Art Book: How to Build Lego Cars

 Do you love building with Lego?   Do you see it for the art form that it is?  Yes, it's STEM and building and engineering, but ... it is also an art form.   You can really see it in these magnificantcars that Peter Blackert helps you design in How to Build Brick Cars.   

Oh...these aren't your standard lego cars...these are master builder cars that go on to inspire you to model your own creations. 

Art Book: Beasts from Bricks

Oh, who doesn't like to build with lego?  I spent hours as a child playing with lego and have had lots of fun playing with my boy child...though the older he gets the more he keeps himself busy with other things and plays less with his mama.  BUT this book is cool!  Making animals from around the world, using the designs in Beasts from Bricks.  It's great!

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." 

plans change

Our plans for the day changed

We had planned to go to Dairy days with the homeschool group.  But it was cancelled due to weather issues

So this morning we went skating.
Then played lego.  We built, we discussed, we had fun.

Then we set off to work with our Spiders Unit Study.

The lad's question of the day was Where do spiders go in the winter?  the answer from here.

Did you ever wonder where all the spiders go in the winter?  (Excluding those little rascals you still find occasionally in your house!)  Do they die?  Do they hibernate? Do they just hide somewhere where you don’t see all of them?
Different types of spiders handle the winter months differently.  There are those spiders that like to come on in and dwell with us in our nice warm homes.  Others, however, will die in the winter but leave their egg sacs well protected to hatch out the next spring.  Some actually do prepare for winter by weaving a web under loose bark or building overhangs where they are insulated from the cold

This of course inspired a game in a young lad's mind.  Let's pretend to be spiders trying to get to winter safety without being caught by an enemy.  so we played a few rounds of this.

today we learned about the lifecycle of a spider.

We talked about how spiders are both prey and predator and the lad made the observation that this happens alot with animals..but it doesn't happen with robots (because nothing eats robots).

we read the story by Eileen Snyder called   The Little Old Lady Who Liked Spiders

So then the above game became can you avoid the lizards who just might eat spiders?   So we played that was well.

I expect that soon my voice will be back to normal and we can get back to our regular reading times.

Spiders and Lego

At breakfast we did our normal reading

10 minute stories

Today's story was about a fellow who was very lazy and how he learned not to be so very lazy.   The lad says "I liked it!"

World History

We continue learning about Knights and Castles.  Today we learned about how a person learns to be a knight.



We continued work on our spider study
The lad was very eager to do this. I had promised him that we could play with Lego today and build spider webs and a spider with it today. :) Here's to creative thinking! :)  So today we focused on learning about different types of spider webs.

Webs have different purposes, according to the individual species of spider, how it captures or stores its prey. Spider's silk can be used to help small, young spiders transport to new areas (ballooning) or be so strong that it is used to make fish nets, as with the Nephila spider web.
Other types of spider webs:

Tangled Web Spiders
Tangled spider webs consist of a shapeless jumble of threads  attached to a support such as the corner of a ceiling.  Cobwebs are tangled webs that have collected dust and dirt.  Cellar spiders, the comb-footed spiders (included black and brown widow spiders), the ogre-faced stick spiders and common house spiders are spiders that make these types of webs. 

 Sheet Webs

Sheet webs are flat sheets of silk between blades of grass or branches of shrubs or trees. Spiders that create sheet webs also spin a net of crisscrossed threads above the sheet.  When a flying insect hits the net, it bounces into the sheet web.  The
spider, which hangs upside down beneath the web, quickly runs to the insect and pulls it through the webbing.  Sheet webs last a long time because the spider repairs any damaged parts.  The bowl & doily spider, the filmy dome spider, and the platform spider form sheet webs.

Gum-footed Webs
Gum-footed webs consist of tightly woven silk strands attached between two branches.  The upper strands are dry and built in sheltered areas away from sunlight while the lower strands are built in exposed area and run down to a bottom branch where they are attached.  Each of the lower sticky strands are covered in sticky droplets and are attached weakly at the bottom.  When an insect walks into the sticky silk strands its struggle break the lines moving the web upwards and lifting the prey off the ground reducing its chances of escaping.
Redback spiders create gum-footed webs.

Horizontal Line Webs
Horizontal Line Webs are made up of one simple line of sticky droplets stretching across low vegetation, bark and leaf litter.  Spiders that create this type of web pull the line taut by keeping the slack silk underneath them until an insect hits the line.  When that happens, the loose silk whips along the line and tangles the prey.  Cribellate spiders and other pea-sized spiders create these webs.   Pic from here.

Bolas Spider Web
The Bolas Spider Web is a very simple web designed for their unique method of hunting.  In order to hunt and catch male moths, the bolas spider sits on a horizontal line and spins a single line with a sticky silk tip that dangles from its leg.  While
waiting, this spider will emit a scent similar to a female moth.  When the male moth comes toward the spider, the spider swings the sticky strand in a circle and captures the moth, pulling the strand in to feed.

Triangle Webs

Triangle Webs are created in the shape of a triangle, hence its name.  The spider weaves silky strands of spokes and spirals that connect to all three strands.  The triangle spider waits at one end of the web for an insect to land.  When it does, the 
spider shakes the web so the insect is caught and cannot escape.

quite fascinating all in all. hard to find images of all the different types of webs. As I find them, I'll add them in. :)

We built a couple of lego webs complete with spiders.  

And then did some spider math.  I started out with 10 spiders sitting in a tree and then a variety of things happened, at one point we were up to 54 spiders in the tree and eventually got down to 0 spiders in a tree.  All done verbally and mentally with the occasional bit of help from a calender and pencil...he is only 6 after all!  :)