Wants and Needs

Today we worked on our Moving Beyond the Page curriculum.  We are going ahead with the 6-8 level and the first concept is Community.  Unit one of this concept is Communities Around the World and today was Lesson Four: Wants and Needs. 

CKW's favourite part of the day was making a Wants and a Needs collage.  As soon as I mentioned that he would need to go to the arts & crafts centre to get the scissors and glue, he literally screamed out "COLLAGE!"  The poor boy is well aware that I am not very artsy and I think he was afraid that he was going to miss out on all the fun stuff. 

So, without further ado, here they are!

He needs healthy food (berries), water (he said preferably not bottled, but he couldn't find a picture of a tap), shelter (that's quite the house), clothing (looks suspiciously like paddock boots to me), medical care (rabies vaccine from one of my veterinary magazines!), and then...  then I saw the picture of the Kardashians!  WTH?!  We don't watch much television, and what we do watch certainly isn't that show!  However my fears were put to rest when he said he didn't know who those people were, but it was the only picture of a family he could find and he knows we all need luvins!

Apparently he wants a car, an ipad, junk food (pop and pizza) and a really good cross-country horse.  Unfortunately, the horse in the photo looks very much like the one who kicked me in the head, so he'll have to stick with his pony for now.

We spent a lot of time discussing domestic and international poverty and what we can do, both as individuals and as a country, to help those in need.  Now that's what I like about MBtP!  I might not have thought to bring these topics into the curriculum on my own ("Just the facts, ma'am"), but important issues like these are definately things that I want to take the time to discuss with CKW, as soon and as often as possible.   



Horsepower!

Physical Education

CKW has been involved in tonnes of physical activities this summer:  baseball, soccer, horseback riding, swimming, skating, hockey, and at camp this year he learned to canoe, kayak, sail, and rock climb.  This past month he has been at the pool at 0830 and swimming until 0930 from Monday to Friday.  It has paid off in spades! 

CKW successfully completed both Levels 5 and 6 in the Red Cross Swim Kids program and finished up his first ever timed distance swim of 75 metres in 2 minutes and 38 seconds.  Way To Go!

Do I Have To Write It ALL BY MYSELF?!

CKW is a very reluctant writer - his brain (and mouth!) goes far too fast for his handwriting.  He produces a tonne of ideas, but has trouble getting them onto the page in paragraph form, and sometimes even into sentences.

We had planned to do the full Moving Beyond The Page (MBtP) 7-9 level this year, but the writing was quickly proving to be more then he could handle.  He was really starting to resist even attempting the process of writing, so I backed off and decided to save the 7-9 level until next year and, instead, we are doing the two language arts heavy concepts of 6-8 level this year: Community and Culture.   However, I have informed him that am not scribing anything for him in MBtP!  We do plenty of outside science and social science studies, and if I find that the amount of writing expected in MBtP for a particular day is quite heavy, then I will scribe for him in other subjects, but I really want him to learn to write on his own.   We are also doing (see links at the side) MCP Phonics C, Spelling Workout B, Easy Grammar 2, BraveWriter - The Wand, and WriteStart Primary C this year, so we are going to keep plugging along, with the goal of having his writing abilities equal to the level required at the 7-9 level of MBtP in time for the 2012-2013 academic year.

So far, he's doing great! Yes, he sometimes does find the MBtP readings to be 'babyish' at this level, but we most often discuss the topics presented in great detail, I always have him choose the second option for activities when they are available, and I try, as often as possible, to add in 'extras' as I find them listed on the MBtP IdeaShare forum.  So far, so good...

Happily, his writing is already improving by leaps and bounds and he continues to read more difficult books on his own and in the more challenging literature unit studies I choose that we discuss verbally.  For these, I went through MBtP, as well as Michael Clay Thompson's literature program and left out any books that they included so we wouldn't end up repeating things later on.  (I hope to add bits and bobs of Michael Clay Thompson's language arts program to our curriculum in the not too distant future, but that put the kibosh to this fall's planned Wind In The Willows pond unit study!)    

Last year, it was recommended to me at school that I should not worry about his handwriting, as he could move onto a keyboard anytime.  Several teaching professionals felt that handwriting was no longer a necessary skill 'in this day and age'.  But I strongly disagree!   As a traumatic brain injury survivor, I have discussed this with rehabilitation ocupational therapists, psychologists and speech therapists, and they have all strongly supported the studies showing that the act of physically writing letters and words helps both children and adults to build and maintain cognitive function.  Benefits include, but are not limited to, reading, writing, spelling, focus, memory, and executive function.  With this in mind, I've made the choice to slow down for a year to allow him to learn to write more easily - one of the best things about homeschooling is we've got lots of time!

