This year, we are excited to start our homeschool in a new geographic location! We moved (hence the falling off of our Preparing Units a little early last year.... ) a few hours north to Maryland from Virginia in the early summer and are excited about all the new places we can explore! (Mt. Vernon, D.C. Museums & government buildings, and local history are all on our lists!)
We have a 9th grader in Rev to Rev, two 6th graders and a 4th grader in Creation to Christ.
Our first week of homeschooling for our 2016-2017 school year is complete! These are some of the books that crossed my desk this week. - I am in love with the Illustrated Family Bible! - It certainly felt great to get back into a schedule and a routine for the kids... Even if it was at a slower pace than I'd like.
I will note that we made a few changes to our math from Christian Light to Teaching Textbooks for our 6th graders. This was a last minute decision that I think I am already excited about!
I really enjoyed CLE (and my 4th grader will continue with it) but, we needed a break from the workbooks for the boys and they have been wanting to try an online math course. So far, Teaching Textbooks has been a hit. The lecture teaches the kids the concept and then they complete the questions. The immediate response if a problem was answered right or wrong seems to be an extra benefit to the kids that I didn't realize made a difference. I guess its a sense of satisfaction.
NOTE: We did have to bump them up to TeachingTextbooks Math 7 as the CLE was about a grade ahead. *Fingers crossed this is a turning point for a year of success for both 6th graders.
In our history, we started off our week by revisiting the story of Creation through the time of Noah. They were amazed to learn that Adam lived to see 8 generations of his descendants. The kids documented the first 10 generations from Adam to Noah.
Each flap lifts to show a name, how long they lived and a special fact about that person. The kids drew a scene of the Garden of Eden on the outside of their flap book and listed ordinal numbers to 10. We then glued them into our history notebook.
In geography, we learned that the stories in the Bible are connected to the earths geography and that the Garden of Eden may have been located in modern day Turkey. We studied the locations of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
We studied Robert Frost's poem, "A Late Walk" and made a water color painting illustrating the words. First, we painted the background yellow and faded it down throughout the paper.
Next, we painted our brown tree and used a toothpick to make lines for the bark. They added a single leaf softly rattling down from the tree. The kids copied one stanza on a notecard to glue onto their page.
These turned out great. I love how each of their art is unique. We talked about utilizing the space on the full paper and I certainly love the concept of blending poetry appreciation with their creative art.
We completed our history page for unit one. The kids did a great job following directions and were all able to fit the text into the boxes, which was a concern for me. The narration in Box 4 was realitvely painless. 😜
Pencils did not write well on the glossy HOD pages and so we are trying the erasable gel pens. This is the first time the kids have written with ink and it's going much better than expected.
Our new, BIG homeschool dry erase board is wonderful! I'll have to give credit to my hubby for putting this together from a big piece of shower board from Lowes! I love being able to write the Teacher, Semi Independent, and Independent boxes on the board for the kids to check off as they complete throughout our day. The kids have done great getting their independent work completed on their own! This is the first year that I have fully implemented any independent work - over due for my 6th graders. So far so good!
I laminated the bible verse cards and we have them displayed at the top of the dry erase board so the kids can easily reference them when we sing! They are working on Philippians 2 for their memory work. The song this week was catchy and the kids did great singing along to help memorize!
Science ended our week with a fun experiment about camouflage and natural selection. Any thing with M&M's is a hit and they were so excited all week to do this experiment!!
The kids learned that camouflage helps animals survive in their environment. They each were given 60 seconds to find as many as they could. It was harder for the kids to find the same color M&M's as the construction paper in our habitat. We made a graph to show our results on our lab sheet.
The Science note booking worksheets found in the Creation to Christ Facebook files are amazing! Thank you so much for all the individuals that put forth so much effort and SHARE! Much appreciated from all the teachers out there like me!
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Our older son (14) is in Heart of Dakota's Rev to Rev and I've decided not to blog his weeks at this time. It's going great so far and he is enjoying the independence and hands on projects. We are grateful that Heart of Dakota continues to bless our family year after year!
We hope our blog is helpful and is an inspiration to anyone that may be considering homeschooling. We wish each of you a successful year along your homeschooling journey.
See you next week with Unit 2!
Be blessed!
