Scarab Beetles, Winchester House and Social Understanding

Today is youth group day where Boy tackles issues of social skills, self-esteem and anger management. We usually count this as his home school for the day. However, Boy watched The Mummy over the weekend and is now obsessed with Scarab Beetles. Offering a wealth of teachable moments, we have maximized the learning and today’s extraneous home school centered on those dung-eating beetles.

We live in a part of the world that offers a host of insect variety, including Scarab Beetles. We have the regular old Rhinoceros Beetles (Dung eaters) and the most brilliant Emerald beetles that feed on Palm blossoms (yes, Palm trees flower). As much as we tried to find some beetles to take a picture, do you think they’d make our task easy this morning. No! Boy has vowed to catch the first Emerald Green Scarab that he comes across and take a photo to show you.

Spelling: With an interest in all things Egyptian, we had to capture the Scarab spellings. This week we will focus on the following words: Scarab, beetle, dung, bowel, vowel, ancient, Egypt, sacred, symbols, baboon. We’ve started with getting three words correct. Boy’s opinion that is that once he has spelt a word correctly there is no need to do it again. This causes a few arguments as I insist that he do the same spelling list the following day: all ten words. This morning he asked me not to say the words like I am a school teacher. I state the word for him to write, put it in a contextual sentence for comprehension and then repeat the word again. Given his hatred of anything that looks like school, I am willing to revise my process. I will do anything to make learning more palatable and to increase Boy’s ability to spell and read. Tips from others will be most welcome. I’m sure I’m not alone in my battle to spell success rather than conflict.

Reading: Sacred Symbols Ancient Egypt. Boy was given this book a long time ago but has never shown more than a general interest in it. Today however, it became the focal point of our home education. The writing is small and contains some difficult words but Boy and I battled through by reading together about the topics that took his interest. Boy was most interested in the Scarab beetle jewel encrusted artifacts and the variety of Gods.

Research: Winchester House. Watching The Mummy appeased Boy’s current obsession with guns. We awoke this morning to Boy and his book on the history of military firearms. His talk was incessant and focused on types of guns and caliber. Eager to further link his obsession to learning, I told Boy the story of the Winchester mystery. We looked at the site and learnt about why the Winchester heiress, Sarah Winchester, surrounded herself with the sound of building and hammers for 38 years.

Interested and eager for more, we spent a good deal of time poring over the site and looking at the photographs of the Winchester mystery house. I had to read almost every page to Boy, including the flashlight tours every Friday the 13th and on Halloween. Boy is keen to visit Winchester House, which suits me because I didn’t have time to visit it when I was in San Francisco.

If any readers live in the area, we would love a booklet or postcard of Winchester house. How cool would it be if home schoolers from around the world could share friendship packs of free advertising material from their hometown: a sort of Flat Stanley project for home schoolers. Our diversity offers so much learning, sharing and social understanding that we could help each other with thematic units of geography and Studies of society and environment.

We live on the Great Barrier Reef: where the rainforest kisses the golden sands of tropical and almost isolated sprawling beaches. If Boy and I prepare a couple of packs about our hometown, would anyone be interested in a friendship swap? We’ll send you our material, you send us yours.

Photo of Golden Scarabaeus courtesy of Claudmey at stock.xchng

Great Barrier Reef: Ocean of Information

Boy’s learning on Marine life has finished with a trip to Green Island on the Great Barrier Reef (picture 1 ). In Boy’s words, “It was the best day of my life.”

Green Island is a small Coral Cay, 30 kilometers east of our hometown, Cairns. The island is tiny in size (12 hectares) but it sits like an emereld solitaire amid 710 hectares of magnificent coral reef and azure ocean.

Six thousand years ago, the island began to develop. Waves swept loose debris from the surrounding reefs into a large pile. As the pile grew and emerged from the water, bird droppings fertilized the debris mound with tropical seeds and vegetation that could survive the fierce elements of sun and salt water.

When the debris mound became solid ground, the young island became a sacred initiation place for the males of a local Aboriginal tribe: the Gungandji people. These people called the island “Wunyami”: place of haunted spirits.

In 1770, explorer, Captain James Cook, christened the island “Green Island.” Named after Mr. Charles Green (astronomer onboard the Endeavour) the island lives up to its name as a haven of green vegetation, green fish, green coral and green tourism.

Boy took to snorkeling on the reef immediately. He spent hours snorkeling to view fish, coral and sea grass (that’s him pictured). I was his snorkeling buddy and was amazed at his concentration, responsible actions and eagerness to see more.

The different varieties of sea cucumber and feather stars were amazing and Boy fully appreciated already having done some study on these amazing reef creatures. His knowledge was enhanced by enacting with these creatures; he touched them, swam around them, and excitedly told other snorkelers what he knew about them.

And…did we find Nemo? Yes we did. Nemo’s entire extended family paid us a visit. Their colourful aquatic dancing was unsurpassed by the animation of the film. In their natural environment, those little Clown fish were the highlight of my day.

Our visit to Green Island and the opportunity to snorkel on the Great Barrier Reef was a home school excursion that provided real time learning unable to compare to text learning. Our preparation with text learning made the experience more meaningful and hopefully has whet Boy’s appetite for ensuring a degree of research prior to any other excursions we undertake.

Read our other articles on Marine Learning (two of them were written by Boy):
2007 Year of the Home School Adventure
Starfish are Echinoderms
Turtle Facts.
Places to visit in Australia
Sun Safety

Starfish are Echinoderms

In response to his Grandmother's questions about starfish, Boy has prepared the following interesting facts about starfish:

* Sea Stars, Sea urchins, Sea Cucumbers and Crinoids (feathering looking creatures with many more than 5 arms) are called Echinoderms (scientific name).

