Thursday, March 08, 2007

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.

6 comments:

Paper Dali said...

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW. That sticker factory tour sounds amazing. And I checked out the link. How awesome are those stickers? I loved collecting stickers when I was a kid ... especially puffy Smurf ones. LOL And now Essie collects them. YIKES. I know where to get some awesome ones .... No, no, must .... not .... spend .... money .... LOL

I love Enchanted Learning. I think the $20 a year is totally worth it.

And I don't know how I'd homeschool without the Internet. I know people did before the Web, but how????? LOL We used it for our etymological studies, too, including, yep, beetle lifecycle. LOL I love how our lives seem to overlap sometimes.

By the way, thanks for the link to the contest. I'll check it out later.

And,oh, my camera seems to be working, so I'll try and upload some writing center pics tonight. I mean, it's just a folder, so nothing too exciting, but, hey, we're homeschoolers and stuff that life, I guess, is WAY exciting for us. ;-)

vegiemama said...

Oh wow, my kids would be jealous that you got to go to Mrs. Grossman's! I agree that you should go every year. And next time, take $20 with you ;-)

G said...

I had such a hard time limiting what we bought too - I HAD to get this set of alphabet stickers that was too beautiful to pass up (and it's educational, right?), the kids each got a sheet & grab bag.... but there was so much more I could have happily bought.

I love Enchanted Learning too.

G said...

C.J. will still be pre-K next year. I am putting together my own little curriculum for her.

Carpooling would be great! The exhibit runs through Sept 2, I think, so we have plenty of time to arrange a day to go.

~Mary~ 4boys4me said...

oh yeah, gotta love Google! We googled Fredricksburg and Antietam this morning while reading a story set during The Civil War. I didn't look long enough to find the pronunciation of Antietam though. ;)

Meesh said...

That sounds like a great tour! I loved collecting stickers as a kid too. I remember trading them and just being obsessed really. I still need to check out the links.

On my compost post you can see the beetle larva up close and personal again if you want! LOL! http://e2o2.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/compost_adventu.html
(sorry I'm too lazy to try and figure out how to do an link w/ html coding right now- not even sure if I could.)

I am such a fan of google. I use it for just about everything- now Owen (who is not reading yet) knows how to type inthe google field in my toolbar for games. He just types "whatevercharachtername online game". He has tried that with every movie we own just about. He's just sure there must be a game for everything.