Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Off in another direction ....

Home*School*Home

I was pretty disappointed about the abridged version of Anne of Green Gables and none of the unit study stuff I found fitting our version of the story. We found it on the map, discussed when in time it happened and quite a bit about the abridged/unabridged issue and then I decided to just go ahead and start the solar system/ universe study my older son has been wanting me to do. I found some solar system mobile kits on clearance at Michael's Crafts for $3.00 and we are going to make those this week. We started out by reading a few little facts from a space book (DK books, which we all LOVE.) and then we went on a solar system hike, which was a lot of fun. We drew the planets on our street (which was pretty much totally deserted this morning) and tried to make the distances to scale, using this web site.

http://www.homeschoolscience.com/
sample_lessons/sample_astro.html

The kids enjoyed putting rocks from the edge of the road in the middle of the road to make the asteroid belt. Anyone walking on our street today will have some new sites to see. We drew all the planets with sidewalk chalk and they are quite good. :-)

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous5:14 PM

    What fun! We once did a simulation of how the earth revolves around the sun, including rotation. It was especially funny when the "earth" got a bit dizzy and fell over, and it got a bit confusing when we added the moon. He kept running into the earth, LOL!

    ReplyDelete
  2. It sounds like fun! We might have to do that too.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous4:24 PM

    Your other 2 models of the solar system are locked in my car since Lindsey and I somehow locked my purse and both sets of keys in it last night!

    ReplyDelete
  4. LoL! Hi Anonymous! I guess you didn't get as lucky as me and have a wrecker man open it for free? I'm going to give each kid a planet a day to paint. Since I know you got them we can start divinding up Devin's kit. It will all come out all right in the end.

    ReplyDelete