Reviews and things

Obviously I've let this portion of the blog go to seed. I originally started Live and Learn for the sole purpose of blogging our homeschooling journey. Silly me, I thought that would remain a separate subject from the life and activities I posted in the journal. Now that the living and learning is being posted in the journal, this space has become neglected.

There's a new plan, though. This section of the blog will now be dedicated to reviews and lists of materials we've used. When we come across especially good books, or games, or other tools of learning I will review them here. Although we try to unschool, we end up doing a lot of unit study style research, so I'll post the tools, resources, and projects from each of our explorations here, as well, something I've already done a few times. I actually have a handful of posts I started over the past month or so that I never got around to finishing and posting, like a review of Math-U-See and resource lists for some of our prehistory explorations, so I'll finish those and back post them.

I don't know if this information will be of help to anyone, but I do know that similar lists on other sites have been helpful to me, and I like record keeping anyhow. Crazy, I know.

Learning tools: Games

The games we play:

The Amazing Mammoth Hunt (Mindware, review)
Camp (Education Outdoors, review)
Carcassonne and expansions (Rio Grande Games, review)
Chess (Science Wiz, Once Upon a Pawn a time)
Dominoes
The Magic Labyrinth (Playroom Entertainment)
Mancala (example set)
Math War (School Zone, but this could be played with any deck of cards)
Monopoly (Hasbro, post)
Pattern Play (Mindware)
Professor Noggin's Ancient Civilizations Card Game (Prof. Noggin)
Professor Noggin's Prehistoric Mammals Card Game (Prof. Noggin)
Shut the Box (we have the Melissa and Doug version)
Set (SET Enterprises)
Tangrams (our set is a book by Chris Crawford)
Totally Tut (Learning Resources)
Upwords (Hasbro)
Qwirkle (Mindware, review)

I've never been a huge fan of games, which is unfortunate because I know they are such a great learning tool, and afun  way to spend extra time. It's not that I have anything against games themselves (most games, that is), it's just that I personally do not enjoy playing them. There are a a few I've always loved—Trivial Pursuit, Boggle, and Scrabble, to be exact—but the rest I find tedious, especially games of chance. 

Over the past couple of years, though, I've learned to enjoy a game or two a day. We usually play during lunch, or late, as the day and our energy is waning. Currently we play very few of our games competitively. Dominoes, Set, Totally Tut, Upwords, and the Professor Noggin games we play cooperatively. The Amazing Mammoth Hunt we play as individuals, but we don't tally at the end. Shut the Box is made for individual play, though we help each other along. Pattern Play and Tangrams are individual games that we often do together. Only with Camp, Carcassone, Chess, The Magic Labyrinth, and Monopoly do we actually tally scores, but even with these we help each other out. The goal to me with these games is to have a good time while learning a bit in the process, be it about math, geography, good manners, or how to think in and around the rules.

I've reviewed a couple of our games on the site, so I linked those comments in the list above. (As a side note, I have recieved no compensation for reviews of these products, nor even been asked to write about them.)

The Amazing Mammoth Hunt

Qwirkle

Carcassonne

Monopoly

Camp

Mancala

Chess
Stop by OLM (to whom we owe big thanks for many of our own game ideas) to see some great lists of games linked up.

Weekly book shelf 2/24

This week's general reading:

This is an adorable, unfortunately out of print, book about a little Ice Age boy who is disliked by the rest of his clan and left behind when they go in search of a new place to live. While learning to survive on his own he rescues a baby mammoth from an avalanche and the two become friends. When Mik finally catches up to his clan, he and his new friend show them how great underdogs can be. (History)

Beautiful rhyming text about an elder in a clan leaving to go in search of other humans while a boy in the clan offers to do his share of the work while he is away. The story is touching and can be read lightly or deeply. The illustrations by Himler are bright and beautiful, but if you can find a copy with illusrations by Symeon Shimin, those are more hauntingly appropriate than Himler's. (History)

This week's chapter book:

This a reread for Calvin. It was actually one of the first three or so chapter books he ever read, but this week it was rediscovered. He loves the idea of the little Water Horse, of course. I can't compare it to the movie because I've never seen it, but it's a sweet story with enjoyable writing and vocabulary.

Dinosaurs and the mesozoic era (resource list)

Dinosaurs and the mesozoic era, October-November 2011

Topics of focus:
Evolution of dinosaurs
Plate tectonics
Environmental fluctuation
Extinction of dinosaurs and onset of mammalian age
Archaeology

Books (fiction):
Dinosaurs Before Dark (Magic Tree House), by Mary Pope Osborne
Time Flies, by Eric Rohmann
The Magic School Bus in the Time of Dinosaurs, by Joanna Cole

Books (non-fiction):
We continued to use many of the books from the Evolution and the beginning of time resource list
Dinosaur (DK Eyewitness), by David Lambert (review)
Dinosaurs: A Non-fiction Companion...(Magic Tree House), by Mary Pope Osborne (review)
Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs
Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Dinosaurs (pop-up), by Robert Sabuda
Evolution: The Story of Life, by Douglas Palmer
From Lava to Life: The Universe Tells our Earth Story, Book 2, by Jennifer Morgan (review)
Great Prehistoric Search, by Jane Bingham (review)
Voyages Through Time: The Beginning, by Peter Ackroyd (review)

Videos:
Allosaurus: A Walking with Dinosaurs Special (BBC)
Dinsaurs Unearthed (National Geographic)
Walking With Dinosaurs (BBC)

Websites/computer resources:
Back in Time (iPad app)
March of the Dinosaurs (iPad app)
Britannica Kids: Dinosaurs (iPad app)
Plate tectonic timeline (HSU Natural History Museum website)

Other fun things:
Dinosaur puzzle (Melissa and Doug)
The Days of the Dinosaur Coloring Book (Dover, by Matthew Kalmenoff)
Usorne Dinosaur Stencil Book, by Alice Pearcey
How to Draw Dinosaurs, by Frank C. Smith
Magic School Bus: Back in Time With the Dinosaurs (The Young Scientist Club)

Activity list:
Reading, reading, reading
Drawing, drawing, drawing, and coloring, too
Researching a few specific creatures and adding them to our felt collection
Continuing the timeline (and playing with it)
Making up our own dinosaurs and giving them Latin names.
Visiting our local Natural History Museum (University of Michigan)

Weekly book shelf 1/20

We've spent a lot of time lately talking first about human evolution, then about human migration. This was my approach to starting history—to start from the true beginning in order to put human civilizations into the real context of relationship. I think that's important groundwork to lay before we, eventually, get into the remeeting of these civilizations and the destructiveness of their failure to realize their relationship to one another.

With that in mind, this is a book that I picked up at our library sale. It goes well with the videos we've been watching lately that lay out some of the more recent theories about human migration into the Americas, which date their arrival here much earlier than previously thought. This is a National Geographic book and is not strictly speaking a children's book, but it is well illustrated and lined with photographs and good descriptions. Calvin loves it.

This is a fun book that is less about the Mayas and their hieroglyphs than it is about the Europeans and their struggle to discipher them. It has a few listed activities that walk kids through making some Mayan heiroglyphs as well.

Every two page spread in this book shows the same spot on the same river over thousands of years. It has been a good companion to our study of human migration and the development of civilaztions. Great illustrations with fun details that keep each page interesting.