tonyandkirsten.org

It’s still a little over three weeks until the date I have in mind for our “official” first day of school  (August 30th), but we did get started with our first two subjects last week — History for Madeline and Preschool for Erik and did most of a science lesson today.

Madeline’s “Mystery of History Volume 1″ curriculum has 36 weeks, and in order to finish by the beginning of June in 2011 and also take the extra breaks I want to take during the school year, we needed to start by July 26th.

Madeline will be studying ancient history from Creation through Christ.  Since Erik’s “Little Hands to Heaven” preschool curriculum also begins with Creation, I thought we should start both at the same time.  That means we’ll finish up his preschool curriculum a couple weeks before summer break, or we have extra leeway to skip a week or two or a few days here and there and still get it all done before next summer.

Besides getting done in a timely manner, another benefit to starting a few subjects early is the opportunity to see how the lessons work for us and what we might need to “tweak” about how we use them.  I now know that this history lessons will take an average of about 10 minutes to read, and that Madeline would prefer to have timeline figures that potentially involve some coloring, but not too much drawing.

Here’s the start of Madeline’s timeline of Ancient History, beginning with Creation:

We decided to go with a notebook style timeline because we thought it would be easier to keep Madeline’s hard work safe from Kai in a notebook.  While the wall or folded board timeline might be neat looking, I think it would be very tempting for Kai to color on or tear off pieces.

I am also getting a feel for the nature of the extra activities in Mystery of History.  I just assumed that we would only be interested in the activities suggested for “younger students”, but I’ve found some of the “middle” student activities could be more interesting for Madeline (possibly with some modifications) than the younger student activities.  For example, the lesson on Noah suggested playing a game of “Memory” with animal pairs cards for the younger students.  That’s okay and fun, but the “middle student” activity involved a series of questions and answers which I turned into a couple of lapbook-style mini-books that we’ll put in her history notebook.

I’ve found out that we can get through one of Erik’s preschool lessons fairly quickly — perhaps in as little as 20 minutes (not counting any involved art projects, which we will do during Kai’s nap time anyway and not during our regular preschool time).  We did all of the first week’s lessons on Creation and the letter A (skipping a few suggested activities, but doing most of them), and we did some of the “B”/Noah lessons this week — luckily I had the second week of “Little Hands to Heaven” extending over two weeks in our schedule, so we are right on track. 

We got back into the science habit today after taking a long break from science toward the end of the school year and into the summer.  We worked on most of the Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding lesson on Gravity.   I find it intimidating when I think about starting one of these lessons on a given day because the format is not as “user friendly” to just read out of like many homeschool books.

It’s a great book, but the author does assume you will read what he writes and synthesize it enough to present it to the student.  I feel like the extra work is worth it because I really like the way scientific thinking is taught in the text (and I really didn’t have to prepare much ahead of time — just read it through and find the supplies for the experiment/demonstration section).  Once I got going with the lesson, it was not as “hard” as I remembered it being to teach from BFSU, and I was able to lead Madeline to a basic understanding of the topic.  I think.

When I tried to review with her at dinner tonight, she did have a hard time remembering where the force of gravity is pulling everything. (She said toward the center of the sun, instead of toward the center of the earth…and of course Tony had to complicate things by pointing out that there are gravitational forces pulling our planet toward the sun as well, it is just that it is traveling through space fast enough to keep moving past the sun and around it in an orbit!)

We’ll do something to review the lesson tomorrow — maybe make a mini-book (another lap-book type piece) to stick in her science notebook.

With Madeline’s Kindergarten year behind us, the task ahead of me is to make plans for 1st grade! Now that Erik is three and wants to do everything his big sister does, I will be doing some preschool activities with him too.  And now that Kai is walking, climbing and trying to get into things even on top of our school/crafts table…so I might have to come up with a plan to keep him from destroying our schoolwork!

Here’s the headlines of what we’re doing for First Grade:

Math: RightStart Level B

Science: Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding + science lessons at co-op

Language Arts: Reading practice +  Alphabet Island 2A for spelling/phonics + spontaneous grammar instruction by me.

