Super Heroes, Toads And Home School

Today was such a great day! It was like my ideal homeschool day.I woke up this morning and the three younger kids all piled in bed with me. We laughed and talked and played around a while, then we got the idea to make up a story about a family of super heroes. So I got out a notebook while we brainstormed ideas for our story. We all made up our own super hero. I was so impressed and surprised by all of their ideas even Lily made up a super hero. We talked about their powers and costumes and made a description for each of them. We gave them names and weaknesses. We made up the villains for them to fight and the setting for our story. We talked and played around with the story for an hour or more before we finally put it up and got out of bed. I'm not sure if the story will ever get wrote, I hope so, but it was fun making up our heroes. After we got up and dressed and fed Becca and her kids came over and we took the kids to SOSO Park to look for pine cones. We planned to make the bird feeders we didn't get around to making last week. At the park the kids found three toads. They quickly decided they were a family so we brought them home and I dug out our Pets In A Jar book. We set them up a pretty good habitat and read a few paragraphs about toads from the book. Then we let the kids just watch them and touch them awhile. We set the aquarium up on my coffee table so the kids could see and reach it easily. Here are some pictures of Lily playing with the toads, she was the only one really brave enough to hold them.

Lily played with the toads off and on all day. she made them hop and swim, she watched them burrow in the sand and she dug them back up. Long after the other kids bored of the toads she was still fascinated by them. I think the daddy toad is Jump, the mommy is Hop and the baby is Skip. After the kids had played around with the toads awhile Becca helped the kids make color wheels out of paper plates while I went up to the store to print out some stuff about birds and amphibians for our Science lesson. We planned on studying about birds today, learning the characteristics of birds and then making the bird feeders but after finding the toads we decided to study amphibians instead. So while the kids colored different amphibians we discussed what an amphibian was, and how they were different than birds, fish, reptiles, and mammals. The kids cut out the amphibians and glued them in their Science notebooks. Then Becca and her kids left and Lily, Lacey and Kyle played outside while I cooked lunch. While we were eating lunch we decided to play a Dutch card game that our friend Tess brought down with her. I'm not sure what the game is called, it's kinda like Go Fish! After lunch Kyle got on the computer while me and the girls put together puzzles of the world. I bought a book a few years ago from somewhere, I don't remember now where I got it, but it's like a board book that has puzzles built into it. You can take each puzzle out and put it together then store it back in the book. It has different things to look for on each map, like find the train or find the pyramids. Well, I thought it was a pretty cool book so I bought it but nobody ever really payed any attention to it so it's just sat on a shelf collecting dust. I came across it the other day and thought the kids might like it. I left it out on the coffee table and the kids found it and began playing with it, putting the puzzles together and looking through the book. So today the girls wanted to take all the little puzzles out of the book and make the whole world map. We spread it out on the dining room table and put it together. We played with the puzzles until they got bored with it and went out to play. We didn't do any of our computer work but I think we still learned a lot and we had fun. As a bonus it was neat to see Lacey and Hannah get so excited about amphibians because they had already been learning about them with their time4learning.

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