Our current Five in a Row unit is The Glorious Flight.  Ben is thoroughly loving this unit, learning all about airplanes and the history of flight.  In a few short hours (I really need to get to bed!), we'll be leaving on a trip to Washington DC.  The highlight of that trip will be to see The Air and Space Museum.  Ben is so excited he can hardly stand it. 

To wet our whistle a bit, we went on a field trip last week with a local homeschool group, to a local small airport.  The children were able to explore a couple of small planes, including sitting in the cockpit.  I put a quick slideshow of pictures from that field trip together.  I hope you enjoy it!  Next week, after we return, I'll add some picture of our trip to DC and of our lapbook to finish up this unit.

This is the lapbook cover.  This lapbook is made with 2 file folders glued together, with extensions added to both sides.  Like I said, it's big! 

This is the first file folder opened......

and this is the second file folder opened. 

In the first file folder, these minit books are on top of the extension.  There is a history of flight timeline, along with 3 minit books about Louis Bleriot, The Wright Brothers, and Charles Lindbergh. 

With the extension lifted, you'll find our maps, flags and clipart of France and Great Britain, along with pictures of several of Louis Bleriot's unsuccessful planes.

In the second file folder, you'll find several minit books on top of the center extension.  There are books about different types of transportation, onomatopoeia, a small French dictionary, and a book with different possibilities of book titles.  One of the alternate titles for The Glorious Flight that Ben came up with was, The Eleventh Try since it was Bleriot XI that finally flew well enough to make it over the English Channel.  On the left side of this half, you'll find his vocabulary book and on the right, a book about the job responsibilities of air traffic controllers and an airplane memory game. 

Lifting the extension in the second file folder reveals more fun.  There are minit books about ordinal numbers and Roman numerals, as well as a couple of airplanes to label.

There is one more little graph that I didn't take a picture of.  It's a paper airplane graph.  The premise is to make several different paper airplanes, fly them, measure the distance they flew, and graph the distances.  I put the graph in our lapbook (it's underneath the labeled airplanes) with plans of completing this as soon as the weather cooperates.

This photo is of Ben posing with the pilot, in the cockpit of the airplane that flew us home from Washington DC.  Every time we have flown (except for the time Ben was only 6 months old), he has asked to see the cockpit of the airplane.  And every time, the pilots have graciously given him that opportunity.  I think this child may be a pilot some day! 

I'd like to introduce you all to Flat Eli.  We are participating in a Flat Stanley exchange with our Five in a Row friends.  Flat Eli went with us to Washinton DC.  Here he is enjoying his "window seat."  And yes, that's the wing of the airplane with the beautiful blue sky above and clouds below the plane.  It was the perfect day to fly! 

Here is Ben standing in front of the Wright Brothers plane, commonly known as the Wright Flyer, housed in the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. 

Also housed in the Air and Space Museum is The Spirit of St. Louis.  This is the airplane that Charles Lindbergh made his non-stop flight over the Atlantic Ocean in.  He flew from NYC to Paris.  We were amazed at how small this plane is. (you can see Ben's head in the corner of the picture for a frame of reference on the size) 

This replica of a space shuttle was a big hit with Ben, but even more of a hit was.... 

finding out the answer to the question, "how do they go to the bathroom in space?"   

Here's the back side of the "space potty" display.  Ben spent quite some time figuring this all out.  Oh the joys of little boys and bodily functions! 

I feel kind of funny ending the photo shoot with a toilet, but I suppose it's fitting, since this is Ben's blog!  We hope you enjoyed our journey with The Glorious Flight.  It sure did take us to some amazing places, both in person and in our imaginations!

Ben and I just finished our study of Johnny Appleseed and yummy apples!  Well, we're almost finished.  We still have some apple taste-testing and apple pie-baking to do tomorrow!  But we finished our lapbook, so I thought I'd go ahead and post some pictures. 