History: Mystery of History Volume 1

Bible: Continue Beginning in Christ, read the Bible together, possibly other devotionals

Handwriting: Not sure yet if we will do something focused or just integrate into other subjects

Music: Pfieffer House first grade music curriculum and Stories of the Great Composers

Art: Artistic Pursuits K-3 Book 1 (I just found a good deal today to buy this used!) + art lessons at co-op

Phy-Ed: Dance class, PE class at co-op, play outside. 

Now, here’s the long explanations if anyone is curious:

In Math, we will move on to Level B of Right Start Math.  We didn’t finish all of level A, but many of the topics we did not cover were things we covered in the two previous math programs we used (Saxon Math K in preschool and Kindermath last fall).  Students can start Right Start with level B and skip A all together, so I am guessing it won’t be a problem for Madeline to miss a few of the level A lessons…or we can always go back and do them if there is a problem!

In Science we will give “Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding” a real go of it.  We did a few lessons this past spring (and we may even do a few this summer) and I still think it is the right curriculum for us — I just need to stay on top of it and do it.

In the realm of Language Arts I know that Madeline will need to be practicing reading.  I think she will be ready to try at least a little bit of spelling too.  Since we already own Alphabet Island level 2, I feel like I should at least give that a try.  I am very curious about All About Spelling , but I think I should resist the urge to spend the money on something new just out of curiosity.   One of the things that appeals to me in All About Spelling is the use of letter tiles to form words — I may adapt Alphabet Island to use more of this approach given Madeline’s dislike of writing.

I’m also looking to begin some very gentle instruction in other areas of language arts such as grammar.  A lot of people seem to like “First Language Lessons” by Susan Wise Bauer to meet this need for 1st and 2nd graders.  But it has a lot of memorization of poems and such, so I am not sure that’s our style.  I am thinking instead I will get a good elementary level reference book (maybe this one) and weave in some grammar instruction as we read and write.  I’ve already found myself trying to explain things to Madeline like the difference between present tense and past tense, so I think spontaneous grammar instruction will come naturally to me!

In the realm of History, We are going to give something approaching the “four year cycle” a try (aka, starting with Ancient history, moving on to Middle ages, and so on in a repeating four year pattern…though I think I will have a “side” of some American history thrown in simultaneously!)  I really can’t find a curriculum that is all I want it to be.  I want to like Sonlight, but I just don’t like their world history book picks for Core 1.  I kind of want the same concept as Songlight, covering ancient history for early elementary, but with different books.  There are some programs out there, but not that I have found that would work super well with a first grader being the oldest student.

So even though I really want to do a literature based approach, I will try out Mystery of History instead.   The text is written in somewhat of a narrative format, so it is much more interesting than a typical dry textbook, and hands-on projects are included as well as some literature suggestions we can read if we have the time.

Mystery of History covers a lot of history from Biblical times, so Bible study will be somewhat integrated into History. We’ll also continue with the “Beginning in Christ” Bible study we started in the spring as well as other devotionals or just reading the Bible together.

Handwriting is really an Achilles heel for us at the moment.  Madeline knows how to form all her letters, but hates to write.   She really freaks out if she has to write more than a few words most of the time — and this is true whether it is a school assignment or something fun, like writing inside of a birthday card.  Every now and then she will be very motivated and write several sentences in a row, but that is rare.  All through Kindergarten, I was hoping this was developmental, and she would not feel this way about writing by the time first grade rolled around.  And it still may be something she outgrows.  So, I am torn on what to do.  Do I segregate Handwriting into its own subject, to practice it without dragging us down in any other subjects?

We didn’t do much music instruction at home last year, but it’s something  I am eager to do more of.  We used the Pfieffer House curriculum at our co-op last year, but since we are joining a different co-op this year that does not include a music class, I decided we would continue this at home — especially since I was able to find a used copy of their 1st grade curriculum with the CD for $8.  This curriculum doesn’t include much in the way of music appreciation, so we’ll read about (and listen to the works of) great composers via the Stories of the Composers book and CD set.

