Little Learning: Exploring Snowflake Bentley

When I was younger, I wanted to be an interior designer. I memorized the prices of furniture off the Ikea catalogues. I drew up all sorts of plans for my bedroom. I saved up, and bought issues of "Home and Decor" to pour over their glossy spreads. I borrowed books from the library, and read about how to hang your picture frames and how to DIY your own furniture. I even took part in Ikea's design your bedroom contest, and was over the moon on being able to choose furniture to place in the store's display.

But when it came to choosing universities and courses after my A levels, I followed my parents' advice. Which was to choose something more mainstream. And perhaps after I had earned my university degree, I could dabble in design if I was still interested. At least this way, I had a degree to fall back on. In the end, I became a teacher, and I got my design fix by making pretty powerpoints and designing the covers of the students' learning materials. In retrospect, I didn't regret going into teaching, and probably didn't have the flair to hold my own in the interior design industry. However, I do still hold great admiration for those who find and pursue their passions, and are not afraid to take the path less trodden.

Which brings me to this book on Wilson Bentley. In a farming community, this man chose to be different, and dedicated his life to celebrating and capturing beauty around him:

"The average dairy farmer gets up at dawn because he has to go to work in the cow yard. I get up at dawn, too. But it is because I want to find some leaf, hung with dew; or a spider web which the dew has made into the most delicate rope of pearls... I take my camera with me, get down on my knees in the wet grass, and photograph these exquisite bits of nature. Because I do this I can show these lovely things to people who never would have seen them without my help. They will get their daily quart of milk, all right. Other farmers will attend to that. But I think I am giving them something which is just as important." - W.A. Bentley. 

Junior J and I enjoyed reading this book on the life of Bentley, and how he managed to figure out, through an arduous process of trial and error, the way to capture photographs of snowflakes. As a parent, it was also heartwarming to see how Bentley's parents dared to believe in his dream, investing their savings in the camera that helped him to photograph those delicate crystals. 

Aside from enjoying the book, I printed pictures (taken by Wilson Bentley) off the official Snowflake Bentley website, and got the boy to match them. We had an interesting time, looking at the details of these snowflakes, and I've uploaded our printable here. Also, I made him some count and clip cards for him to work on counting snowflakes from 11 to 25 (get our free printable here).

Ok, gotta run. Here's to a blessed week!

Monday Made: Polar Animals lapbook

Hello! We've recently started lapbooking during our homelearning sessions. We were looking at polar animals, so Junior J and I did a lapbook on the topic, our first lapbook ever!

:: The lapbook was made using some Book Depository packaging, and I covered the outside with white  paper. Junior J pasted some polar animals (from a printable here) on the cover, added some "icebergs" with paint, and also got to try his hand at typing the title in Powerpoint (he chose the font and got to print it out, and was pretty excited about it!). 

:: This is how the inside looks. I was too lazy to type out the titles, so I just wrote them out using a marker. There's a map to show him where the Arctic and Antarctic regions are, as well as 3 little flipbooks that show him examples of animals from both regions, as well as some that live in the sea. (Update: You can download the printables for the flipbook and map here! Do note that the Beluga whale goes under "Sea Animals", but I've squeezed it into another page to save on paper! )

:: I prepared the flipbooks, and stuck on the names of the animals inside the books. Then the boy got to match the pictures to their names (he cannot read yet, but was able to figure it out by sounding out the first letter for each animal name), and paste them down. 

:: We also watched a short video on the adaptations of penguins and polar bears (you can view it here), and I printed and laminated a couple of pictures of animals and their adaptations (from this site, I used the snowshoe hare chart as a substitute for the arctic hare):

:: And at the back of the lapbook, we pasted a chart of various types of penguins. We used bits of washi tape of varying colours and patterns to identify each type...

... then measured off their heights on the wall with another matching piece of washi tape. That got the boy rather excited and we also measured his height, as well as the height of some of his toy dinosaurs too! (We read "Measuring Penny" before we did this exercise, just to review the idea of measurements and the use of units.) Turns out, he's taller than the King penguin, but shorter than the Emperor penguin!

Not too sure if this is how you do lapbooking, but we did have fun! Will share more activities and books that we covered in future posts, so stay tuned...

Thinking Thursdays: A little dinosaur book (Free printables!)

In anticipation of our trip to Brussels, I prepared a little dinosaur book to keep him occupied, especially for the long car rides.  It consisted of an introduction, and a whole load of pages where he could practice writing the names of various dinosaurs, something that he always asks to do (this boy ONLY wants to write dino names, and is not willing to pick up his pen/crayon for any other topic), as well as a mini sorting activity for dinosaurs based on their diets:

Little Dino Book (Printable)

(You can click on the button above to download the printable, all pictures used were obtained from Wikipedia.)

I printed the pages out, cut them into half, folded them and glued the backs of the pages together to form a mini-book.  I also added other activities, such as pre-writing practice, pattern matching, and mazes from the following sets of printables:

:: Dinosaur Mazes from Busy Bee Kids Printables (you can actually tailor the level of difficulty!)

:: A whole load of activities from 3 Dinosaurs

If you want, you can get more printables from here:

:: Dinosaur Kindergarten Pack from Royal Baloo

:: Dinosaur Printables from Activity Village

To fit those other activities into the book, I chose to print two pages per side, cut them to size and glued those pages down too.  Then I just added some washi tape to reinforce the spine, cut out the other bits that the boy needed to paste, and brought along crayons and glue in a ziplock bag:

The boy was delighted with his book!  It kept him busy during the car ride, where he flipped through and identified the dinos:

It kept him occupied during a long wait for lunch:

And also gave us some moments of peace after dinner:

And to be fair, I prepared something for Baby J too, a modified version of the treasure hunt bottle, which was filled with colourful balls, rice, and various types of pasta for him to examine.  It has kept him pretty happy during car rides!

I brought along some pasta for Junior J to thread too.  These were coloured by him using markers previously.

I still don't understand the little boy's fascination for those huge beasts, but I'm glad the little book was well used during the trip!  And I have to admit I'm learning a lot about dinosaurs along the way, like how Iguanodons are supposed to walk on fours and are not bipedal as previously depicted... and do you know that those Velociraptors in "Jurassic Park" are actually Deinonychus?  The real Velociraptors were much smaller and had feathers!  Ah, home-learning means mummy learns too!