Friday Science at Long Island Science Museum

Today was Mikro's first science class at the Long Island Museum of Science in Plandome. He learned about geology, made a metamorphic snack rock, and put together a rock key. And he got to sit next to his best buddy, both in class and on the train ride there and back again. Today was his first ever drop off class (not that I was far away-- I was out on the porch, chatting with the other moms), and although it was an hour and a half, and longer than he's used to, and his first time without mom looking over his shoulder (er, I did peek in the window a couple of times...), he did fine!






Across from the museum, there's a beach and wetlands area, where we saw all sorts of birds. Mikro's favorites were the egret and the heron, and we were lucky enough to watch both of them catch fish.

Constitution Day Learning Links

Tomorrow is Constitution Day in the USA.

Constitution Day Materials for K-12

A wealth of resources, including online games, about the Constitution, the courts, etc., all here:

Our Courts

Homeschool Update

Science:

Our homeschool group is taking science classes with Mad Science again this semester. The topic this time around is a combination of life science and earth science. This week's class was about geology, volcanoes and earthquakes.



Afterwards, we read some books on those themes at the library. And Queens Library lets kids read down their library fines, so we made progress on that front, too.





Math: More workbook stuff, and he has started just randomly asking us questions about math. Like out of the blue, he'll ask about money and making change, or adding two digit numbers, as in, "Um, mom, does 43 plus 28 equal 71?" Place value is starting to be more automatic. And he's really enjoying logic puzzles. He's getting some practice skip counting by 5s when we return our bottle recycling and get back the deposits (which pays for my morning coffee.)



English/Language Arts:

We've done capitalization rules, rhyming, poetry forms, writing acrostic poems, syllables, spelling games, unscramble word games, how many words can you make out of the letters in a long word (like "emergency" or "instructions"), etc.



History:

We have watched 10 of the 12 episodes of the Silk Road miniseries on DVD. Mikro is reading Kids Discover: Ancient China.



We saw the Silk Road exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History a while back. I wish it was still there. Now it would have context for Mikro... Today he asked me to come up with another ancient China art project for us to do.

We've been outside as much as possible, and that always means watching birds and collecting bugs. We are keeping up our measuring and collecting data on our pet Bearded Dragon, who is now a whopping 9 inches long, almost double her size when we brought her home. And, there's always time for a little silliness...

A Nature Study Resource

Cool short nature videos on NY wildlife here: SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry's Nature in Your Backyard Series.

Fall Foliage at Beczak

Today, Mikro attended Beczak's Fall Foliage River Explorers program. The kids learned about why leaves change color, and the difference between coniferous and deciduous trees. Then they went outside and looked for signs of fall, and leaves to make rubbings of. After doing leaf rubbings, they used paints and a set of stamps to make a leaf identification chart.




As usual, we looked at all of Beczak's critter tanks. Mikro really enjoyed the big blue crab which had just molted. And watching the turtles is always fun. Doesn't the Red Eared Slider look like she's saying "No pictures, please!"?



And here is what I did with the bit of leftover paint, rather than see it get tossed out:



I also fingerpainted on the butcher paper table cover. What was Mikro doing while mom got messy? Running around on the beach with his dad and the other kids. Sometimes I think I'm the biggest kid in the family...

River Day at Croton Yacht Club

Today, the Croton Yacht Club hosted its second annual River Day for the community. There were lots of activities for kids, including making clay "fossils" and wooden boats, picking a piece of sea glass to be made into a necklace for you by a local artist, looking at fish blood and crab claws under a microscope, seining, and observing lots of fish from our Hudson River on display in tanks. But I think the highlight for Mikro was riding on the Croton Fire Department's boat, and blasting the water cannon! We got soaked, but oh, that was fun!







Afterwards, we dried off on a walk along the river in beautiful Croton Landing Park. Mikro was in a rare mood, and let us take photos of him without making goofy faces...





And I think he may have settled on an idea for his Halloween costume...