Art: I have read a lot of great reviews of Artistic Pursuits and am eager to try it out. Madeline loves art and I hope this helps her develop her natural talents!

We’ll also be doing lots of read-alouds throughout the year.  Some of these may be classics of children’s literature, while others will just be fun books that Madeline picks out at the library.  Some we may listen to as audio books! I don’t have a specific plan as to what we will be reading, though I will probably take inspiration from Ambleside Online, Sonlight and other book lists.  Maybe I’ll even make a list of titles we may read this year and write a post about it. 

This post is long enough as it is, so I will leave my plans for preschool with Erik for another post as well!

We’ve been on “summer vacation” from homeschooling for about three weeks now.  Madeline is so thrilled to be on break.  She was so ready for it!  Little does she realize she is learning almost as much, if not more, now than she was during the last couple months of school when we were kind of slacking a bit! *insert maniacal laugh here*

By the time we covered a few more phonics rules via the book “Phonics Pathways”, Madeline was more excited about practicing and improving her reading skills by reading books.  Conveniently, there are a lot of summer reading incentive programs out there to encourage kids to read for the summer.  The prospect of free books from Half-Price Books (every week!), as well as other rewards turns out to be a real motivator for Madeline.  We diligently keep track of her minutes spent reading each day, and the titles of the books she reads.  She has been reading both stuff that is “easy” for her (phonics readers that mainly have three – letter short vowel words plus some basic sight words), and stuff that is harder, like “Frog and Toad”.  The harder books she does need help with.  But I am constantly surprised at the words she manages to sound out either on her own or with quick reminders of various phonics principles.

In addition to reading 15 minutes per day, at least five days per week, Madeline has started using the “Reading Eggs” website again.  Back well over a year ago, Madeline was using this  before we really did much “real” reading instruction.  She got through the part about letter sounds just fine back then, but got stuck when the site started teaching real reading skills.  Reading Eggs is a subscription site, but, lucky for us, they offered past customers a three month free subscription over this summer.  Our account on Reading Eggs actually saved Madeline’s place where she left off in the Spring of 2009.  She gained a lot of confidence by doing some easy lessons that were review of what she learned months ago, and is progressing into harder lessons now.  Many days she asks to have some time to work on this in the afternoon.  So she is practicing reading skills twice a day most days…and is super excited about it!!!

We’re trying to sneak in some math review here and there by playing math games…and we’re raising monarch caterpillars (they are actually pupa now since they have formed their chrysalises)…which makes for an incredible science lesson.

Besides all that learning, the kids are also doing a weekly “sports sampler” class, eight days of swimming lessons, and Madeline will have a three day art class next month.  And we’re just having lots of fun and enjoying NOT feeling obligated to do school every morning!

I knew this would happen.  I did really well for several months writing weekly or bi-weekly updates.  Then I went a month between updates.  Then I gave up and didn’t write any updates for the last ten weeks of school.  At least I am coming back now to write about what we did, for the sake of posterity.    And to feel more psychologically free to write about our summer and my plans for next year.

I declared an end to our school year on June 1st.  Since we didn’t have any curricula that we were clearly “finishing up” before summer break, it was kind of arbitrary.  I would have to say in a lot of ways that the last ten weeks of school were the hardest of our year.  We had an unusually warm spring for Minnesota, and the kids wanted to spend tons of time outside.  Madeline was not excited about school, and I was having a hard time putting a lot of energy into planning when Madeline was likely to not receive my hard work in an appreciative manner.

Math went fairly well.  I had set up for myself a goal of a particular lesson I wanted to reach before the end of the school year, and we made it to that lesson.  We honestly slacked off in geography and science.   We finished all the continents — barely.  Australia and South America definitely got the short shrift.  We didn’t do any more lessons in our science book, though we did go on several nature walks and make observations about the coming of spring in our yard and neighborhood.