* Sea stars (starfish) don’t send their food to their stomachs. They send their stomachs to their food. Their insides come out and cover over their food to digest it.

* Starfish come in all sorts of bright and pale colours: red, blue, yellow, orange and pink. Some starfish are just the one colour and some have spots and blobs of different colours.

* If a starfish gets a broken arm, its arm will grow back. The broken off piece of arm can also grow into a starfish.

* Starfish are known as the vacuum cleaners of the ocean. They live on the bottom of the ocean floor and vacuum it clean. Many starfish means a good clean carpet. I asked the man at the Aquarium if I could have two to keep in my bedroom.

* A Starfish mouth is on their under belly and they have an eye on the end of each of their fingers.

* Sea Cucumbers are cool. If you cut a Sea Cucumber in halves, you would see the shape of a star. Some people eat Sea Cucumbers. In Asia the people love them.

* Sea Cucumbers filter the food from the sand. They suck sand and food in one end and they squirt clean sand out the other.

Related article that started us on our current marine life learning:

2007 Year of the Home School Adventure

Some very interesting Boy information about Turtles: Turtle Facts.

Turtle Facts.

What I learnt about Turtles

during my recent visit to Reef HQ Aquarium.
By Boy, age 11

Turtles can grow to be very big and live for approximately 150 years.

There are seven different types of Turtle species. The Green Turtle is the largest turtle species and baby green Turtles are white. The Great Barrier Reef houses six species of Turtles and all of them are threatened.

Turtles do not lay eggs until they are between 30 and 50 years old and you do not know if a Turtle is male or female until it lays eggs.

Turtles lay their eggs on land and the hatched Turtles have to find their own way to the ocean (Pic 2 and 3 are of a suspected Turtle nest spot on the Strand at Townsville). Birds and other animals eat most of the hatched Turtles and only one out of a thousand survive.

Turtles breathe air and have to surface to take breaths. They can hold their breath for up to approximately 90 minutes if they are sleeping or resting.

Turtles are protected. There are many Turtles on the Great Barrier Reef but there used to be many more. Their numbers are getting smaller every year. Destroying the reef by throwing rubbish into the water or not looking after the environment is killing our Turtle population.

Because our environment is changing, we do not know what the future effect on Turtles is going to be. Their long life span has made it hard to do long studies on Turtles.

Note from Boy’s mother. The Reef HQ Aquarium web site has a range of teaching units that home schoolers can down load. Although the units are designed specifically for Reef HQ programs run at the Aquarium, the information, activity suggestions, curriculum links and outcomes are an invaluable help for those doing a unit on marine life study.

Related blog about our trip to the Aquarium: 2007 Year of the Home School Adventure.

2007 Year of the Home School Adventure

Our New Year, 2007, begins our serious adventure into Home School.

We have had a great holiday. While in Townsville, Boy’s highlights were visiting the Reef HQ Aquarium (first picture), going to an omnimax theatre (I got seriously motion sick!!) and a day trip to Charters Towers (last picture).

We stayed with friends (Boy camped in their back yard, his tent is pictured.) and playing with the family’s kids was such a bonus for Boy. Boy was well behaved, no aspergers melt downs and removed himself from situations when he was feeling overloaded.

While at the aquarium Boy requested that, we build excursions into home schooling. Although we had already intended to do this, Boy took some ownership of his educational needs and began a planning process of learning. He is keen to visit the Aquarium again and asked to visit the Great Barrier Reef to see the fish and sea creatures in their natural habitat fulfilling their environmental roles. Our first two excursions will be just that: we will visit Green Island in the next couple of weeks and will head back to Townsville before the end of January.

I sense a unit of marine study coming on. Boy’s interest will make my job as facilitating educator easy to capture his curiosity and fully capitalize upon it. I am grateful that we live in a part of the world where we can easily experience everything that the Great Barrier Reef has to offer. A unit of Marine learning will not be book based but practical, interactive and based in natural learning tenets within its own environment.

Boy’s learning happened vicariously at the Aquarium. We spent the entire day there and took every tour and lecture on offer. Boy asked the presenters many questions and was always first up with his hand to show off the knowledge he had. Other visitors commented on his knowledge and boosted Boy’s self-esteem like a shot of vitamins.

The next few home schooling aspergers blogs will be Boy based. I will ask him to word process some of his learning to help others learn. His blogs will become part of his home school diary, evaluation and will aid the English program I am designing.

Please, if you have time, would you ask boy a question about his trip to the Aquarium so that it assists in consolidating his comprehension and learning, aides his memory and recall and further builds his belief in himself and home schooling.

Happy New Year to you. I have an inkling that 2007 and our start of full time home schooling is going to make for a very good year for us.

Related article on Supporting 2007 Children to Have a Happy New Year.

Away to Townsville on the Great Barrier Reef.

We’re heading to Townsville for a few days and won’t be back until New Years Eve. I've got to tell you, I really like this house sitting stuff. Last time we came home our house sitter had the house sparkling. BONUS!

This time in Townsville we will be visiting the Aquarium, Magnetic Island and we pray for no Aspergers meltdowns. And no trip to Townsville is complete without hanging out at the FREE water park on the strand. The picture is of our last play there.

I’ll see you all when we get back.

Related article about our recent trip to Townsville.

Map of Qld Coast. We live in Cairns.