Tangents and more

One of the things I enjoy about homeschooling is some of the interesting tangents one can take.

For instance this morning we added studying at least one or two animals every week. We don't go indepth, we just read a bit, find a location of where the animal lives, it's animal track if we can get and draw a picture of it and one fact that is interesting.

today we did caribou. We read about them in this book.


Then I searched for a nature study page we could use a base, and found this one I got as part of the teacher's toolbox from the old schoolhouse.

I asked the lad to draw a picture of a caribou while I found a picture of where the caribou lives (up north) and caribou tracks.

He did that. and then it evolved as pictures in this house are apt to do. To "J is capturing the caribou" (he was tranquilizing them which he's learned about from watching nature shows on TV.


From that evolved this story.
"The caribou are escaping from the zoo and a tree root grew really fast and there were eagles who escaped from the zoo. The angry birds came to help the bunny town Justin recapture all the animals that got out of the zoo. They are tranquilizing the eagle and the caribou." I read what I recalled to the lad and he added the following "The zoo man ran after the guinea pigs and ben said don't attack them, they are trying to help".

This was a just a fun way to learn and think and talk out what is happening.

We also did some work out of this book.

Listening Skills for grades 2-3. This book was interesting because it had a dot-to-dot with all mixed up numbers and letters and I told the lad where to draw and what type of line to draw. At the end of it we were surprised to find a bunny on a swing. The book below is similar to the one we have but ours is an older version of it. :)


A fellow homeschooler over at Learning To Homeschool gave me this idea. To have a daily word to learn. I asked her how she came up with them and she said just words they come across as they read or talk. Since that's too "iffy" for me I decided to use this

Children's Illustrated Dictionary.


Today's word was Aardvark.

I read another chapter out of First Language Lessons, Levels 1&2



We did our normal daily readings out of


10 minute stories

some of the stories in this book are quite good, others leave something to be desired. Today's story left the lad confused.

World History

We are into Roman history now. It's just fascinating reading tidbits about ancient history. Gives us a good framework for study in the future. :)

We repotted a couple of plants, the lad learned what it means that a plant is rootbound and that we have to help the plant by loosening up the roots.

We played a couple of games "pirates" - this is a board game we got at the local dollar store, it is a HUGE favourite of the lad and 9 times out of 10 he beats me handily. And bingo link which is a fun game that we win 50% of the time.

And then he worked on building a spider web on our stair way and helped dad play a computer game. Problem solving skills at work!