Wonder Woman

Synopsis - Princess Diana of the Amazons becomes Wonder Woman and fights against evil, and the gods who try to destroy humans.

Wandering Falcon - "I've never been a big Wonder Woman fan (I'm not a big fan of Superheroes with special powers, I like the regular human superheroes) so I didn't know much about her until we started reading these books. They were pretty interesting. I'm still not a big Wonder Woman fan, but I'm glad we read them."

Optimus Prime - "They're fine."

Bumblebee - "I liked them all!!! The special one is the one where Princess Diana becomes Wonder Woman (he means "The Trial of the Amazons"). The Queen calls her Princess Diana."

Wonder Woman*

1. Monster Magic
2. Dr. Psycho's Circus of Crime
3. Rumble in the Rainforest
4. Attack of the Cheetah
5. Sword of the Dragon
6. The Fruit of All Evil
7. Creature of Chaos
8. Trial of the Amazons

* These books are not numbered, so they are listed in the order that we read them.  Also, for these books I have not listed an author since they are too much like comic books with multiple authors, illustrators, and creators.

Troll Hunters

We finished off Troll Hunters a few weeks ago.

Synopsis - Four kids - Pablo, Zak, Thora, and Louise - find themselves fighting against an army of underground trolls coming to the surface to take over the world. Along the way they meet Dr. Hoo, who guides them and tells them about their special powers based on the constellations in the sky.

Wandering Falcon - "This series started out really strong, and I really liked it, but then book three happened. I'm not sure what happened, I mean, yes there was magic and stuff from the beginning, but all of the sudden the magic just got crazy. However, come book four things got better again."

Optimus Prime - "They were scary."

Bumblebee - "I liked them. I liked the kid Thora."

Troll Hunters by Michael Dahl

1. Skyfall
2. Dark Tower Rising
3. The Lava Crown
4. Fallen Star

Lack of Posts

I'm sorry about the lack of posts, it's not intentional. My doctor put me on a new medication that is currently, MAJORLY, kicking my butt. I'm sleeping 12 hours a day and I spend the other 12 hours a day wishing I could sleep some more. I'm exhausted all the time & I've dropped over 13 lbs from it - 10 of those pounds were in the first week! I'm very tired and it's bleeding over into other aspects of my life. Like blogging. I'm just too tired to blog or to do more than the basics as far as homeschooling goes. I'm hoping my body will adjust to the medication soon here, it's been almost a month now. My appetite is back so I'm not dropping weight like crazy anymore (though the scale is still moving downwards) so I'm hoping that the exhaustion will go away soon as well. So, for the rest of the month I'll try to catch up on posting but I'm not making any promises!

Two Week Review: August 17 - August 30

I just realized I'm behind in these. Again. I don't know how this keeps happening...

School just started here which means Scooby-Doo will soon start speech therapy. I have no clue when he will, he has a new speech therapist and a new developmental/pre-k therapist in new offices so I'm waiting for the school to contact me. Hopefully they will no later than the second week of September. That gives them three weeks to get settled in... Meanwhile, for schoolwork he's doing the same as always. Numbers, letters, coloring, and some logic (these two weeks it was just shapes). He's doing good and he's still a chatter box.

Optimus Prime is still doing physical therapy. Like I said last post, his right leg is longer than his left, causing stress on his hips which he tries to adjust to by turning his feet in. His feet will probably always turn in, but through physical therapy he should learn to turn them out more.

English was still just reading comprehension. Math was reviewing subtraction, place value, fractions (which they love), counting money (they also love that), and telling time. The book they are working on is a book to supposedly bridge 1st and 2nd grade math. Mostly it's just 1st grade math. We'll be done with it soon. Spelling these two weeks were "short a" words, just like last time. (Well, last time had number words too.)

We started a new project for Art that I'm going to post about soon. More on that when I finally get my post up.* Sign Language was all review. I'm not sure that we're going to be doing any new words anytime soon. In Religion we covered Ilmatar and Hestia/Vesta. I forgot to tell you about Geography last time. Not sure how that happened, however all three weeks of Geography covered the theme of "The World" so I guess it doesn't matter that I didn't mention it until today. We did Handwriting, of course, and they had fun with hidden pictures for Logic. In Science we finished learning about Farm Animals and moved on to Favorite Pets.

As for Reading, unless he's having a bad day Optimus Prime is doing AMAZING. He's still working on level 1 and level 2 books. Bumblebee has moments where he has a major breakthrough then he immediately reverts again. It's very frustrating. But I'm sure he'll get it down sometime in the next 6 months. Meanwhile, I'm thinking Optimus Prime might be ready for chapter books in the next six months...