Last week we were supposed to go on a "Johnny Appleseed" field trip to Huber's Orchard in Starlight, IN, with our local homeschool group.  But due to illness, we had to cancel.  So today Ben, Nana and I headed up there for our own field trip.  There was so much to do and Ben was having so much fun, that we never actually got around to picking apples!  But we did eat apple butter on our fried biscuits for lunch at the restaurant there.

Later when I have some more time, I will post a slideshow of the field trip today and maybe the apple pie baking tomorrow.  But for now, here are some pictures of our lapbook!  And for those of you who may be interested, most of the lapbooking components for this lapbook came from the FREE apple lapbook at www.liveandlearnpress.com.  The rest came from www.enchantedlearning.com.

The True Tale of Johnny Appleseed

One thing that we discussed quite a bit...Tall Tales.  There are many books about Johnny Appleseed and we read several of them.  We discovered there are many stories about him that are probably tall tales.   We listened to  Jim Weiss on CD tell several tall tales, including Johnny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan.  This book took more of a simple, biographical approach, i.e. not so many tall tales.  The artwork in this book is absolutely beautiful too!

Here is the front of our lapbook with a color copy of our main book and a handwriting sample.

This is the lapbook opened up.  On the left, Ben colored pictures of apple trees through the seasons.  On the right are several "did you know" facts about apples.  In the center is our Johnny Appleseed fact sheet and a map of the states he traveled through. 

Here you can see the trees Ben colored of an apple tree for each season.

Here are the "did you know" minit books opened up to reveal the answers.  I had these facts plus 4 untrue statements printed out and Ben had to choose the ones that were indeed facts about apples.  He did great.  He didn't even fall for the "apples are not good for you" statement!  Now if I could just convince him of the benefits of broccoli!

Here is the Johnny Appleseed fact sheet opened up.  Johnny Appleseed was born on September 26, 1774 in Massachusetts.  His real name was John Chapman.  He traveled mostly along the Ohio River, visiting pioneer settlers and planting apple orchards for them.  One of the "tall tales" about him says that he was friend to all animals, even bears loved him.  And that he would sleep in the cold rather than build a fire into which a misquito might fly and die.

Here is the lapbook with the center extension opened up.  At the top is Ben's apple art project.  Underneath that you'll find a food pyramid and several minit books.  We touched on the food pyramid, mostly concentrating on where apples fell on it and how it is constructed with the healthier foods as the "foundation."

Here we see the minit books opened.  The minit book to the left is an "apple seed prediction" book.  Ben predicted how many seeds we would find in an apple (3) and then we cut open the apple to find out how many were really there (7).  On the right is our "apple fraction" book.  When cutting up our apple to count the seeds, we first cut it into 2 pieces to learn the fraction 1/2 and then into 4 to learn the fraction 1/4. The book on the bottom is of pictures of the apple life cycle.

Once we were finished using our apple for our math lessons, we moved on to art.  Ben used the apple to "stamp" paints in this beautiful pattern!  Did you notice that the 5 seed pods create a star when cut across the cross section?  Ben thought that was very cool!

Ben and I wrapped up our study of dinosaurs.  It was a really fun study, one that I had pretty much avoided for as long as I could.  I was nervous about studying dinosaurs because I just wasn't ready to broach the topic of evolution.

But thanks (once again!) to Ami over at www.homeschoolshare.com, I was able to teach this unit from a creation perspective with all of her little lapbook helps.  We didn't completely follow Ami's lesson plan for her dinosaur unit for a couple of reasons:  1.  we didn't have access to the same books and 2. I didn't want to spend as much time on the unit as she had designed.  However, in my search for a decent book on dinosaurs from a creationist perspective, I found the book Dinosaurs by Design, by Duane T. Gish.  It was perfect!

I did talk with Ben briefly about the theory of evolution.  When I told him what some scientists believe about the chain of events leading up to the development of dinosaurs (one celled organism changed to a fish which changed to a frog, which changed to a lizard, which changed to a dinosaur), he laughed heartily and simply said, "why can't they just beleive that God created all of those animals?"  Wish I had an answer for that one.