In reading/phonics, I started sensing that the “Explode the Code” work books were becoming less of a good fit for Madeline.  I could see that she was ready to learn new “rules” or principles of reading, but she was not getting to new rules very quickly at the pace she was able to move through the workbook.  Writing is still a struggle for her, and even when I was doing the writing, it turned out that she didn’t really need intensive practice on each and every blend to learn to read them.

Although I had checked out “Phonics Pathways” from the library once before and dismissed it as something that would not be a good fit for us, it turned out to be the right thing at the right time late this spring. Madeline needed a minimum of introduction on the basic principles we hadn’t yet covered (long vowels, r-controlled vowels, more blends, prefixes and suffixes, etc).  Once we practiced a few words on a number of those topics, Madeline was able to sound out many more words and felt ready to try reading more “real books”.  More on that when I write about our summer. 

I feel like we accomplished at least as much if not more than the average Kindergartener learns in a year, if not more.  While some K’ers finish the year reading and writing more fluently than Madeline, some finish the year not reading at all.  So even though we “slacked” a bit and didn’t have a great deal of momentum in the spring, I still feel like we had a great year overall.   I’m still trying to decide exactly what our calendar should look like for next year…but I am wondering if maybe we won’t need a bit of a break when the weather first turns warm.

I can hardly believe it’s been a almost month since I have written a homeschooling update post. Oh wait, yes I can!  During that month we watched the Olympics almost every night for two weeks.  And we did our taxes.  And it got warmer out and it felt like we were doing less school.  I knew I would fall off the weekly or even bi-weekly bandwagon at some point!   Now that I am about to start my quarterly editing work, I thought I better hop back on this bandwagon of writing update posts, lest it become a quarterly update of our homeschooling activities.

Here’s what we’ve been up to in Madeline’s Kindergarten studies:

Bible: We’ve been alternating been the 252 basics lessons and reading from “Leading Little Ones to God.”   This is proving to work out well.  Some of this has been unintentional, as we do tend to lose those little take home sheets from church every now and then.   But other days as I have read through the take home lesson from church, I felt like it didn’t really fit Madeline’s needs very well (such as one lesson that started off, “think about that teacher at school no one likes” or something like that).  And on those days we just read out of the “Leading Little Ones…” book.

Social Studies/Geography: We spent about three weeks studying China. It was fun reading fiction and non-fiction books together and watching a couple of videos.  We worked on a lapbook but didn’t finish it.  The siren call of first warm melty snow and then puddles for splashing made the idea of spending extra time inside coloring, cutting and pasting to be less appealing I think! I may have also chosen lapbook pieces that were too complicated and required too much of me and not enough of her.  I would really like to finish it up, just to say we did it.  We’ll see if that happpens…if it’s going to happen, it will probably mean me staying up some night to do most of it, just leaving a bit of gluing or coloring for Madeline to finish.

We moved to the continent of Europe this week, beginning our study with a lightweight study of Great Britain — essentially just reading a couple of books together.  We’ll study Ireland this next week in conjunction with St. Patrick’s Day!

Phonics/Reading/Handwriting: Madeline continued working on her Explode the Code workbook pages almost daily — this provides for her handwriting practice as well as working on phonics skills.  We also checked out sets #2 and #3 of the BOB Books from the library.  While doing BOB books set #1 proved frustrating to Madeline in the past, she is at the right stage in her skill development right now, and they are perfect! She is learning new phonics skills all over the place, and has said that working on the BOB books is her favorite part of doing school right now.

Math: We are continuing our quick progress in Right Start Math level A.  After making it up to lesson 27 earlier this week, I decided to skip us ahead to lesson 35 so we could continue studying addition — something Madeline is very excited about.  She is actually skipping WAY ahead on her own and trying to figure out how to add two digit numbers and about how the hundreds and thousands places work.  She asked if we could skip ahead to studying addition of numbers in the teens, but I am keeping her working on addition “the right start way”  with the lessons the book presents so we don’t miss out on the cool way this program teaches math.    The lessons we skipped covered geometry and money topics…we’ll go back and cover those after we either finish the addition lessons or when Madeline needs a break from that topics.

