Project-Based Homeschooling

In an effort to shift our homeschooling dynamic from 'student-teacher' to 'learner-facilitator' I am currently enrolled in a Beta Master Class for Project-Based Homeschooling. No curriculum; student projects ONLY!

 

(Can you say Type A+ perfectionist control freak twinges?! YIKES!!! I was worried he might not learn anything, but figured summer was the time to give it a try...)

 

I think it's going to be okay though! Just today he's worked on his arts & crafts projects, made a battery operated electrical circuit with a switch that runs a fan and/or light (for camp emergencies) and read a chapter about veterinarians in 'We Work with Horses' by Patrice Clay. All this in addition to driving our extremely patient mechanic batty with non-stop questions regarding sway bars, bushings, etc.

 

 

 

 

  

Relax Homeschool Mamas - the kids are definately all right!

Lest We Forget...

Happy Thanksgiving Eh!

It's our Canadian Thanksgiving today, so I have a bit of free time to update.  We've been busy, busy, busy!

After getting up at 0630 and leaving camp every Saturday morning to drive into the city for 3on3 hockey, CKW decided that riding competitively was more important to him than playing rep (competitive) hockey, so a few weeks ago a new member of our family arrived:  Top Notch Tuppence, a large, Welsh cross pony who has shown hunters, jumpers and evented - just what CKW needs!

They hit it off immediately and CKW has been riding almost every day since his arrival!

We've been 'doing school' four days per week, approximately 3.5 hours each day and then heading out to the barn for the afternoon.  CKW attends an after school group for a couple of hours every afternoon and then continues on to sports and/or piano in the evenings.  During the day on Wednesdays, we get together with our local homeschool group and socialise.  Great for him to have kids to run around with and really great for me to have other homeschooling parents to talk to.  Seriously, I need the socialisation waaaaay more than he does!

Moving Beyond the Page (MBtP) continues to be our main curriculum spine for language arts and social science.  I continue to be impressed by this curriculum!  Maths is covered with Teaching Textbooks, Singapore Math, Life of Fred, and various iPad apps - CKW is a maths lover!  We are also enjoying My Pals Are Here!  for science and supplement with the Homeschool Science Program at our local city science centre.  Our Canadian social science content is from Donna Ward but I plan to purchase CBC's Canada: A People's History as CKW finds Donna Ward a bit dry, and I have to admit that I concur!  We are slogging though Easy Grammar and Daily Grams but I'm not impressed with teaching grammar based entirely upon prepositions and plan to invest in Michael Clay Thompson's curriculum next year, as long as we have the time to fit it in along with MBtP.  CKW enjoys all the 'Detective' workbooks from The Critical Thinking Company and on days that I am not feeling well, I am very thankful for workbooks and computer based curriculum! 

Fall is my favourite season - hope you are enjoying it as much as we are! 

Giant Panda Poster

I am a panda bear

My heart is going to tear

I'm almost extinct!

Don't you care?

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.   



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!

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!

   

Our Moving Beyond The Page Order Is Here!

We finally received our Moving Beyond the Page order - no thanks to Canada Post!  I ordered just the first concept in the 7-9 level, Environment, as I was a bit worried about the amount of writing that would be required.  Included in this concept are three science/social science units:  Amazing Weather, The Land and Sound, as well as three literature units:  Tornado, Sarah Plain and Tall, and Who Was Helen Keller?.  This concept also includes a human anatomy ear model and a thermometer.

Everything looked great!  I was chomping at the bit to get started right way, but...  I'm still worried about the level of writing required.  It is like pulling teeth to get CKW to write two sentences about almost anything, and I am very reluctant to start out at the level of writing in the 7-9 level and turn him off of the entire homeschool experience. 

Sooo...  I went ahead and read through both the Secular Homeschool forum and the MBtP forum archives and have, reluctantly, decided to put this concept on the shelf for now and place an order for both the Community and Culture concepts in the 6-8 level.  We will start off with those concepts this year (not sure how well three Cinderella themed stories are going to go over!) and really concentrate on the writing aspects of the curriculum, as well as applying critical thinking skills to our discussions of the topics raised - needs vs wants, citizenship, cultures and customs, etc.  I hope this will keep CKW interested and engaged while his fine motor skills continue to mature, and that we will then be ready for the 7-9 level in the not too distant future.



 

On A Roll...

Two days does make it 'on a roll', doesn't it?

CKW started out this morning with his DEAR reading and journal entry, then he 'retold' his independent reading to me while I was getting breakfast together.  I've been noticing people who follow The Well Trained Mind talking about "narration" and I wonder if this is the same as what his public school (and therefore, us) have been calling a 'retell'...  Off to investigate after this post!

In language arts (LA), we read Chapter 6 in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and then discussed the plot, characters, vocabulary, etc as per the LIT and Novel Ideas unit study plans we have been following.  This was a great book to start with, as both of us are enjoying it immensely.  We will be done in no time, unfortunately, but I'm already looking into which read aloud study unit to purchase next.  I'm thinking that The Wind in the Willows, along with a pond study (we have a pond afterall), would be right up our alley!

During social science (SS), we continued with our study of ancient history.  We had started out with The Story of the World, but have since backtracked a bit (!) using the Intellego K-2 World History Volume 1:  In The Beginning unit study.  Today we learned about prehistoric humans, hominid types and the effects of the Ice Age on human evolution and migration.  Next up:  The Stone Age.  We also opened up the Intellego K-2 Maps unit, and finished up the introductory first chapter.  CKW had great fun creating a map of our house, along with a treasure map of his bedroom.  I found the treasure right away, as his map was quite detailed, but wasn't too thrilled to grab my 'prize' of a wet, chewed up doggie rawhide out from underneath the top left corner of his bedroom rug.

After this, CKW did the Odd and Even Numbers lesson in Teaching Textbooks 3, and then watched the BrainPop Jr movie, and completed the quiz, on the same topic.  We went a bit overboard on the LA and SS stuff today, so no time for keyboarding or science, but whatever...  it's summertime, CKW was off to library program, we had fun and we'll get to that stuff some other time.     

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!"