Owl Website

I have blogged before about our adventures on KIDWING - an online owl pellet disection site HERE - For 2nd grade each of my kids does a science emphasis on owls along with reading There's an Owl in the Shower by Jean Craighead George - one of my all time favorite first chapter books for kids! I love Jean Craighead George anyway. Tons of her books are on my kid's reading lists.

Today a friend sent us an INCREDIBLE LINK HERE - an online webcam which is aimed at a mother barn owl sitting on 4 eggs (she ate a cracked one this morning and a whole rabbit too). They should start hatching any time! It is kind of addictive. I suspect they might be like chickens and you don't start counting the days to hatching until the last egg is laid - so that would make for hatching next week. We have the sound down low and the window closed because no one was getting any schoolwork done. Just like with the hatching of our chicken eggs -nobody wants to miss the big moment!

I loved a recent blog post I read HERE about looking at your homeschool program as a whole instead of day or week by week. It was very reassuring to me. Especially with science and history we tend to get in several intensive periods of study over the course of the year. Daniel this year got into a bookmaking kick and wanted to write and copy all the time, since then I haven't really made him do much handwriting. He probably wrote more in that 2 -3 week period than I would've asked him to all year. I know when I first started homeschooling I felt that everyday had to include every element on my list. Now, I see the value of letting a child thoroughly get immersed in a subject matter without squelching their interest so we can go on with a language worksheet or something.

This was really brought home to me when someone asked me to look back at the elementary lessons (particularly science and history) that I still remember from my childhood. It is those projects where I did something out of the ordinary, built a model or really got involved - not the stuff I learned from a book.

By the way - immersion is cool; but in our school the rule is - do your math and spelling first. Reading isn't actually a subject for my kids -it is the fun thing I make them stop doing so they can get their other work done.