When I Wasn't Looking

Liam teaches himself new things daily.  Part of the goal of home schooling is to help him take his mad skills and learn to apply them to challenges set by other people.  The DIY.org stop motion camp gives him specific challenges to meet, and that takes him out of his usual comfort zone.  But he still manages to use the skills on his own.  I was looking for an older stop-motion video to add to his DIY.org page and found one he'd made totally on his own.  Yes, it's another countdown video, but the animation is really, really GOOD!

The graphite drawing class went well this week, so we'll continue to have an "away class" at Pastimes for a Lifetime studio.  And I chanced upon a Chinese tudor online who might make a nice addition to Liam's studies.  Sometimes other languages help us tune in more closely to our own.  And Chinese is a really cool language with an amazing writing system.

Liam built a short PowerPoint presentation each day, on the science topic we studied.  We start with a BrainPop movie (these are all from the "Diversity of Life" unit).  After the movie, we reviewed some of the fun questions and went online to find out more about a detail that interested him.

Here are the slides from this week's lessons (the font choices did not translate into the still slides - they're actually much cooler looking than this):

I like how he played with the word "amphibians"

Even though the language is a little advanced, it gives us a chance to look up words and do more research on concepts he doesn't get.  By reviewing the presentations every day, he has more chances to think about it.

We Google images to go with each presentation. Part of the fun is seeing which image he'll use to illustrate the slides

For reptiles, we focused on a reptile he'd actually met.  Mr. Scales was an albino ball python that came to the annual  Spring Faire at Liam's old school.  Kids could pet the snakes and they were up for adoption.  Liam really likes snakes.  I like them too, but I don't think I have the stomach to feed them cute, furry mice.  There was a lot of information on pet websites about ball pythons.

We made more presentations, but my favorite is the one on Mammals.  Mammals are differentiated by how they give birth - placenta, birth/developed in pouch or eggs.  Since Liam found my pregnancy and sonogram pictures so fascinating, this was a really fun presentation to put together.  I didn't have any songram pics of him to add, but we definitely spent some time talking about them.  And now - Mammals:

The "Birds" presentation was fun, just to see the juxtaposition of the world's smallest and largest birds:

Once again, it was fun to tie in the field trip to the text.  My apologies for the completely random way the formatting gets scrambled when turning the PPT into pics.  I'm sure Liam will solve this problem on his own very soon - when I'm not looking.