Term 2 - Organizing Each Week

Page 1 Term 2 Planning


I like to be able to see the big picture easily when I am organizing, but also boil it down to each week. I like to use a table format to organize my weeks. I do an overall plan, and this is our working document. I leave projects open ended, I don't plan them ahead of time. They are our daughter's responsibility - she decides what projects she will do based on a book or a subject. 
I usually highlight and check off what is done. I then know if we are covering what we set out to do. I have used this format for years now. I take this information and make a nice document to hand into our school, but the weekly plan is the document that we work from. 


I tried just having one document, but I felt like it was too open ended in large chunks rather than weekly bites. We may read ahead or complete more than a week at any given time - then I can look for some extra days off here and there. It also helps me to see where we are not moving forward, needing more time, or even falling behind. I love the overall view! 

Page 2 Term 2 Planning

At the end of a term, there is a great sense of accomplishment for all of us when all the boxes are highlighted and all the work completed.
Blessings!

Ancient Egypt Study


We have had a great study of Ancient Egypt. We studied Egypt about 4 years ago, using Story of the World. This has been a more in-depth study with a variety of readings. Here is what we did:
We started by reading God King by Joanne Williamson. This was a great way of studying the political structure of Egypt at the time. We enjoyed it and it was great to go back to the bible after and read the passages from the time of King Hezekiah.
We are partially through Mara, Daughter of the Nile, and this book will just have to get finished over the next month, even though we are finished up Egypt. It is a story with lots of twists and turns. 


Here are some of our other reads...
This is an excellent book as an option instead of a textbook. It is engaging, including stories amongst the facts of ancient  civilizations. It also weaves in our biblical history and puts it into the time frame of the ancients. This volume covers from the Home of Abraham to the Pax Romana. There are a total of four volumes.

This book helped in looking at the daily life of the Egyptians, the importance of the Nile, and many other aspects of Egypt that we studied. It was a great addition. 

Our daughter used Ancient Egypt History Pockets to do her notebook for the unit. She read from this and did the activities. 



We watched The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston. What an epic that was!! It was a great way to visualize the Israelites in Egypt and the oppression they experienced.

We have had one Co-op so far with two more focussed on Egypt. I will keep you posted on these!!
Our daughter has watched several videos on Egypt from Discovery Education. She especially enjoyed the ones on  Egyptian Archeology. 

We are off to Greece in a few weeks. We will see you there!! Blessings!!

The Art Fraud Detective Books - Why we have enjoyed these books so much!


Art Fraud Detective ,The Great Art Scandal and Art Auction Mystery by Anna Nilson are great books for not only learning more about art but learning many math skills as well. 
We have enjoyed these books so many times. They come out again after a year or two when everyone has forgotten “who did it” and again we enjoy the mysteries. 
The skills used in these books are keen observation, deduction, statistics, and data management. 


In each book there are different mysteries to be solved. For instance, in the book Art Fraud Detective there are several thieves who are part of certain gangs. You can look at the pieces of art, see the forgeries and then tell which gang they are a part of. You then deduce from your information, who was part of the forgeries and who was not. 


Finding the differences from the real painting and the forgery is a lot of fun. It is a search that can be sometimes obvious and sometimes very hidden! It means that you need to look at the paintings closely and that is wonderful for art study. 
These books are real treasures for those wanting to study art in a fun and engaging way! Blessings!


Audiobooks and how we enjoy them!


Over the past 5 years we have enjoyed so many different audio books and series, that I am just going to highlight a few.
We have used audiobooks to ensure that the type of literature our daughter is exposed to, may not be at her reading level, but will challenge her in understanding and thought.
We want her thinking to be at her age level and her reading to challenge her above it.

Audiobooks also allow her independence. She doesn’t have to wait for me to read a chapter, she can “read” the book on her own. Some of her “reading” is assigned reading but much of it is at her leading. 


