History and Art Today - Mosaics and Viking Carvings

So today we finished the mosaic that Levi drew last week... it took forever to do.. not really though took about 30 min of cutting and gluing the tiny itty bitty 1/2"x 1/2" pieces of paper on there. I now have a new-found desire to thank every teacher that ever did that kind of prep-work for any of my classes as a kid.

THANK YOU and I'm curious as to how they never lost their minds because I was ready to hand my 3yr old the scissors and tell him to cut the paper.. we'd get the same effect just none of the pieces would be uniform :-P hehe

ANY WAY - the finished product is quiet nice and my son did a pretty dang good job... I will, howsoever, NEVER be making a mosaic card to hand out ;-)

Now what we learned was that the Romans (Roman Empire Era) made mosaics on the floors of their buildings. They used bits of colored rocks to do them. The Byzantine Empire Romans though put their mosaics on walls, think the Hagia Sophia or the San Vitale, and they used colored glass so that when the sun filtered into the rooms these wonderful masterpieces lite up and dazzled the senses of any who gazed upon them.

The other thing we learned today was that the Vikings never wore horned helmets .... amazing... LOL.. I never knew this.. talk about stereotyping to the extreme... that's all you ever see in films and the operas or books n so forth.. They also were masters of woodworking.. not just the beautiful resilient ships they sailed on but in crafting some truly beautiful pieces of art. I can only imagine how many hours went into some of the pieces ( look up the Smithsonian for Viking exhibits and view the guided tour - http://www.mnh.si.edu/vikings/start.html )

So for the review of the Byzantine Empire Art he drew the sky scene and "we" proceeded to turn that drawing into a mosaic. For the Viking Art review he drew an overlapping design that was then turned into a snake with A LOT of persuasion by the mother figure because this simple thing turned into an hour long issue due to stubbornness ;) The son is very much like his momma.

History and Art

So at the begining of the school year we started out learning about Ancient Rome in History and now in the second semestor of Art we are studding artwork from that time period and making our own. I say we because even though Levi is the one in school I'm learning a bunch of stuff too. LOL
Anyway, last week he learned about Frescos and had to draw what he would want painted on his bedroom wall and this week he painted it.

My mom helped him with the water and the bridge so that they looked like that was what they were but on the whole he did it himself. This is supposed to be my mom's yard ;-) but she doesnt have a pond or a bridge there LOL I'm going to say this is my son's wishful thinking .

Free Reading :) Never was easier

So from the Learning Coaches group I learned recently that you could get free books for your Kindle.. well I didn't have a Kindle when they were talking about it.. I had Nook for PC from Barnes & Noble and wanted free reading material like they were talking about. So I looked at the different sites... not down-loadable books for them only for Kindle because most of the reading material came from Amazon.com as the Author's had agreed to only sell the books from Amazon.

So I looked to see if there was a way to get a free download of Kindle for my PC like I have for Nook :) C'est magnifique, there was :) Here is the site - http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000426311&tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=7442400567&ref=pd_sl_6g97entshf_b

Now.. if you have Nook (and if you don't the free download is at Barnes and Noble) they give a few freebies out... but if you go and download the Kindle for free .. WOWZA there are TONS and I do mean TONS of options... If you have the Kindle you can go to your local library (if they offer this) and check out the books that way... If you choose to go through Amazon they have lots n lots of books for free (I just downloaded like 19 LOL ) There is also this site called ereader.com and they tell you offers - http://ereadernewstoday.com/free-kindle-books-5-free-books-for-2-6-12-2/6710860/

and finally if your on FB here is a link to a group on there :) - https://www.facebook.com/pages/Free-Books-for-Kindle/136225579732999

So, since I'm me and love to READ READ READ .. I've decided this is a godsend LOL I can read as much as I want for free and don't have to worry about late fees and not being able to get to the library on time .. really awesome for the Fri-Sun downtime when it's closed :(

AWESOME FOR ME!!!!!! YAY

Today is a Perfect Monday

So today we start out with Math, that lovely little thing that my son loves but gets frustrated with when he gets something wrong and today was the Unit review and Unit Assessment. So we did the review.. then we did some games to help him study the stuff he was having problems with ( I LOVE that he can play games to learn things BTW because it makes him think and he has to get the right solution to do the game so it's just FABULOUS!!!) and then we started the Test...... Guess what happens?
The test is online... and just as we get the finish I get logged out.... I log in.... get sent back to the log in .. . I log in again... once again I get sent back to the log in page... I log in with his account.. same thing... I enter the web address to log in ... it can't be found.. Three times I try this and then give up and start doing what pages I can off line for school work and view the Learning Coaches group on FB seeing that the whole group is having the same issues and that it is a technical issue that the school is trying to resolve..

Can I just say I agree with the one LC that any day after the Superbowl should be a holiday??? I do believe that too much booze and too much food and too much celebrating or drowning of sorrows could have a very .... adverse effect on the job performance the next day ;-)

Today is off schedule but hey.. we're doing homeschooling and that means I can work around this and make him do "games" on another site for what he wasn't able to get to today and we can do trips to the library and I can make a game out of his Spelling words and let him play my Jeopardy game I created for his Viking History test review ( http://jeopardylabs.com/play/vikings-history ) :) Life is good and we can make this Monday a productive one.