Gifts of the Nile: Week 2 Review

Our first unit of study this year is a short unit on Ancient Egypt. Although I planned it for only a couple weeks since we've discussed Egypt before, I've found so many books and projects I wouldn't mind exploring but there's not enough time! On the other hand, I'm really excited about our Ancient Greece unit coming up so we'll have to revisit Egypt later on!

This week we explored the great Nile River and learned how incredibly important it was for the Egyptian people. We learned about papyrus, hieroglyphics, irrigation and the importance of place value!

On the whole, we had a good second week. Next week we will continue on with our Egypt studies but will turn our focus from daily life of the average Egyptian to the great Pharaohs and the Gods and Goddess of the culture. 

Oh and we had a guest speaker this week....

Next time I need a substitute teacher, I know who to call. ;)

Easing Back In

So we have wrapped up out first week back to school and it was a success overall! Yay! As I said before, we started out with half days (so only about two hours a day) to transition everyone from Summer Mode to School Mode.

I already covered our first day in a previous post. On Wednesday we went to the library on post. This is where I have to make a "bad mommy" confession - this was the first time we'd gone to any library in over two years! Eek! To be fair, we have TONS of children's books in the house and are constantly adding new ones to our collection but still...

We got there in time for Story Time...where my kids were the biggest and oldest of the bunch since all the others were in the 2-3 year range but they had a good time and everyone picked out some books.

We continued our "All About Me" project with a page on Favorite Things and Favorite Foods during the rest of the week. Aside from drawing and coloring, they each had to try to write the words as they sounded them out.

Fridays are usually our quiz day (spelling and math) and then fun art projects or music. As we didn't have any spelling words this week - we were left with art mostly. We made Monster Marks (corner bookmarks), which I found here on Pinterest. Lots of cutting and gluing and folding involved but pretty simple and painless. Plus it's easy to offer lots of options to make the monsters full customizable. 

J's is the pink pig monster. I's is the leopard monster. A's is the orange thing that makes me think of Animal from the Muppets. The Purple critter is mine. I helped with some of the cutting and the instruction but they picked out the features and assembled their creatures. 

Back to Homeschool!

This time of year my Facebook and various parenting forums are flooded with all those CUTE "First Day of School" pictures and, I admit, the photographer in me gets a tiny bit jealous of the photo-ops of class rooms and bus rides and meeting the new teacher.

I can't simulate all those things at home. And I wouldn't want to really - it would look a little cheesy for "meet the teacher" to always be ME after all. But we do take a picture on the first day of our new school year!

J, who is doing second grade this year, says she wants to be a swimmer when she grows up.

I will be doing first grade work (for the most part) this year even though she's only five. She says she wants to be a swimmer as well - perhaps I shouldn't have asked them in the same room at the same time.

And then there is A, who is doing kindergarten level work who she's only four. She claims she wants to be a baker when she grows up. I hope she does, if so I'll keep her around forever. hehe

I decided to ease into the first week with shorter days and just some light projects that involved coloring and writing mostly. On Day One, they each did a self-portrait of themselves and I must say - they don't look as colorful in person as they seem to see themselves.

Our "Curriculum" and Resources

At this stage in the game, I have been putting together our "curriculum" from dozens of different sources. I'm constantly finding new things to add to our little school or ideas I want to try out so I don't think I'd ever feel 100% comfortable with a boxed, all-in-one curriculum.

As I've mentioned previously, I start with the Core Knowledge series and then expand outward from there. Here's what we have in place for this year! Note: Everything for each subject isn't pictured, I just pulled out some of the highlights.

Math

As a group, we will start the day with our Number of the Day. This simple sheet will be a fast review on place value, various ways to write numbers, adding by tens and hundreds, equation forms, etc. I will not have all the girls fill out the work sheet every day because it would be a massive waste of time and paper but we will do it all together. Obviously they aren't all on the same level but I intend to teach lessons as a group before they do their own leveled worked. In addition to the four operations, telling time and money sense, we will be spend time learning about geometry, data interpretation and playing all sorts of math games.

Language Arts

Learning to read (or read even better) will be a huge part of this year's language arts plan. I like to combine understanding of phonics, word families and sight words to teach the girls and, so far, this has worked well for us. J, who is well beyond the BOB Book level, will be keeping a reading journal of all the new and exciting books she reads this year. We'll also spend time creating stories together and individually. As part of our weekly routine, the girls get a spelling list to learn and study for a quiz on Friday as well. There are a number of activities centered around these weekly words that have built in writing and grammar practice.

Everything else

As I mentioned before, we're planning to do Unit Studies this year which will bring science and social studies together (along with math and language arts to an extent). We will be watching lots of videos, reading lots of books and probably cruising the web while exploring history and science together! I plan to introduce both Latin (as part of our Ancient Rome study) and Spanish (for practical reasons) to the girls this year though it won't become a major part of the day at this stage.

Every day this week, J has come to me to tell me she "can't wait for school to start!" as all the bits and pieces have come together. I think we must be on the right track then!

Workbooks and Grade Level

Every year I picked up a couple workbooks for each girl to use for extra practice during the school year. Worksheets are not a major part of our daily life but having some that are ready made is good for reinforcing and practicing concepts, particularly in math and grammar.

This year I picked up small math workbooks from Scholastic and then the following from Mead.
*Note: I don't think these are the exact editions we have but the concept is the same

They seemed to have a diverse selection of concepts at first glance and, overall, I'm happy with them. The only problem I noticed, after looking through them more extensively at home, is that my girls could probably do over half the work already for their respective grade level! We haven't even started the school year!

