Google rocks!

Gosh, I miss one day of blogging and I feel so irresponsible! LOL, I really take this seriously. ;)

Wednesday: I can't believe that I already can't remember what we did yesterday. Umm, umm...oh yeah! Duh, we had the best day ever. We toured yet another local gem that I had never been to before: Mrs. Grossman's Sticker Factory. It was way up there as one of, if not the, best tours ever. It was cool, kid-friendly, and full of fun freebies. At the end of the tour they gave everyone baggies of stickers and a post card to decorate. Then, of course, the tour drops you off in the factory store...OMG, let's just say I'm thankful that I only had $10 on me. Where was this place when I was 8 years old??? We decided that we are definitely going back to this one at least once a year. I let the kids each pick out one pack of stickers and one little discount grab bag. That totaled about a million stickers once we got home. They fulfilled their stereotypical roles as Cameron got pirate stickers and Cassia picked out the princess/castle/unicorn set. Personally, I wanted the camping ones and the Klutz book of Art History (and the fancy letters and the laser-cut flowers and the birthday decorations and the endangered species and, and, and...). You should've seen our dining room table when we got home, lol. I should've taken a picture.

I know I had Cameron do some schoolwork too. I think it was phonics, "ie" as long /e/ and... I guess that was it. See? This is why I have to blog every day. I would not remember a darn thing we did if I didn't blog it! Thank God we don't have to do any sort of record-keeping to homeschool here.

Thursday I had to go get my temporary crown replaced. Yes, the one that I just got on Tuesday. It wasn't as badly cracked as I thought, but a piece of the top had broken off making the tooth sensitive. Anyway, I had to rearrange gymnastics classes and drag all the kiddos down to the dentist's with me, but they were perfect. Yay! C&C just watched a video in the waiting room and Greyson sat on my lap the whole time pulling the dentist's hair, lol. Luckily she has a good sense of humor about the whole thing.

When we got home, I wasn't much in the mood to struggle through phonics so I just pulled out the science text and we read a chapter on life cycles. We learned about the life cycles of chickens, butterflies, and cockroaches. Interesting mix, I know. The kids were both very interested in learning the life cycles and Cameron even read the titles of the butterfly cycle diagram: egg, larva, pupa, adult. Even more impressive is that he remembered that the pupa casing is called a chrysalis. Next we did the one and only workbook exercise for the chapter which mostly involved a lot of remembering and comparing the different life cycles. The activity book has a ton of activities for this chapter though. Lots of dissecting chicken eggs and looking up butterflies on Enchanted Learning. I can't wait to do some of those. We did learn in the workbook that the beetle has a similarly staged life cycle as a butterfly and that a grasshopper's is similar to a cockroach's. This prompted us to try and look up what a beetle pupa looked like, since we didn't even know that they went through that stage!

And this brings me to my title. First we looked in the Kingfisher First Animal Encyclopedia. We found some butterfly pupa. Then we looked in the DK First Animal Encyclopedia and found several pages on insect life cycles and butterflies and moths and another couple on beetles, but no beetle pupa. Then it was time for my friend and yours, Google. Go ahead and Google an image search for "beetle life cycle" and you will not be disappointed. Cam was so into it. After we finished the workbook exercise he started asking if he could play video games but I made him wait to see if we could find a beetle pupa first. Once he found out that we were going to search via internet, he stuck to me like glue through the whole investigation. We looked at just about every link on that first page and he would've sat through more, I'm sure.

So let me just say again, the Information Age is awesome and Google rocks. Maybe we should call this the Google Age. Back in the Google Age, students could find information on any random concept that happened to enter their little minds, and it was good. Knowledge is Power. Rock on, my little nymphs. Rock. On.