That's all I got for these two weeks!

* The post has already been put up.

Book Project Part 1

This quarter for our Art projects we are doing something different. We're making a "book".

The idea came about because we have a TON of scrapbooking paper, and I don't scrapbook any more. So, what to do with all that sturdy paper? Make a book, of course!

It was pretty easy. All we did was pick out prints that we liked and glued them together to make a page. Then we did the same to make (matching) covers.

Then we whole punched the book and ran some yarn through to make the spine. Like I said, SUPER easy. (Actually, I said "pretty easy" but you get my point.)

We then picked a theme for our books, and either drew pictures (Bumblebee) for it or searched the internet (me & Optimus Prime) for pictures to print up and color. 

My theme was Freya, however I also printed up Frigga and Aphrodite pictures as well sticking with the whole "love goddess" theme.

Now, these are all shots of my book. Why not my kids? Their books aren't finished yet! Once they are I'll do a part two post at the end of this quarter and show off their awesome books!

Concept Week #15: Prehistoric/Early Humans

This unit was sort of a part two to our last dinosaurs unit. After learning about dinosaurs for three straight months, it led to the question, "What about early people?"

Unfortunately, I could not find any worksheets to do along with this unit. Everyone had websites up filled with information but no one had any worksheets or activities related to this topic. Their reading level isn't quite good enough for me to write up fill-in-the-blank worksheets or anything similar so we just went without. It was very frustrating. In the end I couldn't think of a project to do either, so all we did was read our book about it and discuss the things in the book. We read Eyewitness Books: Early Humans which covered topics like Homo Erectus and Homo Neanderthalensis moving into modern human tribes spreading out across the world. We learned about early tribes (and even current tribes) on the continents as well as hunting and gathering and early forms of money. We covered the Bronze Age and the Iron Age as well as writing an burial practices. It was a very good book for a topic that not much information exists on.

It wasn't the type of unit they were used to, but future units (in later on grades) will look more like this with just a textbook and discussions. In the end we learned new things, and that's all that matters.

Concept Week #14: Life Cycles

This Concept Week was super easy, however the boys loved it so I have no complaints. Actually, Optimus Prime picked out this unit. I was at www.education.com trying to figure out what we wanted to do when he saw a sheet where you glue pictures of frog eggs, tadpoles, and adults into the correct order. He wanted to do it so I spent the day printing up a TON of sheets. They had coloring sheets as well as gluing sheets. They covered plants (corn, pumpkin, etc.), animals (reptiles, amphibians, fish, birds, and mammals - including humans), and bugs (lots and lots and LOTS of bugs!).

Like I said, some sheets were for coloring, some were for gluing, and there was some overlap in them (grasshoppers and butterflies, for example, had a coloring and a gluing page). It covered how life starts as an egg (either inside a mammal or laid somewhere) then turns to a hatched (or birthed) baby, which ultimately grows into an adult who has more babies.

Was it a very basic concept for second graders? Yes. I think even for first graders (though that was the heading I found the sheets under). But they enjoyed it, even if it was easy, and they were excited to learn some of the interesting facts that went along with some of the pages. We had never really covered the idea of death before in our schoolwork - beyond talking about mummies - so we got to go over that a bit too. Eventually the mommies & daddies stop having babies, and as the babies grow the mommies & daddies age and begin to die. This happens sooner in the world of bugs than animals, but it still happens. We also talked about how some animals (and pretty much all bugs to the best of my knowledge) lay their eggs and leave. They don't stick around to raise the babies like mammals (especially people) do.

So, we got to cover a few different themes with this unit.

We did not have a project. I really couldn't think of an appropriate one to do, and they had so many cutting and gluing pages to do that I felt like we really didn't need one.

On the flip side we did have two books to go with this unit. I was fairly certain we had a Magic School Bus book that covered life cycles, but I couldn't find it. I did, however, find two other Magic School Bus books that covered the topic. The Magic School Bus Goes Upstream: A Book About the Salmon Migration and The Magic School Bus Plants Seeds: A Book About How Living Things Grow. The first one obviously covers the salmon migration. But, in case you don't know, the salmon go upstream to lay their eggs then they leave them. The eggs hatch and the babies find their way home. The second one covers plants going from seed to plant to seed again. We had already read the second one for our kindergarten Concept Week on gardening, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to read it again.

So there we go, our first 2nd grade Concept Week!