Science: Despite my best intentions, we still aren’t doing quite as much science as  I would like.  We did have a blast doing a “solid, liquid, gas” scavenger hunt around the house, and we started the lesson on Air.  We also took advantage of the nicer weather (and Madeline’s curiosity about things she was observing outside) to talk some about seeds and the coming of spring.

We had a really fun week doing school this past week…here’s what we’ve been up to:

Bible: Last week I mentioned that I missed some of the other Bible materials we read last semester since we have been focusing on the take home lessons from 252 basics this semester.  Well, I “got my wish” this week.  I stayed home from church with the boys a week ago Sunday since Erik was sick…and the 252 basics take home lessons never made it into my hands.  So, we read a couple chapters from “Leading Little Ones to God”  and we did some lessons out of “My See, Point, and Learn Bible book“.  This book is more on Erik’s level, but Madeline enjoys it too…so it is fun to do with them together.

Math: We worked on lessons 13-16 in RightStart Math this week.  Besides practicing abacus skills, the main new concept we practiced was even and odd numbers.  While i had briefly mentioned this concept before, it was really fairly new to Madeline. We used math tiles and “dot cards” to help visualize whether each number between one and ten was even or odd:

Madeline also really enjoyed the games in this week’s lesson, including dot card memory, a “comes after” game that was similar to “war”, and dot card bingo.

Reading/Phonics: We continued using Explode the Code (ETC) books 1.5 and 2 this week.  I am still really happy with my choice on these books.  Since starting the explode the code books we covered double letter word endings (words that end in combos like -dd, -ss, and so on) and we’ve started covering some two letter beginning blends.  I’ve also been trying to find simple “easy reader” books from the library for Madeline to read.  She still needs some help here and there, but I can definitely see improvement in her abilities.  Here she is hard at work on one of her ETC pages:

Geography: We completed our study of India this week.  We did all of our planned reading (I linked to the titles in last week’s wrap up post) on Monday, then worked on our lapbook on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.  Madeline and I decided to do a double lapbook to cover the continent of Asia — with one folder each for China and India.   We got the India section of the lapbook about 95% finished.  We just need to add some pictures of the animals we learned about from India (elephants, tigers, monkeys, etc) and a picture for the title flap.  I didn’t take pictures yet — I’ll post pictures of the whole thing once we do the China section.

Science: We finally started “Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding” (BFSU)!  I seriously considered skipping lesson A/B-1, since the topic of organizing and classifying sounded so basic.  But, upon further reflection, I thought that it would be a good subject to discuss and be able to refer back to in the future.  Both Madeline and Erik really enjoyed an “observation skills” activity that demonstrated how it was easier to remember the contents of a tray filled with objects when the contents were sorted into various categories, versus when they were scattered on the tray randomly.

We also started discussing lesson A-2, which is on the states of matter (solid, liquid and gas).  This is a review for Madeline to some extent because we covered this topic last fall.   We’ll do a little bit more with lesson A-2 this coming week and possibly start lesson A-3 (on the topic of Air) as well.  Once we get past lesson A-3 I think we will try out the weekly schedule rotation I wrote about in my post introducing BFSU.

“Game Day”: Since we had neither a field trip or our co-op this week, I planned a “game day” for us on Friday.  We worked on educational games like those in our math curriculum and some sight word games, and we played a couple of board games from our game cabinet.  I also gave Madeline and Erik each a chance to make up their own game.  Erik’s game was called crown soccer and involved playing soccer in the playroom and living room with a tiny soft soccer ball:

And Madeline’s game involved some homemade paper dolls playing soccer:

“Game Day” was super fun and I think it’s something we will do again in the future!

I wrote a couple posts earlier about two curriculum changes we’re making for science and phonics.  Here’s what Madeline and I have been up to in general for the past couple of weeks during her Kindergarten studies.

