Satori Smiles

Seeing that Amazon had quite a few Basher Books on sale for just $3.60 earlier this month, I decided it was time to start our Basher Book collection. I was happy with the books we got and took a bunch of pictures with the intention to blog about them. I dropped the ball on that though, and now only a couple are on sale. I apologize I didn’t have a more timely post, but it looks like Planet Earth and Physics are still on sale. Otherwise, you can get the new and updated versions at a decent price. Some qualify for Amazon’s 4-for-3 promotion.

What are Basher Books? These are colorful, quirky science (and other topics) books designed starting for ages 8-10, but like almost everything we use, we take off a few years. The cute illustrations speak to children in an memorable and accessible manner. They are small books, measuring 7″ x 7″  with 128 pages. The author and illustrator is Simon Basher.

So far we have these books plus Planet Earth which just arrived today.

Here’s a peek inside The Periodic Table.

A closeup of one of the “characters”…

It seems like most of the books (but not all) include a poster. They are attached in the back of the book and are perforated so come out easily, measuring about 9″x13″.  The coolest one is from their Periodic Table book.

Basher website offers a download page which includes a large version of the above poster, other posters, desktop wallpaper and more. Here’s their Periodic Table PDF poster.

Here’s a page out of Astronomy – Out of This World.  The lower right corner shows one of the books with the black remainder mark since I got it at the clearance price.

The included poster…

A page out of Rocks and Minerals – A Gem of a Book!

More posters in action.

Here is more information about each book on the Basher Laboratories website. It doesn’t seem to be a complete list though. We’ll be building up our little collection, although some of the books will not be relevant for a year or two for us.

We look forward to getting the new Grammar – Write Here, Write Now book next which just came out last week.

A few minutes ago Satori asked me for “that book that you read stories and ask me questions”. I handed her the big Writing with Ease workbook.

I then hear her downstairs reading to her American Girl dolls. She also has her Peter Rabbit book out, and she’s asking them the related WWE questions!

I am in the loft looking down on her class. Sooo cute!

After we learned our US States early this spring, I figured I would eventually have Satori track license plates on the road. Before I could bring that idea up to her, she already was noticing that vehicles all had license plates for different states. I planned to get a workbook or something for our next trip, but didn’t have it ready in time, so today I figured I could probably print it out from home.

I googled “state license plate checklist” but didn’t find anything perfect. This checklist was the closest. I found the license plates extremely hard to read, so I added the state names to it. I fired up the laminator and now we have a glossy License Plate Checklist!

I quickly realized that neither permanent nor of course dry-erase marker would stay on the laminated page forever, so I will be bringing along these tiny stickers instead. Satori can use them to mark off when she’s seen a particular plate. I think up to 3 can fit, and if she wants, she can even color code them and stick new colors on top to signify even more.

Here’s the checklist I whipped up today, in case anyone else wanted to use it.

License-Plate-Checklist

I may post a few updates while we’re on vacation, but if not… we’ll see you after Memorial Day! Have a great holiday.

Thanks to everyone from this blog and on WTM who suggested great places to see while we’re in Oregon.

For Mother’s Day last weekend we spent a glorious day at the Denver Zoo. The weather was perfect and we spent it with family. Both my mother (Satori’s Grammy) and my Aunt Elizabeth were in town, so our whole family and our out-of-town visitors as well as cousins Peyton, Brady, and Beckett enjoyed the day.

Props go out to Aunt Elizabeth who gave the girls these cute, colorful umbrellas! Handy against the searing Colorado sun.

The twins check out the lioness. The lion with his big mane was in front of the other window.

Off in the distance we saw African Wild Dogs running around.

David maneuvered the twin’s stroller. Here he is posing with my Mom.

Satori and Peyton were inseparable as usual.

I didn’t take many actual zoo animal photos, I did not bring my heavy telephoto lens. I couldn’t resist this baby orangutan and his mother.

It was so cute to see the mom pick up the baby by his arm and just fling him on top of her head!

Shortly after entering the zoo, we also witnessed a mother Bighorn Sheep preparing to give birth to her baby, and by the time we were leaving the zoo, she had just given birth.

It is extremely challenging to get all the children to look at the camera.

We only saw half the zoo before it was time to go, but here”s more of our favorites animals.

This photo will always make me laugh. I thought it would be super precious to have the two girls feed fluffy pink cotton candy to each other. Satori immediately offered her tuft to her cousin, but little Peyton loves her food and proceeded to cram her whole handful into her mouth quickly! I gave up on that cute idea and just took this photo.

Thanks Mom and Aunt Elizabeth for spending the day with our family! We’re sorry it snowed a foot in the mountains and we were unable to have you up to our house, but that will happen soon.

I’ve found myself purchasing tons of eBooks and PDFs versions for our curriculum. I print them out and place them in a Staples Better Binder. That habit was getting too expensive, especially at $9 per binder. I also found myself loving spiral bound books, as they lie flat. So I was open to some new ideas…

Yesterday I took the splurge and purchased a ProClick P50 Binding System. I found the best deal at Office Depot, where I got it in-store for just $50. I got some sturdy back covers, glossy front covers, and some combs, and the total came to under $100. You can use your own cardstock for covers though, so the fancy covers aren’t necessary.

Right away I bound my History Odyssey Ancients book that I hadn’t been using as it was just loose papers that I had filed away a year ago. Now, I have a beautiful, glossy history book!

