Q&A, Lapbooks, and Dolphin Games

I've been asked a couple of questions lately, and I thought I'd start by answering those.


First of all, how long do we do school each day? It's probably easier to answer per week. On Mondays and Wednesdays we have our long days. We usually do school from 9 until 3 or so, but probably with an hour lunch. So, about 5 hours each of those days. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we have to leave the house around noon. So, we usually do school for about 2.5 hours. And, we often have a field trip on Friday, so we'll do a few hours in the morning if we can, but if it is a full day field trip, we don't "do" school that day. So, I guess we do a total of about 15-18 hours on a "usual" week - that includes Bible time, math, language arts, lapbooks, history projects/models, science experiments, piano practice, etc.


I was also asked about my cameras. I use 2 different cameras. My smaller, point & shoot, is a Canon PowerShot SD900. I use this "every day" and I also use it for all of my macro shots - like photos of insects. My "big" camera is a Canon Rebel XTL and I also have a zoom lens for it (Canon Zoom Lens EF 70-300mm 1:4-5.6 IS). I use that primarily for my birds - even in my own backyard.
  
Next, we finished our "Legend of the Easter Egg" lapbook. Yeah! This one turned out pretty nice - I think because it is so "full."



Besides the other things I've already shared, we also read the story of Jesus death & resurrection from the Bible. And, we read about Jesus last supper for the "Celebrating Communion" booklet.

 

This was just a great study and I love how it incorporated the true story of Easter.

And, we started a new lapbook today - on dolphins. This was Alexandra's choice. Today, we had some "ph" spelling words like telephone, nephew, and photograph. These were great words for Alexandra to work on.

We also talked about the classification of living things according to Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. I memorized these by the mnemonic King Phillip Came Over For Girl Scouts - there are some other versions here, but I found lots of different ones online. Did you learn a sentence to help you remember these when you were in school? If so, I'd love to hear it!

Another booklet had us making as many words as we could from the letters in "dolphin." This was harder than I thought, but we came up with quite a few. Our words: I, hi, in, hip, old, lip, pond, pin, pod, old, hold, no, on, pod, and lion. Do you see any others?

Last, we watched a few online videos... of dolphins blowing cool bubble rings! This is incredible! I really had trouble believing these bubbles were made by the dolphins. This site gives an explanation of how the dolphins make this incredible toy. Once again, I stand in awe of God's marvelous creation.