Bible: We’re continuing to work on the memory verses from church and read through the take-home devotionals from the 252 Basics.  Since there are four of those per week and we usually only do 4 days of school per week, this hasn’t left a lot of time for other Bible readings, like “Leading Little Ones to God” (which I have missed the last two weeks when we haven’t read it).  I’m still pondering what to do about this.  The 252 Basics devotionals are short, but Madeline usually seems ready to move on to other subjects after we have finished one.

Math: We’re now through (I think) the first 12 lessons of Right Start Math level A. Madeline is improving at using the Abacus and being able to quickly enter or identify any number from 1-10.  Most of the other material in the lessons is still review for her, so we are able to get through one (or sometimes even a bit more than one) lesson per day.  She is really looking forward to getting past the review section and getting on to something other than just the Abacus being new and challenging.  But since using the abacus and visualizing quantities is so important to this curriculum, I don’t want to skip any lessons.  She’ll just have to be patient a bit longer. 

Phonics/Reading: As I mentioned in my other entry, Madeline finished Level 1 of Alphabet Island.  Yeah! We’ll be moving on to using Explode the Code books 1 1/2 and 2…and you can read more about that in my recent entry on the subject.

Geography: We started studying the continent of Asia, and specifically the country of India the last two weeks.  I had hoped to spend no more than two weeks per country that we plan to study. But due to only having seven days of school in the past two weeks with Madeline visiting Grandma during week #17 and restarting our co-op this past week (and some other distractions on days we did do school), we didn’t get as much done as I was hoping to. So, we’ll continue to work on India this week as well.  So far for our India study we have read the chapters in Hero Tales about Amy Carmichael (a missionary to India), a folktale and a couple of non-fiction books about what India is like today.  This week we will read another folktale (from this book), a picture book story, and a “Magic Treehouse” book that takes place in India.  We’ll also make a couple of lapbook pieces for a lapbook about the whole continent of Asia.

Science: Okay, so I slacked and we didn’t get science done.    I had planned to not do science during week #17 since we only did three days of school that week.  Then I held off preparing for science this past week until late in the week, and then by Friday we had other distractions and we just did the basics, skipping the science lesson.  We’ll remedy that this week and start having a block for science planned in earlier in the week!

For fun: Madeline (and Erik) really enjoyed making valentines almost every day this week!:

After our three-and-a-half week break for Christmas, we resumed our regular school schedule the week of January 11th.  I think the break was good for both teacher and student, and now we’re both excited to be doing school again.

Here’s what we’ve been  up to the past two weeks:

Bible: Our church started a new children’s curriculum called “252 Basics“.  The kids get take-home materials each week with 4 additional short lessons to do at home, so we did those and worked on her memory verse.  We also read a couple  chapters out of “leading little ones to God.”

Reading/Phonics/Writing: We resumed our Alphabet Island lessons, working on some of the “U” word families and starting the short “O” families.  Madeline’s handwriting practice was primarily working in her Alphabet Island workbook.  I was very pleased that Madeline retained (and even possibly improved) in her reading skills over our break!

At the end of this past week I looked to see how many lessons we have left in Book 1 of Alphabet Island, and we only have nine left! So, we’ll definitely be starting Book 2a this semester.  I am pondering taking a short break in between books to focus more on sight words for a few weeks, since I don’t think we have been giving them the attention they deserve as Madeline has been eager to study all the short vowel word families.

Math: As I mentioned in my post about our Kindergarten plans for our new “semester”, we decided to switch to RightStart as our new math program.  While waiting for it to arrive, we did a short unit on measuring.  During week #15 we used a small workbook on measuring with non-standard units that I picked up for a buck last year.  Since I don’t have a balance scale, we just did the pages on measuring length and perimeter. Madeline did a great job with this and really enjoyed it.

At the beginning of week #16 we worked on volume measurements, as in the type that are used for cooking:

This was super fun and great practice for Madeline (who wants to be working more independently in the kitchen).  Then on Tuesday we worked a little bit on measuring with “standard” units, a.k.a. inches on a ruler.

