LEGO ABCs: M is for Mindstorms

**Please read the important note at the end about next week!!**

Welcome to our weekly blogging through the alphabet series. This week is the letter M! It has been so fun and challenging to do this every week. Yesterday (and the day before) I was building and playing with LEGOs a lot in preparation for this week's and next week's post (because we'll be camping), and it was super fun. My kids are having a good time playing too. If you haven't done it yet, play LEGOs with your kids. It's actually pretty fun, and they'll love you forever!

This week we have a few things to share for the letter M, but we'll focus on our Mindstorms sets. And, co-host Chareen will be sharing about Math Resources for Home Education.

Before we get started let's have a glimpse of last week's letter L posts:

• Homeschooling Tips from A to Z: Letter L from Homeschooling Highway
• L is for Lee (American Civil War) from A Mom's Quest to Teach
• Check out all the links from last week at the Letter L link-up

Okay time for the letter M!

Let me just start out by saying that LEGO Mindstorms sets are not cheap. We have been blessed to receive these sets as part of our school funding, and one of the sets will actually have to go back to the school when/if we leave (unless we decide to buy it from them). So, with that said, if you ever get the chance to have your kiddos be a part of a LEGO robotics team it is a tremendous opportunity. Alex will be joining a LEGO league next school year, and that is one of the reasons we decided to get this set for him with his school funds.

We'll start with Alex's Mindstorm's set. He just got this at the end of this school year. He is very excited to learn about robotics, and have his own set to work with. 

Unboxing the set was interesting and exciting.

He doesn't know what a lot of these pieces do, but he was ready to try.

First, everything had to be sorted.

He immediately wanted to start building because he saw his older brother build a lot of things over the past few years, so he found some instructions for a sorting machine and started building. He quickly realized though, that beyond building he didn't know how to get it to operate.

So, after he had fun building that we went back to the beginning. There are beginning lessons from LEGO to get to know the Mindstorms system and how to program it. He built the basic driving base, and learned some basic coding and what the different sensors are.

I also went through these lessons myself so I can better understand and help him. I rebuilt the whole driving base too.

A few videos to show the action...

I was able to get it moving and turning in circles!

Aric's Mindstorms:

My older son Aric, got his Mindstorms set back in 2017. He became a Mindstorms pro mostly by himself. He built and programmed all kinds of things including this snake:

A robot...

I wish I could remember exactly what this robot did...

A guitar... (this one was pretty cool, even had guitar sounds)

He used to build all the time...

He even built a rubik's cube solver. It's one of my most viewed videos on Instagram. You can see that video here on Instagram. Or below! I figured out how to embed it, yay.

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A post shared by Desiree Winz (@desireewinz)

M is for Minifigures:

I can't let this letter M post go by without mentioning one of my favorite parts of LEGOs. Minifigures! or Minifigs if you like the sound of that better.

I recently saw a friend post about how her kids like to take pictures of their minifigs in action out in nature. I loved that idea so I tried to do something similar. Mine aren't as creative, but I had fun trying.

First, we have a ladybug minifig walking in one of our flower pots with some painted rocks.

 

Then we have the stand-up paddler out by the pool.

This guy, well he's just lost in a LEGO world...

M is for Marble Maze:

It seems lately I can never just pick one build for the week. I have so many fun ideas I want to share! This one is all over Pinterest, a LEGO Marble Maze. Basically, it's a large lego baseplate (any color) with bricks on it that make a pathway. We had fun making the pathway kinda easy at first and then moving the bricks around to make it trickier. 

The goal: get the marble from the beginning to the heart-shaped piece. Want more of a challenge? Add another marble and get BOTH marbles to the heart-shaped piece. This took me less than 20 minutes to make and one kiddo has had a blast with it. Another kiddo gave up. I've done it a few times and I really enjoyed it too. You want to know what surprised me about this? The marbles don't move smoothly because of the circles so that alone adds a challenge.

Here is a video of it in action: (done by Alex)

That's finally all of our LEGO fun this week! Thank you for reading and joining us!

Now it's your turn to share! Please join co-host Chareen and me as we blog through the alphabet and link-up below:

• Desiree @ Our Homeschool Notebook: All of my current ABC posts

• Chareen @ Every Bed of Roses: M is for Math Resources for Home Education

Edited: We will be taking a break next week for 4th of July (US holiday). We will be taking

the week off for family time and I realized that there may be several other families that might

need the week off too. Besides, it's a good time to take a break halfway through the alphabet!

I will also leave this linkup open an extra week!

**Rules for linking up:

1. Your post must be family-friendly. We have the right to remove any posts that are inappropriate. 
2. When linking up you agree to give us permission to share your post or a photo in any future blog posts and social media shares. 
3. Please link back to the host or co-hosts blog, and use the image if you want. 
4. If you can, check out a few other posts in the link-up and leave some comment love. 
5. Please, make sure your posts relate to the alphabet or blogging through the alphabet in some way. Evergreen content (past posts that relate) is also welcome. 
6. The link-up will be available for one week for each letter. 
7. Last of all, have fun. If you can’t join for one week, don’t stress. Just join next time, and enjoy!