Off Topic...

"My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world." - Jack Layton

You can read the entire letter to Canadians here.

Moved Into the 'Finished' File

Today we finished up our first two Intellego unit studies:   K-2 World History, Volume 1: In The Beginning and K-2 Geography: Maps.

CKW really enjoyed making a treasure map and hiding a chewed up dog rawhide in his bedroom for me to 'discover'.  We also dug quite deeply into geographic and magnetic north pole and managed to veer off into the science of magnets for a couple of days, something neither of us much minded!  Finishing up today we watched a National Geographic documentary on oceans/ocean life and have been discussing how to save the world's oceans ever since.  The actual geography in this unit was a bit basic for CKW's taste, but it's the rabbit trails that I/we find most interesting with these unit studies. 

Volume one of world history was primarily prehistory (which I have already written about) but we spent last week and today working on the third chapter in the unit, Mesopotamia.  I've been using several Dorling Kindersley books for social sciences and we both especially enjoy The History Book for kids.  It's "a trip through history from the stone age to the digital age".

We had read about Mesopotamia when we first started out with The Story of the World (SOTW), so a lot of it was repetition, but we enjoyed making a cuneiform tablet to keep track of our barley trading (don't ask) and then we spent a couple of days reading about the adventures of Gilgamesh and contrasting those with tales from the bible.  I was going to leave the in depth study of world religions until quite a bit later, but I know where this is heading...  So off to CurrClick I go for the Intellego unit study of World Religions!   

We are really enjoying our new Moving Beyond the Page curriculum, and this has caused us to put our Intellego unit studies somewhat onto the back burner.  However, when we do make time to use them, we always enjoy ourselves!  Most of them are supplementary fun for us, but they could easily be used as a main curriculum spine, especially if you make time to follow all the rabbit trails found while investigating the main ideas presented.  I noticed that they are planning to come out with an Evolution unit study for K-2 this fall and I am definately going to pick that one up as well. 


Afterall, we just finished up two units, so that's reason enough to get two more, right?

    

We're Canadian, Eh?

Our main social sciences curriculum Moving Beyond the Page is American, and as you have probably guessed by the title of this post (if you haven't read my little bio blurb thingie), we are Canadian.  Therefore I've been spending quite a bit of time trying to find a curriculum for Canadian history, geography and civics that is secular and at an elementary school level.  Not as easy as you might think!

This is what I've been able to come up with, thanks to several Canucks on The Well-Trained Mind forums.  Our main curriculum was purchased from Northwoods Press and was written by Donna Ward.  They are workbooks, and I didn't purchase the curriculum bundles, but I think they will work just fine for what we are going to be studying at this stage.

Our geography spine will be Canada, My Country and I purchased several books to go along with this curriculum, including several books from Kids Can Press.  Looking through, the spine seems secular and although we both find geography to be a bit of a slog, I think we can make this into something 'fun'.

 

For history, I also chose author Donna Ward, and purchased her Courage and Conquest: Discovering Canadian History as our curriculum spine.  Along with the highly recommended The Story of Canada by Janet Lunn and others, I think we will do okay with this topic as well!

Homeschooling Goals

Today, on a forum I frequent, I responded to a question from Melissa with regards to homeschooling goals.  Much food for thought in the various responses and, in order to keep these goals front and centre, I've dedicated a new page up top to this specific topic.

Love the forum at The Secular Homeschool Community! 

Back From Vacation!

We very much enjoyed our week at the cottage but now we are back home, not enjoying this heat or humidity!  Thank goodness for central A/C!!

We have finished up our Prehistory unit, comprised primarily of Intellego's K-2 World History: Volume 1 - In The Beginning and the documentary series Walking With Cavemen.  We also watched a few episodes of Walking With Dinosaurs and Walking With Beasts - seven year old boys love that stuff!  Great online resources we used were Becoming Human and PBS' Human Evolution webpage. 

I came up from doing the laundry one afternoon to find Homo habilis on our back deck!  Nice crocs 'person with abilities'...

And did you notice something?  I finally played around with Blogger enough to use links in my posts...  Yeah Me!