Right start arrived mid-week and we were able to work through about five of the lessons.  The early lessons are very basic material, so most of it was review for Madeline — she just needs to get familiar with the terminology, tools and other things unique to this program.  A neat by-product of starting with these very basic lessons is that Erik has been eager to sit in with us and “do math with mommy and Madeline.”  I’m sure it will be over his head soon, but for right now learning how to recognize groups of three or four objects, count out two beads on the abacus, or make a triangle with “tally sticks” is right up his ally.

Social Studies/Science: We’re studying the continents this semester, and we began with a two week study on Antarctica.  This worked out very conveniently since a study of Antarctica is as much as science study as anything else, and at the beginning of week #15 I still hadn’t decided on a science curriculum for this semester. (I did end up picking something — it will either get it’s own blog post or I will write about it next week).

For the literature portion of our study we read “Mr. Popper’s Penguins.” This book was thoroughly enjoyed by all, including me.  It’s very funny! We also read a stack of non-fiction books about Antarctica.  Most of our reading was done during the first week of the study, then we worked on our lapbook project during the second week of the study (see my previous post for more on that).

The next stop in our world tour of the continents will be Asia.  We’ll focus for 2-3 weeks each on two different countries — first India, and then China.

Lapbooking is something I’ve been curious to try out for a while, and I finally decided we would take the plunge and try it out with our Antarctica unit.  I’m not sure I can say it any more clearly myself, so here is a quote from the Cathy Duffy Reviews site explaining what a Lapbook is:

“Lap Books offer creative ways for children to record information they are learning and create attractive presentations of that information, as well as use the information to study. A Lap Book is essentially a creatively folded manila file folder with lots of smaller creatively cut and folded pieces of paper that are attached in different ways. This loose definition reflects the realm of creative options that might be used to create lap books.”

Madeline really enjoys crafty projects and I have to admit that I enjoy it too…so lapbooking seemed like it might be a good fit for us.

There are many free resources out there to download various pieces for making your own lapbooks.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a whole one about Antarctica that encompassed exactly what I was looking for.  I definitely didn’t want to start from scratch on my very first go-around with lapbooking, so I used printables from three different sources:

The Penguin lapbook at Lapbooking Lessons (free registration required to download)

A Penguin Lapbook by Angela Frampton

Various mini-books found on the Polar Animals lapbook page at HomeschoolShare

We also selected from creative-commons licensed photos on flickr to include, and use a map of Antarctica cut out from an old atlas I got for free recently.

And, here’s how it turned out:

We accomplished the entire project this week.  It turned out to be quite an undertaking to do the mini book on Penguins within the larger book on Antarctica. But, all told, we probably spent no more than 4 or 5 hours on the project, including my research and printing time.

Madeline really enjoyed helping with some of the cutting, nearly all of the pasting, some coloring and doing some of the writing.  She also dictated a fictional story to me (a mini-book that pulls out of the yellow pocket in the penguin folder) and helped me decide what to write in several of the flaps where some decision-making was required on our part.

This project was a great way to review what we learned about penguins and Antarctica from all the library books we read over the past two weeks, as well as learning new facts.  Madeline seemed to be retaining quite a bit of information as we discussed what was in each mini-book of our lapbook.

Madeline enjoyed this experience enough that she would like to do lapbooks for the other countries/continents we study this semester.  I would like to think we could do at least one for each continent! Hopefully by making these lapbooks, Madeline will have something to refer back to later and review or remind herself of what we have learned.

I think I can reduce my prep-time for future lapbooks having now done it once, and I can be better organized by being able to work on some of the mini-books as we read our library books (rather than starting the lapbook after reading most of the books, and having to pour back over the books to find answers to some questions we had). Maybe some of the places we study will even have “ready to use” free lapbooks already available…which would definitely decrease my prep time by not having to sort out and keep track of possible printables from a variety of sources.

If you want to learn more about lapbooking, a great place to start is this Squidoo lens on the subject.

We’re only perhaps about 40-45% done with our school year, but the Christmas break makes it feel like the half-way point.   We finally got “back to school” this week after taking about three and a half weeks off for Christmas.