One thing I am losing over putting them in binders is the ability to place a label on the spine. I have colored tape that I rolled around a top coil, so we’ll see how that works in identifying them if they’re all on the shelf.

Here’s a look at how thick it is, with the clear front cover and black, sturdy backing.

A look at the device itself. It looks very simple, and it is – yet it’s very sturdy and weighted, so you stick the papers in, and then run the top thing over the papers to punch the holes. This inexpensive version will punch 6 papers at a time, but I normally like thicker or glossy papers, so I only punch 3-4 pages at a time to make it easier. It’s super easy to run the top over the papers if you give it a manageable job.

I purchased two boxes of spines, for 45-page and 85-page capacity. If you do use covers, that lowers the capacity. There are only three sizes of spines that I’m aware of, and the 110-page capacity spines I could only find in boxes of 100 for $50. I decided to wait on those.

I love these special ProClick spines because you can open them back up, take out, reinsert papers, and then zip them back up! They feel nice and sturdy, and they look great. Books now lie flat.

I asked for some ideas over at the WTM last night… Thanks ladies! I finally found a use for the beautiful scrapbook papers I had been collecting just because they’re so pretty, even though I’m not a scrapbooker! The spines are easily cut. So I made a cute mini-notebook on Africa for Satori to use.

I made this template super quickly last night, but hey she totally loves her new notebook! She even slept with it last night. We’ll be putting all 53 African countries in here (more on that later).

Another great idea is to put the spines on top, which makes it easier for a child to write in a workbook.

Since the spines hold up to 85 pages (110 if I purchase the bigger size), not all complete programs will fit. Some people split their programs up into different volumes. Also, an affordable option is to purchase 3:1 spiral coils (Thanks Paula for this idea), which are both more cost effective and hold more paper. The con is that they won’t click back open. This is a good idea for larger teacher’s manuals.

Daddy gets treated to a school day almost every Saturday, with Miss Satori as his teacher!

He gets to learn subjects like Spanish, Latin, Spelling, Science, History, and this week they even learned Gym/PE. Since he doesn’t know Spanish, but has been in Mexico/Latin America all spring, his Spanish lessons have come in quite handy! Here he’s learning parts of the face in Spanish, as well as his numbers and colors.

She gets the idea for the schedule on the whiteboard from her Monday Colorado OPTIONS class for homeschoolers. They put her in the Kindergarten class where the students learn the letter A and how to write it and what sound it makes. She pokes fun in private about that, but we do not attend for the academic aspects. I make sure she is respectful to the teacher and other students, even though she is working several grade levels above them. Other than the babyish lessons, both Satori and I love having her attend the all-day class. They do learn things we haven’t focused on at home that require more people, like music and PE.

This weekend she put Daddy to shame as she showed him how she learned almost all the African countries (and some of the capitals) this week. She laughed when he didn’t know where Senegal was. (She seemed to have forgotten she didn’t even know what Senegal was a few days ago.) This week I showed her Shepperd Software Geography website on Africa and we did their tutorial on North Africa, West Africa, and Island countries. I made it a bookmark on her computer.

The next morning she woke up and brought up the website, and proceeded to teach herself the rest of Africa. She woke me up when the computer was calling out the country names – Angola! Uganda! Kenya! Eritrea! I then quizzed her on an iPad app, and she knew most of the countries! I had been trying to teach myself every night for a week, and she gets it in one morning. It’s amazing how quickly young kids can memorize. Daddy was amazed at how quickly she learned Africa too.

More about this later, and I’ll post the resources we’ll be using to go more in-depth on learning our world countries.

Last month I was specifically looking for state geography iPad app games, and I found Stack the States, recently released for iPad. This game rocks! It is only $0.99 and so very worth it. It’s cute, colorful, fun and extremely educational.

It quizzes you on capitals, states, nicknames, abbreviations, bordering states, and more. You select the state answer and then you position your state to fall and stack up below the b&w line.

The states will tumble, bounce, and finally settle, hopefully on the platform. If you’re not careful, a state will fall right off. What’s cool is that you can plan how your state will fall so it will best stick. Even better, is you see the relative sizes of the states. I happen to have a lot of big states here, but the sizes are very apparent when you have some of the smaller northeastern states paired up with a state like Alaska and Texas. It’s so funny as the states look at each other with their huge eyes.

Once your stack of states goes over the line, you win that session. You then earn a new state to add to your map.

After you earn a certain amount of states, you are able to play more games. Here’s the bonus Puzzler Game. The states bounce off each other if you hit them, so you have to keep that in mind and carefully position each state in place.

A week later, Stack the Countries was released on 2/24/2011!  This is $1.99, but of course, you’re learning the entire world, so very worth it. A game on the world world can be daunting, especially for a 6 year old, so you can start out on “Learn” mode for a continent.

Clicking on a country brings up the basics, you’ll see the country shape, name, flag, and capital.

Click View Flash Card to learn even more.

When you’re ready to play, you can control which types of questions are presented…

Now you’re set to play!

Just like in Stack the States, you earn countries to unlock more bonus games. It reinforces the position of a country, as well as making the game totally addicting.

Check out this YouTube to experience Stack the Countries:

These two iPad apps are our absolute favorites and by far the best value. Our entire family plays these games, and we also literally have a “blast” with Rocket Math, another great educational app by the same person who made Stack the States. I’ll blog about that in another post.