Neat Newts, Nice Weather, and Nifty Normality's?

   We have chosen Matilda as our first young adult book as its a story book and not a picture book. We will read it at a leisurely pace. After watching the film version of Matilda (found on Netflix) and hopefully soon we will watch the Musical version we were curious about the newt and we explored this creature. Not too many resources are available, thankfully we found an adorable sheet from: teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Crested-Newt-Information-Text-Reading-Passage-For-Animal-Research-Amphibians-8035420   We drew a newt, Barron created his to real-life size, each inspired from the resource we purchased, however we cannot post a screenshot of the purchased product online due to respecting the creators rules. We learnt that they are endangered animals and are found in Northern European countries. This map is excellent: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/which-countries-are-considered-to-be-part-of-northern-europe.html showing us Northern European Countries in Blue: 

We also learnt that climate change is impacting the survival of such creatures: https://reports.peakdistrict.gov.uk/ccva/docs/methodology.html 

  

We missed a chance to celebrate Roald Dahl Day on September 13. Kindly visit: https://www.roalddahl.com/teach/ where you can download some free lessons to accompany his books. We have one for Matilda:

   *We finished reqding Matilda in Mid-December and found a neat page at the conclusion of the book regarding this day: 

Returning to the topic of climate effects we thought we would mention the activity that we have recently introduced this year to our homeschooling routine, checking the weather. We have a neat app on our tablet that Barron has learnt to use to find out current and future weather conditions. There is also a great resource from: weather.gc.ca/forecast/canada/index_e.html?id=on   It mentions the great weather features in various areas. We purchased three excellent resources from The Dollartree in the summer of 2019. We created a mini Weather Station area where we use our clock to record what time we observe the sky. We use our Weather Guide to the Sky Wheel to help us identify the types of clouds we observe. The Weather Tracker comes in English, French, and Spanish and we use that to record the temperature (we use C however F is available) and indicate the wind speed and the wind direction. We also use the cloud type feature to list the cloud type again as a way to remember the cloud variants that we find in our sky that day.

  Thinking of how we view the sky from time to time from our Weather Station it is such a neat thought that years ago DiVinci also peered up into his sky and pondered upon what he viewed. The connection to Barron's favourite artist/ inventor Leonardo DiVinci and the sky is rather fascinating.  It has been noted that, "As a painter, Leonardo naturally took a keen interest in the properties of light and illumination. However, unlike other artists, he turned his scientific mind to the task of dissecting these properties to better understand their inner workings. This signature method of inquiry led him to correctly postulate why the sky is blue, far ahead of such physicists as John Tyndall or Lord Rayleigh of the 19th century. In one of his numerous notebooks, da Vinci wrote that people perceive the sky to be blue due to the sun's illumination of minute particles of moisture in the atmosphere." Source: https://www.leonardodavinci.net/facts.jsp

 Barron truly enjoys him as a painter, especially his Mona Lisa painting. We discovered some wonderful free resources available at: jumpstart.com/common/color-mona-lisa and https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/LEONARDO-DA-VINCI-Inventor-Coloring-Page-Craft-or-Poster-STEM-Technology-2494212   We also found this nifty idea where you use a standard picture of Mona Lisa and then convert it into something that is not her normal apperance, thank you creative genius at https://techiehomeschoolmom.com/mona-lisa-art-lesson/ These are our artistic adventures on accomplishing that: 

We created a Bat Girl Mona Lisa complete with the Bat Girl signal and a Chef Mona Lisa (well Chef Boyardee) and Bear decided to do a real life parody of himself by transforming into Salvador Dali. May you find artistic expressions in your day.