She loves the fact that she can listen and create at the same time. Her creating seems to increase her comprehension rather than lower it!! I digress.... on to the books....
First, look at your library’s audiobook section. We have an old cassette/cd player so that we have been able to take advantage of many of our library’s audiobooks. We now use the Overdrive system at our local library to take out more books and transfer them to our daughter’s iPod. 
Next, we have enjoyed http://www.booksshouldbefree.com/ for many selections. This is a great site to find books because of the visual aspect of the site. Many of the books on this site are from www.librivox.org and are read by volunteers. One of those volunteers has a site of her own. She is an excellent reader! http://kayray.org/kayray-reads/  or http://kayray.org/my-recordings/
Our daughter also has enjoyed many of the titles from Jim Weiss. 
http://www.greathall.com/storytelling.html . The Jonathan Park series has been a great addition for Creation Science http://www.jonathanpark.com/. We have just begun looking at the resources available at http://christianaudio.com/. We have used this site for some great history titles http://kids.learnoutloud.com/. 
If you are looking for specific recommendations just leave me a comment and I can try my best to help, Blessings!!

Our First Co-op of the year - Ancient Egypt

We had our first Ancient History Co-op for the year. We are planning to have our Co-op once per month for 9 months. 3 months studying Ancient Egypt, 3 months studying Greece and three months studying Rome. 


This month we started out by talking about the Nile. We used 2 mapping activities from Enchanted Learning. 
and
While the children were colouring, I was quizzing them on the cities along the Nile in Ancient Egypt versus now. I had a large map of Ancient Egypt on the wall. 

I then read to the children from Learning Through History Magazine Ancient Egypt about farming and the Nile.

We then watched a video on the People of the Nile from Discovery Education. We watched a 15 minute segment on people in all sections of the Nile. It showed the Ancient tools that the people of Egypt used to irrigate the land. 

When this was done we took a break and then dove into making our Nile Rivers. The children made the Nile out of Fimo clay. The fimo was very challenging to turn into a Nile. It was cold outside so the clay didn’t heat up enough to work well. Perseverance was needed but eventually all the children made their Nile rivers. They filled their containers with soil and put “the Nile” on top. They then went to the grass seed and sprinkled it on. When they got home they would flood their Nile Rivers and “decorate them”. 


One of the children built a Shaduf and several children said they would add items when they got home. 

By this time, we started eating lunch and getting ready for our afternoon Ancient Art session. Blessings!

Videos we keep on watching!!


I have never regretted purchasing these sets of videos. They have been watched many times. I am surprised that we can’t quote them all word for word!
First is the Popular Mechanics for Kids. They are still available and well worth the purchase. I am not sure how many times these have been watched. They are great science videos (albeit a little graphic in places) that help children to see interesting aspects of applicable science.


Another set is Be the Creature. These are by the Kratt Brothers and they really explore what it would be like to be a certain animal. Though some are a little intense for young children we have enjoyed these many times.


Another set is by Devine Entertainment. We have lent these out to many of our homeschooling friends. There are three sets of videos - each video has a young person who is friends with an Artist, Inventor or Composer. 
The first is The Artists Specials:

 The second is The Inventors Specials:

                The third set is The Composers Specials:

All these videos may be available through your local library. Blessings!

Websites Our Daughter Keeps Going Back to!!

I wanted to share a few websites that our “Little One” has kept going back to over the years. 

The first is Spatulatta. This is a great cooking show with two young girls and their mom. Sometimes they have guests or guest chefs in the episodes. They are great videos for inspiring cooking in kids. 


Another website that our daughter has frequented is Steve Spangler. Steve Spangler is part scientist, part magician and his videos are very entertaining. These have been watched over and over with laughter and interest. We have purchased a few of his science kits and not been disappointed!



Another science website “Little One” has enjoyed is Dragonfly TV. This has many science experiments and activities to watch. 


Family Fun is a great website to find crafts, cooking and activities. They also have great ideas for parties and seasonal celebrations. 


Blessings!

