Rabbit Lapbook

Well it looks like we'll finally bite the bullet and try this lapbooking thing. Apparently, in this Homeschool 2.0 universe that I now find myself in (Homeschooling in the internet age) you aren't home educating unless you're creating lapbooks. In Homeschool 1.0, you were cutting edge if you had foregone textbooks for unit studies. (We were sooooo clued. As in "Konos." Back then, the Hulcy kids were the kids. Not the grandkids.) In this millenium I'm feeling longer in the tooth and less inclined to build full-scale teepees in the backyard or create walk-through models of the ear.

So now it's these lapbooks.

A lapbook is like a pop-up book for showcasing a child's knowledge of a topic. Of course she could write a report or take a test. But if you are the grandparent at the holiday dinner, wouldn't you rather play with a pop-up book than read a book report?

This form of documenting MeiWei's knowledge may be well suited considering her aversion to handwriting. Oh, it's not that she has nothing to say! I have to persuade her that we only have so many allotted words we can use in a day and she shouldn't waste them.....(No, it's not true. You do what you have to do to get a little peace.)

With a lapbook, she can present bite-size pieces of info in the form of mini-books written by hand or even typed, it doesn't matter. And knowing that her audience is going to really love looking at her work is an incentive.

Need a visual? Check out the Queen of Lapbooking

So upon concluding the Rodent chapters of Thornton Burgess' Animal Book
I asked her what her favorite animal was and she quickly replied, "Rabbits!"

I got a good start with other mini-books (the bones of a lapbook) pertaining to rabbits at Homeschool Share

So here we go! Give us a week. We're going to try and have it done to shove in front of all the relatives at Thanksgiving.

Oh, and I found out that rabbits are not rodents. More later...

This Week's Menu

Monday
Fried Chicken, baked potatoes, green bean casserole. I hope I can equal my mom's reputation for the chicken. Good advice here if your mom is not available.

Tuesday
Chili for crock, cornbread

Wednesday
Herb-crusted Pork Chops , Walnut-Sage Potatoes au Gratin , (test-driving for Thanskgiving), steamed broccoli

Thursday
Orange Chicken in Crockpot (or "crocked" as AMCD coined), rice, stir-fried asparagus

Friday
Mac'n'Cheese "crocked" , green salad
Doing this cuz the family LOVES Dad's "mac-cheese" as we call it , again thanks to AMCD. Wish me luck though after reading all the comments posted to CrockPot's site.(eyeroll)

Saturday and Sunday: no plan. There are leftovers or DadR and Tai can cook. They both love to. To be frank, I love to do almost anything else.

Cooking Again

I've been blessed abundantly for the last two years with DaddyRobin's willingness (even eagerness) to make dinner virtually every night. In fact I had practically forgotten how to cook! He can grill, he can stir-fry, he can put together interesting ingredients and all without a recipe.

He had been laid-off in the spring which allowed him to be home all day and do odd jobs, cut grass, help with MeiWei, and most importantly COOK. But when that ended last week (and we are singing God's praises that it has, don't get me wrong! :-)), I confess I was in tears at the thought of homeschooling all day and being responsible for dinner every night along with other evening "taxi jobs".

I'm that spoiled. How embarrassing.

I always chastise myself about this, how "other mothers", particularly those homeschooling ones that have five kids under 10 and one on the way, who garden organically and bake all their own bread--whole grain--do it. Okay, my excuse can be GAD (general anxiety disorder), but then that kind of thinking only adds to my anxieties!

Well, sweet, supportive hubbie talked me through it and my fears began to subside as he assured me that frozen entrees by Stouffer's were OK.

Then I found some blogs other homeschoolers were using:
I'm an Organized Junkie and A Year of Slow Cooking . "Junkie" encourages weekly menu planning. So that's what I've done for a record two weeks in a row.
This week I've even added home delivery from Giant Food's Peapod program. I'm justifying the $7.95 delivery fee as the time-value of money saved for not driving there and back, spending on spontaneous purchases, and exhausting AMCD and me at the end of a school day. AND they'll give me free delivery on my next order over $100.

I'll keep you posted. Delivery is Monday morning!

Nature Notes

We had three great spottings today in the wild. On our daily walk, we were surprised to hear--in broad daylight--an owl calling from far off. It turned out to be a Barred Owl . You can hear it at: Barred Owl - Whatbird.com

Then, while we didn't actually SEE it, we must have startled some small rodent or shrew scuttling under the fallen leaves right next to the road we walk on. It had a raspy squeak of an alarm that it sounded many times. We hoped it would show itself, and finally we started poking around. Within seconds however we saw movement 10 or more feet away. It hadn't taken any time for it to be outta here!

It was an especially well-timed event as we have been reading about the Rodent family for many weeks now using Thornton Burgess' Animal Book for Children. Just today we had read about shrews, and came to know that in point of fact, neither shrews nor moles are rodents! They are in their own group, the Family Insectivora, or "insect-eaters." Now that I think of it, they don't have gnawing teeth, the hallmark of Rodentia. Learn more about the Northern Short-tailed Shrew.

Then towards evening, Father Robin, who was on his way to the mailbox, almost stepped on a little garter snake. He called out to me, but it wriggled away just before I got to it.

Baby Garters http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcwetboy/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

As I was planning to lead a Bible study of God's creation at our Pioneer Girl meeting that night, I thought having the little snake available would have been the icing on all the natural materials that I had collected for observation. I could just hear the girls scream!! :D More on Garter snakes

Even on the WAY to the meeting, our luck continued as I warned myself that, with Mother Nature hitting us from all sides today, that I better turn on my high beams to avoid really being hit--by a deer! No sooner was the switch flicked than a large bird of prey--owl or hawk--swooped across the road right in front of my car!

Before leaving, I did capture a possible kind of stink bug (in the kitchen) so we would have something from the Kingdom Animalia to observe. The girls actually fell quite in love with the ugly little thing. It was long and thin with large, heavily jointed legs, brownish gray in color all over. It moves slowly and deliberately and its friends like to hang near my windows (where they get caught in spider webs!) The odor it emitted wasn't even unpleasant. It did not have the standard shield shape, so it may have been some other kind of beetle. We had a grand releasing at the end of the meeting.

I think the girls got the message: God's world is very cool when you stop and take a look.

Science Fair Display Board

And Here is MeiWei's final project (most of it).

All the kids, right down to the kindergarteners, did a superb job! Watch out, world!