Day one of ping – Geography

Today we went to China! We found China on our globe and heard the anthem. We also reviewed the other countries we know (Australia, France and New Zealand).

We got another stamp on our passport – and put our ping story disk on China on our map to help us remember where it is. We are making a flag, and have coloured in the chinese flag as well.

Google is a wonderful tool – we found china on google earth and looked at some photos of china, the yangtze River and the Great wall!

Miss E LOVES finding all these new places! She says “I want to go there one day” (and mummy says so do I!)

Rowing this week – The story about ping

I’m really looking forward to rowing this book! It’s a favourite I remember from MY childhood. We’ve got so many things to learn and enjoy from this book. I can’t WAIT!

A new site I love!

Doing a little surfing and I found this site! http://kids.audible.com 

For as little as 99c you can download an audio book of MANY classics!

And there are HEAPS of FIAR titles there!
Guess what I am doing before our drive tomorrow?

Building the tower

Time with daddy! As a follow up to our looking at the architecture of the buildings drawn in Madeline we used our wooden blocks to build our own eiffel tower! I think they did a great job!

More Madeline fun!

No pictures right now … camera battery is charging – but I wanted to share some more of our Madeline fun we’ve been having.

Yesterday I worked – so we only had a little time to row. But I wanted to touch base to keep the familiarity with the book going.

We read Madeline again and then using shells tried to see how many different ways 12 could look like. So – we did “12 little girls shells in two straight lines” and counted that their were six shells in each line. We then tried 12 little girls shells in 3 straight lines to find that we only needed 4 shells per line. And we kept going with all the combinations we could think of.

We also looked at relative size and putting thing from smallest to largest since Madeline was the smallest of the girls. I would randomly pick two shells and Miss E would choose which one was the largest and which was the smallest.

Today we have had some fun with architecture. We have been looking at the drawings in Madeline and used Google earth and streetview to find photographs of that places that the artist has drawn. Later today daddy and Miss E and I are going to use blocks to try to build our own buildings. It’s SO nice to have daddy home to help!

Rowing Madeline

OK – we didn’t wait till after easter to start. I couldn’t wait.

Yesterday we started rowing Madeline.

Miss E loved the book – which certainly helped! We read it through twice – then started on geography.

I showed Miss E the passports we are making, and she helped me finish it. Then I showed her our new globe and explained what it was. We started by playing and finding Australia, the US (where our friend Alyssa is) and New Zealand (where Miss Paula is!). We also learnt to recognise the Australian and New Zealand flag.

Then our lesson proper began. We found France on the globe, and put a stamp in our passports. We learnt about the capital of France, Paris (where Madeline lives) and heard the national anthem. We had a look at how far it is from Australia.

We found pictures of the French flag and went outside and made one for ourselves.

Later on we got Miss E’s dolls out to make “12 little girls in two straight lines” as an introduction to the math concepts we are going to work on later this week. She REALLY liked that! I think this is going to be FUN!

Our other new addition …

 

Our other new arrival this week is this amazing globe! It’s the Smart Globe by Oregon Scientific. Not only is it a globe – but when you point to a place with the pen it will tell you all sorts of interesting facts about that place. You can hear the national anthem, learn about the currency, size, capital, population, leader, time and weather. You can compare two places or measure the distance between two places. AND you can link it to the internet to download current information!

It even has 3 different levels depending on the age of the child, and games and quizzes.

As we progress through our FIAR books we are going to travel this globe and learn all about our amazing world. We are printing passports this afternoon ( thanks to Angela at Satori Smiles for the link!) (http://satorismiles.com/2009/04/03/pretend-passports-a-great-homeschool-tool/)

 

Then we’ll be ready to begin our BIG ADVENTURE!