sure moon sand will never make another appearance in our house, but I'm glad we at least figured out what it was all about. It's fun...just *really* messy.

We wondered what was in the sand to make it so sticky but wet and not dry out. We looked online and found out that we basically could have made moon sand ourselves for a LOT cheaper then we paid for a fancy kit. It's just sand, cornstarch and water!!! We decided we will make it ourselves another time. Maybe for an outdoor activity...:)

January is GAME MONTH!!

Lola came up with a good idea. She thought January should be a game month (for homeschooling projects), since it's a short month and because they got all kinds of cool new games for Christmas that they really want to play. I thought it was a great idea, so here we are!