We also discussed that most of the time museums will talk about dinosaurs living millions of years ago, but that we believe it was only thousands of years ago.  I'm not sure that had much of an effect on him, since at 6, he doesn't have much of a concept of time.  We haven't really started using a timeline yet, but that might be something I need to consider now.

I posted a few days ago about our trip to the Children's Museum of Indianapolis.  There is a slideshow of pictures from that field trip on my blog entry from last week, entitled, Dinosaurs, if you havne't seen it.  I wanted to mention again about how amazing the dinosaur exhibit is there.  Also, one thing I noticed was that in our interaction with staff there, there was no mention of millions of years ago or evolution.  I'm not sure if it was a conincidence or if they are trying to be sensitive to the creationists, but it was nice.  I know that Ben would have been outspoken had he heard much of that kind of talk!

Here are some pictures of our lapbook.  Thank you again to Ami, who designed most of the minit books that went into it!

Here Ben poses with the 2 main books we used for this study.

This is the front of our lapbook, with Ben's handwriting sample and the cover of the book, color-copied.

Here's the lapbook when you first open it up.  On the left flap is a minit book about the days of creation, on the right flap are our vocabulary words, and in the center a dinosaur world map minit book and a small book about reptiles.

Here you can see what the days of creation book looks like opened up.  I typed out the different things God created and Ben matched them up to the right day.

I did the vocabulary words similarly to the days of creation, typing out the definitions and then letting Ben match them up.

Here you can see the dinosaur world atlas and reptile books opened up.  For the atlas, Ben colored pictures of several dinosaurs and then matched them up to the continents on which they were found.  He used our Dinosaur Atlas book to figure these out.  The reptile book was made by cutting out pictures of diffferent reptile and gluing them down.  In the center, Ben drew a dinosaur.

This picture shows the lapbook with the added extenders opened up.  The top extender has a wheel which examines what possibly happened to the dinosaurs after the Great Flood.  Under the wheel is a little minit book with adjectives describing dinosaurs.  In the center of the lapbook is our dinosaur graph, where we were able to compare the sizes of different dinosaurs.  Some dinosaurs were small like chickens, some were over 40 feet tall!  Glued to the bottom extender is a coloring book we printed from www.enchantedlearning.com.  On the underside of this extension is a print-out of Psalm 8, the Psalm Ben is currently memorizing.  We chose this Psalm for now because it celebrates creation.

This is just a closer-up picture of the wheel and dinosaur adjectives book.

Here is the adjectives book opened up.  Each page has a picture of a dinosaur on which Ben has written a different adjective.  We read the book Hairy, Scarey, Ordinary, by Brian P. Cleary, to go along with this lesson.  Ben loves this set of books, called Words Are Categorical.  They are great for grammar lessons!  Some of the adjectives Ben chose to describe dinosaurs include:  enormous, ugly, stupid, mean, stinky, and extinct.

Here is an up close picture of the dinosaur coloring book. Each page inside has a picture of a different dinosuar, along with some facts about what they ate and how large they were.  There is also some handwriting practice inside there.

Psalm 8, found on the bottom extender under the Dinosaur Coloring Book.

Though I was a bit hesitant to study dinsaurs, we had a great time.  I found about 6 decent-sized toy dinosaurs at Wal-mart for under $1 each.  I brought these out after we had studied a bit.  Ben was able to name all of them but one!  His ability to remember details about things astonishes me.  One of the dinosaurs (velociraptor, I think) is known by his giant toenail.  Ben immediately noticed that on one of the toys and that's how he knew it was a velociraptor.  I had not even noticed the toenail! 

Thanks for stopping by and be sure to leave any comments if you have any!  We love to hear what you think about what we're studying!

A couple of weeks ago, my hubby and I had the chance to spend 6 days in Midtown Manhattan.  We left Ben home with my mom for their yearly "vacation at home."  Every year, in August, my mom takes Ben for a few days and they have fun visiting places in Louisville.  He had a great time with her, but I know he wishes he could have gone to NYC with us.