Baggin' the Dragon Maths (A REVIEW)

Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew

 

One thing I feel is an important part of learning math is practice. Along with our daily math lessons I always try to get some practice in. Any kind of practice, whether it's facts or a game or a worksheet. Usually, I try to make it fun too. So, when I get the opportunity to try out a fun new math game it's a no-brainer for me. This fits the bill for fun math practice for sure. 

What is it I'm talking about? It's Baggin' the Dragon Maths Online from EdAlive! This is a fun online "board game" that allows the child to answer some challenging math questions to earn points and hero cards. The program is adaptive to the child's level as they play, and the questions are challenging enough to get the child thinking. I even played it with my kiddo and he beat me a few times!

To play this game my son has to log in to the Baggin' the Dragon Maths app. Once he logs in he can choose to play with the computer or he can join a game that a friend has created, he just has to get the code. He and I played a game together and it was definitely much more fun with a friend than with the computer.

The board game (pictured below) looks like a big circle with arrows. 

Screenshot of the game screen.

The dice are rolled and the game piece is automatically moved unless there is a choice on which path to take. Once the game piece lands, a math problem is presented. The child can click a button if they feel the problem is too hard. It's that easy! The end of the game is determined by what is chosen for the game length at the beginning. We usually did 20 turns. That was equivalent to about 30 minutes of math time for my kiddo.

I liked this because it was a fun way to do math without feeling like work. I was quite surprised at how well done the math problems themselves are done. I felt like they really got us thinking and engaged in the problem. If you need something for your kiddos to play this summer to keep the math fresh in their minds, definitely check this out!

See what other review crew members had to say about this by clicking the banner below!

The Sun: Books and journal pages

Studying the solar system is a favorite topic of ours around our house and we've studied the sun a few times over the past few years. The most recent time was when my 4th grader was making his way through this Fun-Schooling Science Curriculum, All About Space from The Thinking Tree. 

It's only a small 2-page spread in the book, but to fill in all the information we find books and activities to read and do. I wanted to just share some of those things we used here!

Books:

There are so many fun books about the sun. I got some picture books and of course, we also used some general solar system informational books.

First we have Sun! One in a Billion By Stacy Mcanulty. This picture book presents a lot of facts and information about the sun in a fun way. Not a lot of words on each page, and the pictures are colorful and fun. I think this one is great for younger kids (preschool age), but even my 4th grader enjoyed it.

Next, I have a Let's-read-and-find-out science book called The Sun Our Nearest Star by Franklyn M. Branley. Another picture book that gives a lot of facts in not a lot of words and nice pictures.

The last book I want to share is Sun up, Sun Down by Gail Gibbons. This one is loaded with so much information as you'd expect from a Gail Gibbons book.

We used our Apologia Exploring Creation with Astronomy Textbook and accompanying notebook a few years ago and this is one of the notebook pages. Making a sun collage. This could be a fun activity on construction paper too!

Sun Activities and experiments:

We've made sundials, pizza ovens, and sun prints. Any project that involves the use of the sun is so fun. It gets the kids outside (usually), and helps them to see how important the sun is to heat our world. We've never done it in our homeschool, but I've also loved activities involving shadows and chalk drawing.

This is a favorite activity of most young boys... We've grabbed some magnifying glasses and burned holes on dry leaves. It's such a great lesson to use to help teach about not looking at the sun. We found these magnifying sheets at our local dollar store and we found those to work so well. Almost better than the little glasses.

Make sure to do it in a well-cleared area because the leaves will get hot real fast, like a sidewalk. Find some leaves and use the magnifier to focus the sun onto the leaf.

The boys really had to work to figure out how to focus the sunshine on the leaf just right.

We tried a few different kinds of magnifying lenses. 

Here is a fun YouTube video that we find really interesting: All About the Sun for Kids: Astronomy and Space for Children from Free School...

I love being outside in the sunshine. I always look forward to the summer and the sunshine because where we live it's pretty rainy/cloudy most of the other seasons. In fact, we have a pretty big heat wave coming through our state this weekend so the sun is definitely still doing its job really well. I hope you can enjoy the sun wherever you are!

This post is a part of

The Homeschool Review Crew's weekly social media challenge

LEGO ABCs: L is for Legoland

Here we are at the letter L for blogging through the alphabet. For this week I will be sharing a trip we took to Legoland a few years ago, and my co-host Chareen will be sharing Life Skills in Your Homeschool.

