Homeschooling Update

We're still looking at oceans. Here are some resources we've used recently:



Bill Nye Ocean related videos: (Links are to the first of three parts for each topic. You'll find the links to parts 2 and 3 on the first video.)

Ocean Exploration
Oceanography
Ocean Life
Fish
Marine Mammals

My little reptile lover insisted on reading this book (which is mostly amphibians, but has some lovely lizards in it):



And then we watched the Bill Nye videos for reptiles and amphibians...

Reptiles (part 1)
Amphibians (part 1)

We are still reading about prehistoric creatures and dinosaurs (of course!), including this book and its prequel:





He has several more dino books from the library, including the silly picture book Dinotrucks, which he giggles over and reads and rereads to himself.

We've been reading poetry about winter, and weather:



And this beautiful book, with words of wisdom from Chief Seattle, accompanied by gorgeous paintings:



... and continuing the conservation theme, this book, about our planet's water supply:



We've had a fun look at some of our country's 50 states:



And learned a little bit about Chinese New Year:



We picked up a treasure trove of interlibrary loan books on ancient Egypt and ancient Greece. We are having a lot of fun reading the Greek myths, and the first Percy Jackson book, the Lightning Thief (which I have on my Kindle, and read to Mikro during train rides...) We've been listening to the Jim Weiss CDs of Susan Wise Bauer's Story of the World: Ancients, and are just starting the parts on Greece. Mikro loves these stories, and is over the moon for the Jim Henson Storyteller DVDs of the Greek Myths and classic fairytales.

We've already read these Egypt books (and my beetle obsessed boy, who wants to be a coleopterist as well as a paleontologist, particularly enjoyed The Scarab's Secret, which is narrated by a beetle.)



We've read about other insects as well. The silkworms reading was inspired by our visit to the Silk Road exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. Quite the contrast between beekeeping and silkworm raising-- the bees are left to do what is natural, with minimal interference, while the silkworms have been selectively bred into creatures who could not survive in the wild.



And we've even worked in a little math reading. He's really enjoying playing Sum Swamp and doing some math with playing cards, a la Dealing With Addition.



Best of all, he enjoys all of it!