I think I may end up saving some of the early pages that I know they've mastered for their younger siblings (except the K book obviously) to graduate in to later in the year. No reason to give them busy work if they already have the concept learned! I also suspect I may need to go buy new workbooks (or make my own sheets) midway through the year for the next grade level.

iPad Apps for School

We're a very technological family. Robby and I love "gadgets" so when the iPad first came out, we both looked at it with fascination. For me, it reminded me of a PADD from Star Trek and therefore owning it would serve my inner-geek. I didn't realize at the time just how much it would be used both by us and, eventually by the kids!

 I've downloaded a number of educational apps over the last few years and wanted to share some of the ones we use to teach and reinforce skills with the girls.

BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr have fun daily/weekly videos about any number of topics. Last year there was a great one about Rosa Park and one about Martin Luther King Jr. Moby, the robot, helps give a brief introduction to a topic. BrainPOP Jr. is geared toward K-3.

The TeachMe series has a Toddler, Kindergarten, First Grade and now Second Grade (which I haven't looked at yet). They reinforce math, spelling and sight words appropriate to each grade level and reward with coins or stickers in the app.

Word Bingo and Math Bingo are just what they sound like, Bingo games centered around sight words and math facts. These are both great for helping the kids memorize those things without having to bust out the flash cards.

Rocket Math, Sushi Monster and Math Drills are all Math based apps. They can be customized to the level or operation that needs to be practiced. Rocket Math and Sushi Monster are math games. Math Drills, though not a game, we use daily and for end of week assessment since it keeps records and I can email progress reports from the app.

Stack the States, Stack the Countries and Presidents vs Aliens have been entertaining the girls (and me) all summer! They give basic information about the subject matter in a fun, game like environment. Monster Physics is made by the same company and teaches basic physics principles without them even realizing they are learning!

Articulation Station is a great app if you have a kidlet who needs a little extra help articulating certain sounds. You can either buy the entire collection or select the individual sounds your child needs.

Beyond the more free-play, game apps, we also have some reference material apps that do not get used daily but come in handy. These are generally more science or history based but I recommend them - especially This Day in History and Science360.

Enjoy!

Fifty Nifty United States

I found this on Pinterest and really wanted something similar for our school room.

Source: theberry.com

So I set out to recreate it...at least somewhat. Managing the overall shape of the United States was easy enough, I printed a line picture from the internet, cut it out and traced the edges. Then I decided to free hand the states inside instead of cutting and tracing each individual state...

As you can see, that didn't work out so well. Particularly New England, which is full of teeny states with weird borders.

I set the map aside and figured I would reevaluate later. I'd seen another map that used scrapbook paper for the various states and thought I might combine the two ideas to finish the project.

Unfortunately, I didn't have scrapbook paper on hand (because I'm more of a digital scrapbooker) but I recalled the sticky sided foam we had from projects last year! In hindsight, scrapbook paper would have been easier because I could cut it with scissors!

By this point, my fingers hurt from using the hobby knife to cut a long the edges but I was over 50% done and not giving up now!

Still needs some finishing touches (like a frame) but I like the end result! And New England doesn't look like a hot mess anymore!

And for fun, a blast from the past (or mine anyway):

Getting Ready!

With less than two weeks to the start of the nearby schools, I can't help but get caught up in the rush of preparing for a new school year. I have a confession to make, I LOVE office supplies! Even before I had kids, I would feel a draw towards those Back-to-School sales because pencils and binders and markers, oh my! I've already bought the girls new folders (and labeled them), new pencils, new crayons, new composition books and new workbooks for the year.

But all that wasn't enough for me! In addition to figuring out our unit schedule, I felt the need to rearrange our little classroom to make it a little more functional for everyone. The first big change was our central table. Last year it was a small, child sized table that was the perfect height for our girls. The problem? Not much working space on the surface. I brought in a full-size card table and chairs instead.

Then I raided the girls' room for one of their storage units which had been used to store toys. As they've out grown most of those toys, I took them all over to a friend with younger children and re-purposed it for our school room.

The easel has a chalkboard on one side and a dry erase board on the other. It can also be used for art as needed. We have a second easel in storage at the moment that I would love to pull out as a dedicated Art Center but I don't have anywhere to put it unfortunately. 

Tucked underneath our bar now (relocated) is the girls' computer station.

Finally we have our calendar and weather center. You'll probably notice it's on August and this is being posted in July, I can explain that. We're on summer break from school right now so the calendar had been on June up until just minutes before this picture was taken. I figure, July is almost over - may as well jump to August now.

The computer used to be under the calendar area and the kids' mini cooper was under the bar. Well Jasper (our Beagle) used the car as a jumping off point to get him ONTO the bar to wreck havoc so we had to make a change.

As an eclectic homeschooler, I pull curriculum ideas from a variety of sources and piece it together for what works well for us. When I first started homeschooling, an experienced friend suggested starting with the Core Knowledge Series and I'm glad he did! While I don't use these books for everything or even every aspect of the books, they give me a jumping off point to make sure the essentials are being covered each year.

As I have budding readers, we have the complete BOB Book collection, several early reader books and Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. This approached worked wonderfully for J and I will be using it for I and A as well. Actually, they both already started with this last year and I can't wait to see them continue to develop their reading skills.

It's going to be a GREAT year!