Before we get started let's have a glimpse of last week's letter K posts:

• Choosing Rabbits to Keep from A Net in Time
• Letter K Favorite Books from At Home: Where Life Happens
• Letter K Homeschooling Tips from Homeschooling Highway
• Last week's Letter K link-up

Okay, onto the letter of the week! 

Back in 2018 we found a great deal on year passes to Legoland California Resort. We don't live close, but we decided it would be worth it to buy the passes and make the journey down there a few times over the course of the year. We had fun making the trip down twice that year and going for several days while there. So many great memories! This post has been a walk down memory lane, and now I want to go back!

Our family's 6 passes, one for each person. These got us into all of the attractions, including the water park.

Legoland does have some great resort hotels to stay in, but we didn't stay in those. They were a bit too spendy for our family of 6, so we stayed at local hotel only about 5 minutes away. It was nice and they had a super yummy breakfast every morning. The boys loved this so much.

Having the hotel breakfast each morning before we headed to Legoland for the day was so much fun for these boys!

After we parked it wasn't a far walk to the front gate. It looks so fun seeing the Legoland signs.

Our family walking up to the entrance.

Arriving at Legoland for the first time was pretty neat. We didn't know quite what to expect, but the entrance was really cool.

Our family picture at the entrance (I think this was actually at the end of one of the days since we forgot to take it in the morning)

One day the cousins came to join us (they live down in the area). They all had a good time exploring together.

Our kids and their 3 cousins.

One of the first things we saw as we walked in was the Ninjago world. Actually, first there was a HUGE Lego store. Then we saw all kinds of fun giant LEGO Ninjago characters, and rode the Ninjago ride.

So many cool statues made completely out of LEGO!

One of the coolest parts about Legoland is the minifig trading. If you bring a minifig to trade, you can trade with any of the Legoland staff that have minifigs they are willing to trade back with you. The kids were hooked on this and this almost became the focus of our days. They can trade as much as they want, and they found some pretty cool minifigs! It was such a fun part of our visit.

Minifig trading was so fun. This was a trade that the boys scored, but I'm sure this one got traded eventually when they found a better one they wanted.

Another cool part was finding Lego minifig characters to take pictures with. We ran into Hot Dog man, Unikitty, Emmett, and one of the Ninjago characters.

Alex with Hot Dog man

April and Alex with Unikitty.

There were so many giant statues made completely out of LEGO pieces. These were incredible and fun to look at. Some were seen on rides, and some were seen just walking through the park.

This particular LEGO statue was in the waterpark area.

The rides are for the most part made for kids. Not a lot of huge roller coasters. There are a few of those, and of course they rode those over and over again, but the big kids even had fun on some of the less thrilling rides like this fire station race for example. These two cousins worked as a team to put the fire out first.

The water squirts out at the fire target in the windows as the fire/police truck moves forward. It's a fun race.

Miniland USA

There are several cities recreated with LEGO's that are there to look at. It's really cool to see the details.

I don't remember what each one is, but I know there is San Francisco, New York, and New Orleans. These buildings are huge!

With the boys next to the buildings you can see how tall they are.

There are some landmarks made of LEGO...

They had a whole Star Wars miniland when we were there, but I believe they were getting ready to remove all of the Star Wars statues and stuff after our visit. 

The Taj Mahal made of LEGO was cool. It was jokingly referred to as the Taj Masmall by our tour guide on the "coast cruise" ride that we were on.

There is a whole section at Legoland dedicated to the Friends (girly) sets. One boy hated walking through that section. We challenged them to sit with the Friends statues. They were not the happiest about that, but took the challenge.

This knight statue was situated outside the LEGO castle where the Dragon roller coaster was. It was fun to see these fun things all over the park.

One last thing...

They have LEGO sets of Legoland California. We have a set of one of the rides that I talked about in this post. It's the Fire Academy water squirting ride. It's a fun little set. One of the boys built this one.

That's our trip to Legoland in a nutshell! I have way more pictures of course, but it would be an incredibly long post to add all of them. I hope you enjoyed seeing our visits to Legoland. If you get a chance to visit, I highly recommend it.

Now it's your turn to share! Please join co-host Chareen and me as we blog through the alphabet and link-up below:

• Desiree @ Our Homeschool Notebook: All of my current ABC posts

• Chareen @ Every Bed of Roses: L is for Life Skills in Your Homeschool

**Rules for linking up:

1. Your post must be family-friendly. We have the right to remove any posts that are inappropriate. 
2. When linking up you agree to give us permission to share your post or a photo in any future blog posts and social media shares. 
3. Please link back to the host or co-hosts blog, and use the image if you want. 
4. If you can, check out a few other posts in the link-up and leave some comment love. 
5. Please, make sure your posts relate to the alphabet or blogging through the alphabet in some way. Evergreen content (past posts that relate) is also welcome. 
6. The link-up will be available for one week for each letter. 
7. Last of all, have fun. If you can’t join for one week, don’t stress. Just join next time, and enjoy!