Pollution

Diego likes The Wild Kratt Brothers on PBS. They talk about animals and their habitats. He is interested in talking about endangered species. He likes to talk about why animals are endangered and the impact of human beings on animal populations. He brought up the coral reefs.

He wanted to talk more about pollution. We talked about the Gulf oil spill from five years ago.
"For 87 straight days, oil and methane gas spewed from an uncapped wellhead, 1 mile below the surface of the ocean."

He asks difficult questions mostly about why people do things that would hurt the planet, when we depend on the planet to live. He talks about what we need to live and how if we kill the trees, we won't be able to breathe. He understands so many things without being told. He wondered why he knows these things and other people do not. Because if they knew, they wouldn't do it.


We talked about how humans make messes on the Earth, but other animals don't do that. We looked up pictures of the Fukushima disaster. He wanted to know what Cesium looks like. He had such good questions and so much to say. I just let him ask me questions and we tried to find the answers to them. He asked when it would run if they could stop the leak. That is a hard question to find the answer to. We are still looking for the answer to that. We found that they have to keep adding water to keep the reactors cool and that water leaks out into the ocean at the rate of 300 tons every 8 days. That is hard number to comprehend. They say it is enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool.

They sent a robot down to look at the reactors a week ago. We saw the video from that.

He wants to write letters to our Representatives to get them to close the nuclear power plants down in Ohio. We found that there are two and that their licenses run out in 2017 and 2026. He thought first we could tell the workers to shut them down. But I explained how the workers don't get to decide that.

He loves to use google earth to spin the globe and zoom in to different places. He is especially interested in the Sonoran Desert. He zoomed in on Japan today and we had a discussion about languages.

We learned greetings in Greek and Spanish. Because one of his Great Grandparents is Greek and one is Spanish. Another is German so we will get to that someday.

Other helper sites for curriculum

This is an excellent resource for curriculum ideas. http://allinonehomeschool.com/grades/second-2/ And this Discover K12 http://discoveryk12.com/dk12/

Continents and Oceans

Working on identifying all the continents and oceans on the map of the world. Spent awhile planning which continent we would like to visit and how much it would cost us to get there. http://earthbrowser.com/ GAMES: http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/World_Continents.htm

Our Favorite Practice Websites

Our Favorite Practice Websites: http://www.spellingcity.com/ http://www.abcya.com/second_grade_computers.htm http://eduplace.com/kids/sv/applications/wordbuilder/index.html?grade=2&unit=1 http://www.arcademics.com/games/ http://www.toytheater.com/fruit-fall.php http://www.learntoreadfree.com/index.php

Solving Inequalities

We found some videos on inequalities that were very useful. Diego is a master at greater than, less than. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1Ojd1knhZI

Book List

Diego's book list:

A Bad, Bad Day By Kirsten Hall
Danny and the Dinosaur by Sid Hoff
Tog the Dog
The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn
Library Lion by Michelle Knudsen
Sebastian's Roller Skates by Joan De Deu Prats
Guji Guji by Chih-Yuan Chen
Chester's Way by Kevin Henkes
Me and My Cat by Satoshi Kitamura
Enemy Pie by Derek Munsen
A Bad Case of Stripes by David Shannon
No! David By David Shannon
When Pigasso Met Mootisse by Nina Laden
Private I, Guana by Nina Laden
No Mirrors in my Nana's House By Cynthia Saint James
Stellaluna by Janelle Cannon
Sophie's Masterpiece by Eileen Spinelli
Brave Irene by William Steig
Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch by Eileen Spinelli
To Be a Drum by Evelyn Coleman
The Tooth by Avi Slodovnick

Solar Flares

There was a solar flare yesterday which we were able to view video from NASA. This tied into our discoveries of atmospheric qualities which protect us from solar radiation. Using a book called Questions & Answers: Planet Earth: Learn About Our World.

Story Bots

We found a youtube channel that does short song lessons. We love it. It is called StoryBots.

Numbers

Diego keeps doing math in his head. Asking me if he is correct. 20+20+20=60 Today he wanted to know how many hours are in 100 days. So I showed him with a calculator how to do that figure. 24 x 100 = 2400 Then he wanted to know how many minutes are in a 1000 days. So I showed him that we first must know how many minutes are in one day so we can then multiply that number by 1000. How do we know how many minutes in one day? We have 24 hours in one day, but how many minutes are in one hour. He just wanted to know the answer though and was less interested in figuring out the problem once it got too long. 1,440,000 minutes. He thought that was exciting to see and then wanted to talk about how numbers go on forever. He wanted to go over what comes after a million and on and on. I had to look it up because after quadrillion, I couldn't remember. What comes after a quadrillion?

Animals

http://a-z-animals.com/animals/ We discussed vertebrates and invertebrates today. Diego was able to give examples of invertebrates. He first thought of bugs, then sea life. He named squid and jellyfish. He brought up the fact that ants have their bones on the outside like armor. We learned about exoskeletons.

He wanted to look at wasps and talk about how aggressive they are. He was shocked to learn that wasps only live 12-22 days or so. He said, they don't even get old. He talked about that for awhile. There are 75,000 species of wasps and 12,000 species of ants. He wanted to look at termites and we learned they can live two years. We looked at the skull of a Dunkleosteus

from the Devonian Period. The skull is two feet long from 360 million years ago. He wanted to know how they found it when it should be at the bottom of the ocean.

He noticed that it looks similar to a snapping turtle. We talked about how land and oceans change over time. We talked about how the creek in Mt. Airy forest is full of sea life fossils and how that area was obviously under water at some point.


We looked at The Scale of the Universe. It led to an interesting discussion about size and what we can see with our eyes. We were introduced to units of measure that I have never heard of called yoctometers and femtometers. Diego's questions are always very astute. He asked, "How do people know this? If we can't see it, how do they know?"

We saw a Japanese Spider Crab that is longer than a human being so we had to verify that ourselves. We spent some time watching videos about Japanese Spider crabs on youtube. The crabs are fierce looking but have gentle dispositions. Diego said that he would hold one if I helped him. They can live 100 years. That led to ghost crabs and other sea creatures like the giant Oarfish.