I started reading the second Great Lesson yesterday, the Coming of Life, and it led to my son pulling out one of his books on... hm, either pre-historic life or specifically dinosaurs, not sure which... and bringing up all kinds of things and tying in this and that and so on and so forth. Yes, he loves animals, including prehistoric animals and just about anything, to the point that last night he and I were watching "A Series of Unfortunate Events" and at the part where we see Uncle Monty's animal room, he said something like, "I'll probably have a room like that when I'm older. " lol. In any case, we didn't manage to finish reading through the whole lesson yesterday, what with the little related interruptions/discussions and other stuff going on, and I was going to finish it today, but reorienting ourselves, he was reminded that I had said we should go outside and measure just how long 70 feet is. So, since it was beautiful weather at that moment and since the weather's been blah and even changed from nice to blah very quickly, we went ahead with measuring distances. We took some sidewalk chalk and a metre stick and I calculated how many metres 70 feet is on paper. (Ha, can anybody see a potential math lesson to suck him in with here? :D) We picked a starting point and marked every metre. He decided he wanted to see other measurements, too, so we took note of 14 metres (the wingspan of a particular dinosaur; I can never remember the names; the bucket is at the starting line):
21 metres, the length of a smallish apatosaurus (I tried to take a picture from the side to get a real feel, but I would have had to get on someone's roof! lol):
and 40 metres, which was the length of I can't remember what.
When we told my niece about it being the length of some dinosaurs, she kind of looked at us like we were nuts. lol.
I, incidentally, had initially written down 70 m and when we went outside and I said something about 70 m, my son gave me a look and asked what we were measuring that was 70 m. I said the apatosaurus. He said it was 70 ft. I was silly enough to have to go check; he is always right with these kinds of things!
In any case, he was a happy camper with the school work this morning and recognized it was school work and he was enjoying himself and decided he would stay outside with my 4yo niece (kindergarten starts for her next week) to "do phys. ed." (jump rope and then ride around the block a few times on his bike).
Dd is doing okay getting started with her online school work. She's a tad behind in math because it wasn't really made clear ahead of time where she should be in her work by now and what exactly she was supposed to be doing, so she ended up doing some work she didn't need to do at all (oops) and she just needs to learn about not being too perfectionist when doing certain school work--especially stuff that isn't being handed in! She'll catch on with the pacing. She finished her English that has to be handed in, but that first English assignment is always so hard because so much of how something is marked depends on the teacher, regardless of how many rubrics they give you about how they will mark. She's done some stuff for phys. ed., hasn't started religion yet, hasn't started art (the last two are full-year and just because of the nature of the courses, won't be a problem to catch up on) and we have no clue what's going on with her German course yet, so that's not touched at all either. But she's got the mandatory stuff done and is now enjoying having the afternoon free to do as she wishes. :)
All I can say is: TGIF. :D
I, incidentally, had written down 70 m at first and when we went outside and I said something about 70 m, my son gave me a look and asked what we were measuring that was 70 m. I said the apatosaurus. He said it was 70 ft. I was silly enough to have to go check; he is always right with these kinds of things! lol.
In any case, he was a happy camper with the school work this morning and recognized it was school work and he was enjoying himself and decided he would stay outside with my 4yo niece (kindergarten starts for her next week) to do phys. ed. (jump rope and then ride around the block a few times on his bike).
