Learning over time

Yesterday we did reading and housecleaning.  We read all our normal books.  Played pirates.  Learned what some valuable things are now-a-days that pirates might want to steal so we've been having pirates stealing art!

Today we spent time on Studyladder.       We worked on sight words, blending, using descriptive language, and what not.  In the afternoon we went for a walk at the dam.  We took a different trail than normal and we spent time looking under stones and deadfall to see what type of insects we could find.  

We seemed to be plum out of luck in finding anything other than the ordinary ants, earthworms, small black spiders and pill bugs UNTIL we stopped to look at a sign and there we saw an interesting bug which obliged us by staying still long enough to be captured in our insect catcher. :)   We want to show the lad who is teaching the bug class during HOPE days tomorrow.

What else?   

OOH.. we had a LOT of fun watching some water spiders

They were sculling back and forth on a stream we came across.  It was the lad who first saw how interesting their shadows were.   The lad had fun experimenting with what he could do to make them come out and play and what would make them go and hide. 

We saw a variety of interesting small flowers coming out to bloom.  Trilliums and dog tooth violets, then these funky little yellow ones that made me think of violas but they weren't, and these white and purple ones that grew together in the same patch.  Haven't a clue what they are called but they inspired comment.  

On an interesting side-note.  Two things have merged in my son's playtime lately.

One. we read the newspaper together at breakfast.    We talk about the news, we sometimes learn from the news (aka the other day we read two different articles that had to do with genetics and research), and of course we read the comics.

Two. Lego city has a website with games on it.  one of those games is a chance to create your own comic strip using lego characters.  This totally captured his imagination and he had SO much fun with it.

The merger:  OH My but the lad is having fun creating tiny newspapers WITH comics strips.  The angry birds are busy doing funny things in their stories, and the borrowers (a movie we've watched recently) are busy telling a story too.   These are multi-day comic strips.   He has news articles and ads and all sorts of things in them.  They are tiny as the lego characters must carry them around, and they are rolled up just as the newspapers are rolled up.  :)  Every once in a while I get the question of "Mommy.. do you think they would write about this in the newspaper?"   My standard answer is "Sure, why not?  They write about all sorts of things."