Where do you-all find the time?!

The time to homeschool and blog? 

We've been puttering along all fall, continuing to use Moving Beyond the Page as our main curriculum spine, and very much enjoying it!  We are almost finished with the 6-8 level and will move into 7-9 early in 2012.  We're also been spending our time working through Teaching Textbooks 3 and I will order the next level after the holiday rush is over.  Challenging Word Problems and Life of Fred - Elementary are also going well.  We've been using My Pals Are Here! 3/4 for science, as well as several Intellego Unit Studies for both science and social science.  We have workbooks for days when I'm not at my best, but both find that discussion centred around whatever we are reading suits us best.  Fine arts and physical education are mostly done out of house, and as for French - well, let's call it a 'curriculum in progress'...

Kind of like my blogging! 

CKW with his latest Lego 12 Days of Brickmas creation.  Day 2 - Gift Wrapped Present

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?

    

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!

   

History - Story of the World & Intellego History of the World Volume 1: In The Beginning

We started The Story of the World (SOTW) last week and although we have been very much enjoying the book, I wanted to add in more depth, along with some online activities. Thanks to the ladies at The Secular Homeschool forum/community, I researched multiple suggested secular history curricula and we have added in the Intellego Ancient History Volumes 1, 2 and 3 Unit Studies.

Today we started with Ancient History Volume 1 and CKW really enjoyed it! We discussed how to think like an historian and archeology, especially as compared to geology and paleontology. We did a quick diagram of our family tree and then discussed how our family history has affected our lives today - drawing parallels to world history and our world today. CKW made up a list of questions to ask his grandfather about his childhood (75-80 years ago), as well as another list he is hoping that his grandfather will be able to answer about his great-great grandfather's childhood (140 years ago). The links in the Intellego units are a hit, to say the least.

I was pleasantly surprised how much he had retained from our SOTW readings. When the Intellego unit asked what he knew about history, he was able to state quite a bit of correct information about nomads, hunter/gathers, the fertile crescent, Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, mummies, etc. Any concerns I had about whether or not he was retaining information from our shared reading sessions have been put to rest!

Canada Post is still on strike, so I continue to wait for our Moving Beyong the Page and Teaching Textbooks orders. I have the Critical Thinking books I ordered here, but think I will save those for the 'real' start of Grade Two. CKW enjoys ancient history and when I told him tonight that this was how homeschooling happens, he immediately jumped up onto me and very excitedly said: "Well then, I want to be homeschooled for sure!"