Educational Scrapbooking


When our daughter was younger she did many years of Educational Scrapbooking. I will post several entries on this topic. For this post, we were using Sonlight, and these entries are from our working with Sonlight World History. It was a rich experience and she used many resources for her scrapbooking.


Pictures from the Internet
Pictures from old Encyclopedias
Pictures from History books sanctioned to be “cut up” books - usually with lots of pictures that I got from a thrift store
Stickers (both ones from the store and ones we made with our sticker maker using clip art)
Variety of paper - I would pick up ones I thought might work at Costco or when Michaels had a sale
Computer Scrapbooking program - we used Creating Keepsakes


“Little One” was only in Grade 2 so she dictated many of the writing portions and I typed them. She loves interesting fonts so after she would highlight the writing and change the fonts to what she felt looked appropriate for the entry.


We obtained many of these fonts from:
Every page she did each day had a different look to it, depending on how she was feeling. Using 12x12 paper allowed her to include lots of pictures. I also encouraged her to include in her scrapbook pictures of hands on projects that she did. This one was a Viking village that she made. 

It is very neat and tidy to have these all lined up on our school shelf in albums, depending on the year and the program we used. We can pull them out anytime and reminise about the good old days and the fun we had!!



Blessings!

Sandwich Book Reports



Over the years I have had our daughter do these book reports using a "sandwich" and each piece representing a different element of the story. This one is based on the Noel Steatfield book "White Boots".

Here is the link so that you can enjoy some Book Report Sandwiches. 

Blessings!

















Courage and Compassion Ten Canadians Who Made a Difference



While studying Human Rights I read aloud this book to our daughter. It has 10 stories of Canadians who made a difference in varying area of human rights or social justice. 
Each week we looked at a couple of the biographies. 
This was an excellent book to remember that an individual can make a difference. Each of us can affect change. 
The story "Little One" enjoyed the most was the last one in the book about a young girl who sees the problem of homelessness in her city and finds ways to help. She begins her own foundation - The Ladybug Foundation. This was inspiring. 
It was so easy to tie these stories back into a study of human rights. I had our daughter point out the rights that were being violated, but that was only the beginning of our discussions. There was so much to talk about for each of these Canadians.
I hope that you enjoy this book as much as we did!! Blessings!

Yarr me Matey's or Studying Treasure Island


Last year we had a great study using Treasure Island. I read this aloud to our daughter and explained some of the vocabulary along the way. We had some great discussions about the rich characters that Stevenson wove into this novel. We did another author study. 



I suggested this book as I thought it was a way to compare stories to movies (and the fact that our daughter thought swashbuckling was very cool - doesn't every 12 year old girl?). There are so many different movie versions of Treasure Island. We also did a more traditional novel study using a Core Knowledge unit as a base. We used many of the ideas in this study to make comparisons, round out the learning.


Here is the link to the materials we used.
http://www.coreknowledge.org/mimik/mimik_uploads/lesson_plans/265/Treasure%20Island.pdf


We also used these lap book pieces to add to our notebook.
http://www.homeschoolshare.com/pirates.php


We watched two very different versions of Treasure Island while we were studying the book. The first version was the Disney Movie from so long ago.
I had our daughter compare Muppet Treasure Island with the other book Treasure Island. The questions I asked were:  What was similar about the book and the movie?  What things were different than the book? Did you enjoy this movie and why?

I wanted her also to be able to give her opinion on a piece of media. In this case it was the Disney Treasure Island. I asked... Who was her favourite character in the movie? Was the set realistic? What were the themes of the movie? Was the movie exciting? What was the climax of the plot? Why did Jim Hawkins shove off the boat in the end? How many stars would you give this movie? Did you like this movie better than Muppet Treasure Island?
Finally she did some art based on the lesson in the Core Knowledge Study. A parrot mosaic.

 This was a great study on so many levels - comparisons, media, opinions, art, writing, learning history of another time, learning about an author and his writing and the list goes on. I hope you have a great time on the high seas!! Yarr me Matey!! Blessings!