Camian Academy

Jamie got his hair cut.

Before:

After:

Today Ani and Cameron (mostly Cameron) worked on building a hut to sit in to go birdwatching. They only used things from around our tiny backyard. (The horse included… for some reason it has been outside for a couple weeks now.)

Today Fritz turned 2/3 of a year old. He weighs 18 pounds 13 ounces and is 28 1/4″ long now.

Starting Monday we’re going to be using Five in a Row. We’ll do four or five weeks of that. We’re planning to keep that around for low-key “break time” school. In April we will move on to Sonlight. We’re planning on using Apologia for science (astronomy). We’ll continue with Math-U-See, Handwriting Without Tears, and Latin for Children.

About two weeks ago Ani took the California Achievement Test. I knew she had gotten all the answers correct so I was curious to see what her results would be. The results arrived today. (Side Note: If you need to give your kid the CAT, I highly recommend Seton Testing Services in Front Royal VA.)

Vocabulary: 91 percentile
Comprehension: 96 percentile
Language Expression: 90 percentile
Math Computation: 95 percentile
Concept & Application: 98 percentile

Reading Total: 95 percentile
Mathematics Total: 98 percentile

We finished our dinosaur unit today. The kids had lots of fun with it, but we are all ready to move on. The remainder of what we did is:

• Finished reading Jurassic Park
• Read The Lost World
• Read Magic School Bus Chapter Book #9, Dinosaur Detectives
• Discussed map skills and followed coordinates to map out a path
• Discussed how body temperature varies throughout the day and took our temperatures each hour for 6 hours and then graphed the results
• Played Dino-Mite card game (many times!)
• Tried to predict where a drop of water dripped on the back of the hand would go
• Discussed largeness of prehistoric animals and insects
• Discussed differences between herbivore, carnivore, and omnivore teeth and determined humans are omnivores
• Built four wooden dinosaur skeletons (brachiosaurus, T. Rex, stegosaurus, and triceratops)
• Identified model dinosaurs using Dinosaur Dictionary
• Used the projector to enlarge and trace dinosaur models
• Assembled Dinosaur Museum
• Cameron copied an entry in the Dinosaur Dictionary (this was totally Cameron’s idea and not assigned)
• Ani used information from Dinosaur Detectives to write a short report on T. Rex (this was totally Ani’s idea and not assigned)
• Ani used information in the Dinosaur Dictionary to write a short report on Maiasaura (also Ani’s idea and not assigned)
• Assembled dinosaur notebooks from all the papers they have worked on through the dinosaur unit

We are planning to begin reading the kids’ Dinotopia series tomorrow. The kids liked the Dinotopia TV mini-series (they saw that a few years ago) so I think they’ll enjoy the books as well.

After practicing writing his name over and over as I mentioned yesterday, Cameron now has how to write his name down. Everything he has made or drawn today has his name written on it!