Sunset Learning Academy

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

First Birthday

Big Blue eyes!

Happy Birthday!

Johnny turned one on the 16th. We had a party with friends and loved ones. We will be having another party up north with family in a few weeks. Crazy, I will be going to my eldest sons wedding one day and celebrating my youngest sons first birthday the very next day! Life is wonderful!

Sing it Johnny!

More cake!

What is it?

Thursday, May 6, 2010

NC Aquarium

A day at the Aquarium with Havelock Homegrown Kids. We had a wonderful, exciting, educational time. Lots of neat things to see, tons to learn, and fun with new friends!

We got to hold a starfish, pet a stingray, watch a hermit crab find a new home. They do a fish feeding daily at about 10:30, we watched divers jump into the tank with SHARKS! There was a jelly fish, and fishes galore! A huge exhibit about turtles, otters were at play. They sure put a show on for us! Johnny liked watching the BIG fish, Tyra enjoyed the stingrays and talking to the lady that worked there. We found her very knowledgeable. Jacob found the Sand Tiger Sharks interesting. We all enjoyed the blizzards afterwards!

Thank you to NC Aquarium and all the supporters for such a fun filled, educational day! We look forward to our return!

Special Links of interest

Kids Glogs

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Earth Day 2010 Online Posters

We have done our share of wasted resources by our weekly poster boards and lap booking. For Earth day 2010 we have found a site to help eliminate this waste. Glogging, online posters!

My children and I are still in the "learning" phase of how this all works, so please be merciful with us!

The assignment for Tyra and Jacob was to make a poster board about recycling. Johnny and I worked on one for Earth Day so that I could learn how this all works. I have found this to be a very fun way to research and learn! However, there is a way to "upgrade" the account and add class projects. I would LOVE to do this, but at $99 a year I guess I can do without it.

My children enjoyed it. Tyra likes learning new technology on the computer and my older children enjoyed this much better than a regular poster board. I still am a bit old fashion and enjoy cutting, pasting, and painting on poster board. I liked the idea of producing less waste! I also have a hard time disposing of our poster boards and this adds clutter to our home, so all around it has been a nice experience. We are going to continue to glog, but I think we will still do an old fashion hands on project from time to time also!

Please check out our glogs and let us know what you think!

Recycling by Jacob

Recycle, Reduce, Reuse by Tyra

Earth Day 2010 by Johnny (and mommy)
On the Earth Day glog there is a link and be sure to listen to the music as well!

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Pollen

POLLEN, POLLEN, POLLEN EVERYWHERE!

A true sign of spring! I awake and BOOM, pollen covers everything both inside and out. Some say allergy season is here, take an antihistamine. WAIT! Look at the trees, is that a bud blooming? The flowers are all opening, what an amazing site! So as I look upon the beauty that God has allowed me to witness I ask myself, "Spring comes without a coat of pollen in Indiana. Why is that so?"

I had my children do some research. They spent all day working on finding the facts about pollen and the way it is carried. They used the web, books, call a friend / family, and even talked to neighbors. After their hard work on the project, and on getting along.

Here is their slide show.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Product Review Expedition Australia

Our adventure in learning about the "Land Down Under" was fun and exciting! The Download N Go™- Expedition Australia Ebook is divided in to 5 days. This is for K-4th, yet I used it for my 9 year old, as well as my 2 high schoolers. It is written by Amanda Bennett and The Old schoolhouse. There are several book suggestions for each day. I was able to find many of these in my local library. The Ebook is set up to make a lap book through the week. We made a lap book but then upon our final day we made a few poster boards to tie it all together. We unfortunately had a death in the family so rather than the 5 days to complete this we had to take a break in the middle. This is why we did the poster boards, it was a way to "refresh" our memory of all that we learned.

On our first day we went to a web site that was included in the ebook that the youngest child loved! It was a nice interactive way of learning. This was a great start! Some of the video clips included in the lessons were a bit dull and so we expanded the lesson with some of our own resources. Each day we learned about a different animal, geography, a new word to add to our vocabulary, music, crafts, history, science and many interesting things about a culture other than our own. Every day there is several links for sites that all have the same info, yet some of the sites were easier to understand than others. I liked having multiple resources to use.

To adapt this to fit my older children we expanded our research and the older children had to write a report. The younger child had to give an oral report upon completion of the lessons. We had a great time learning as a family. They challenged dad everyday with a new fact.

We have many people we know that have been to Australia so upon the completion we played with boomerangs, and didgeridoos. We made our own boomerangs as well. The children were able to view pictures that other had brought home from their trips to the "Down Under."

I would highly recommend this Ebook if you enjoy lap booking or unit studies. With having multiple ages and levels in my home I found this to be a fantastic resource for family learning. Not only did the children and me learn a lot, we also had a great time as a family. At a low price of $7.95 you can not go wrong.