So when we got back home and were choosing which Five in a Row book to study next, Ben wanted to learn about NY.  So we chose The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge. 

"Once upon a time a little lighthouse was built on a sharp point of the shore by the Hudson River. It was round and fat and red. It was fat and red and jolly. And it was VERY, VERY PROUD. Behind it lay New York City where the people lived..."

And so begins the story......

 We've had a lot of fun learning about New York, lighthouses, bridges, personification, and compound words.   But mostly we've just had fun reading this book over and over.  Ben really loves it (and so do I!)

Yesterday we went on a "bridge hunt" around our city.  We live along the Ohio River, so there are many bridges.  We drove over a couple, looked at others, and then went to a park where there was a old stone arch bridge.  There was also a fountain to play in, so of course Ben had to get wet! 

At our weekly co-op, we have been learning about owls.  Last week, we dissected an owl pellet.  That was a huge hit with all 4 boys!  Ben found 3 rodent skulls and various other bones and fur inside his pellet.  We've also continued learning about the Baroque period in music (Bach and Vivaldi) along with the string section of the orchestra.  In American History, we have learned about a few more Native American Tribes, including the Sioux and Navajo.  In PE, the boys are learning the rules of ping pong!

Here are a few pictures of our lapbook covering our studies from The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge.  

Here's Ben proudly displaying our book of the week!

This is the cover for our lapbook.  Ben

wrote the title as a handwriting exercise

and I color copied the book cover.

This is our lapbook when you first open it.  On the left is

Ben's Daymark Book.  On the right, his Bridge Book.

In the center, you'll find a map of NY, one of Manhattan,

and information about NY's capitol, nickname, and state

symbols.

This is the Daymark Book opened up.  Ben colored them with different

patterns to show how lighthouses each have a different

pattern to so that sailors know their positions based on the

pattern of lighthouses they see.

Here you see the map of Manhattan

opened up.  It's difficult to see in this

picture, but there is an inset picture of the

little red lighthouse in the upper left. 

Here you see the minit book of the NY state

symbols opened up.  The state bird is the bluebird,

flower is the rose, tree is the sugar maple.

Here is a sample page of the Bridge Book.

We have samples of suspension, cantilever,

stone arch, truss, railroad, 2 arch, and drawbridges

in the book.  All of the bridges were found right

here in our city with the exception of the suspension.

We used a picture of the Great Gray Bridge (the

George Washington in NY) for our example of that one.

This is the view when the center page

is lifted.  At the top, there is Ben's drawing of

The Little Pink Flowers and the Great  Green

Oak, an example of contrast in size in art.

Under that you will find a handwriting exercise

and gamepieces for our compound word game

on the left, and on the right, a close-up picture

of the little red lighthouse and a drawing of Ben's

Beetle, showing personification.

These are compound word game pieces,

which easily store in the cup at the bottom.

This is Ben's Beetle (you know, as in the VW Beetle car), with a face drawn on it to show

personification.

Here's a lighthouse Ben built from his pattern blocks.

Here are a few pictures from our  our bridge hunt!

The Falls of the Ohio Railroad Drawbridge

This is the view looking upward while on the Sherman

Minton Bridge, a two-span, steel thru arch bridge.

I took this photo as we approached the George Rogers

Clark bridge, a cantilevered thru truss bridge. If you look to

the right and left, you'll see the sidewalks.  You can walk or

drive over this bridge between KY and IN.

This is the Tyler Park bridge, a stone arch bridge over

a pedestrian underpass.  This bridge is located in one of

our lovely metro parks.  You can't see it, but very close is

a playground and water fountain for the kids to play in.

The next picture shows Ben cooling off in the fountain. It was

hot and muggy this day and we both needed some cooling off!

Ben cooling off in the fountain water

at Tyler Park.

 All in all, another great couple of weeks in our homeschool!   

Edited to add a photo slideshow of some pictures I took while visiting NYC.  enjoy!