On Friday I set up another phonics game for Gareth to try, using cards I made from this site. It was a perfect fit for the his reading level right now, and he seemed to enjoy himself. We played it as a simple matching game, like concentration / memory, though the cards could be used [...]
Over the summer the boys spent a fair amount of time googling for interesting websites about dinosaurs (and staying out of Mom’s hair while she conferred with realtors, contractors, roofers, painters, stagers, and the like—read the update if you missed it), and one of their favourites was of a new TV show called Dino Dan. [...]
This afternoon I played some phonics games with the boys. I got the idea (and gameboard) for the first game here. We used a dice with 1-2-3-1-2-3 rather than the cards, and we adapted the rules slightly to even things up: Gareth needed only to say the sound the letter(s) made, whereas Daegan and I [...]
A few weekends ago Jim pulled out his old organic chemistry molecule set from university. He and Gareth had a great time exploring atoms and molecules: They started by making a molecule Gareth knew—water, or H2O: They also made something else we need to survive—oxygen, or O2: The night previous we had lit our first [...]
After spending a couple hours in the hot sunshine at the bug class, we slowly headed back to the car. En route, I saw some interesting birds, like this spotted sandpiper: When we got back to the hotel, we went for a swim. This was our first time staying at this hotel in Edmonton (the [...]
On our weekend trip to Edmonton for Daegan’s birthday, we took in an Insect class for families at Devonian Gardens, about 15 minutes SW of the city. Daegan and Jim have done classes in this series before, but this was Gareth’s first time—and mine—and was he ever excited! We all had a good time, but [...]
Shortly after returning from our roughly 1400km (900 miles) dinosaur tour of SE Alberta and SW Saskatchewan—a tour I am glad we made when we did, as the region has received torrential rains and has flooded badly, washing out sections of the Trans-Canada highway: The town of Maple Creek, SK, which we went through, had [...]
We spent quite a bit of time inside the Interpretive Centre at Dinosaur Provincial Park, and we were all quite surprised to find that there was far more to it than dinosaurs. (Many more dinosaurs are on display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, about an hour and a half away, and I think [...]
I’m going to break my post about Dinosaur Provincial Park into two parts: the first on the park and badlands (“the outside”) and the tomorrow’s post on the excellent Interpretative centre (“the inside”). We were absolutely blown away by the park, and how many things there are to do. Next trip we will take the [...]
After the T rex Discovery Centre, we made the scenic drive through the Cypress Hills to Medicine Hat, AB,where we stayed overnight. En route we saw more pronghorn antelopes: and stopped at the Alberta Tourist Info Centre at Walsh, just inside the AB / SK border. We’d stopped there on the way out for a [...]