We’re also changing gears at our homeschool co-op for the new semester, swapping main subjects from science to social studies.  Since my plan has been for us to study co-op subjects in more depth at home, we’ll be switching gears in both of those subjects as well.

Here’s a look at what we’ve been doing in the various subject areas, and what direction we’ll take for winter/spring 2010.

Math: We worked through about 75% of the material in Kindermath during our first 14 weeks of school.  I knew this would be a temporary program for us, lasting through the school year at most, and possibly only through the first half of the year.

After a lot of research and discussion with Tony, we decided on RightStart math.  It’s more expensive than a lot of programs, but I think it will be worth the investment (and like our phonics curriculum, most of the items are reusable…so assuming we’ve made a good choice, investments made now will pay off over time as we use the materials for at least three kids).  Since RightStart uses somewhat novel methods of teaching adding, subtracting and so on, I thought it would be best to drop Kindermath before I got too far into teaching Madeline one way of doing math, only to have to unlearn it with RightStart.  I ordered RightStart today, and so hopefully it won’t be long before we start using it!

Phonics/Reading: Alphabet Island is still proving to be a good fit for us (which I am very glad of, since that was my big curriculum investment in 2009).  It’s looking like we may finish Book 1 before the end of the year, in which case we will move on to book 2A.  Madeline is definitely making progress in her reading ability!

Handwriting: We’ve done a mish-mash of things, from name-writing practice to short copywork to a few lessons of “Draw, Write, Now” and various “real life” writing activities like writing notes and cards to send.  Between these things and the handwriting practice contained within Alphabet Island, I haven’t felt the need for any other formal handwriting programs.  I think we’ll continue along this same path in 2010.

Science: We spent our fall semester in co-op exploring science topics inspired by the days of creation in the Bible.  At home, we read along in a corresponding text book, as well as reading some library books and doing a handful of projects and experiments.   I was disappointed by the textbook component of our study.  It just wasn’t very “science-y”.   While I had at first liked the idea of linking in the study of the Biblical creation account directly with science, I think the textbook we used was too heavy on describing what the Bible talks about, and too light on teaching scientific principles.

Despite the fact that we are “back to school”, I don’t have a firm plan for our science studies for the rest of our school year.  I am intriguied by R.E.A.L. science.   Today I discovered “Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding: A Science Curriculum for K-2“.  And Tony has been talking about just writing his own elementary science lessons for us to use.  It should be an interesting adventure no matter which route we choose!

Madeline also received a microscope and a telescope for Christmas, so we may wing it a bit and try and incorporate using those two tools into our science study this semester.   Madeline loves experiments and we didn’t do nearly as many as I hoped we would in the fall, so doing more experiments would certainly be a winner with my student.

Social Studies: As we move to geography studies in our co-op, we will also move to studying geography at home. This fall we our focus was on history (mostly early US history).  We used parts of  “History For Little Pilgrims” and also read fiction and non-fiction from the library.  Using that textbook cemented in my mind the idea that using literature to teach history is a much better idea than using a dull textbook.  Madeline really enjoyed listening to me read historical fiction or biographies written by the D’Aulaire’s, while she got bored of me reading from the textbook after a very short period of time.  I think more literature-based history study is in our future!

This winter/spring, our co-op will study the seven continents, focusing on one or two countries on each continent and learning a bit about those countries as well as missionaries that traveled there.  I purchased Galloping the Globe to use as a tool to further our study of each continent at home.  We’ll plan to read books from the library, try cooking various foods from around the world, and maybe do some other hands-on projects to help Madeline learn about world geography and culture.  We may do some kind of semester-long project like making a notebook or binder with maps and other pages about the various countries we study. I think the trick for me will be to not let us get overwhelmed by too much detail and activity.  I’m sure we’ll revisit world geography and cultures various times through elementary school, so I need to remind myself to save some of my great ideas for when Madeline is a bit older. 

Bible: We’ll continue reading “Leading Little Ones to God” as well as doing the take-home lessons/activities from the new Sunday School curriculum our church started this month called “252 Basics”.

I’m excited to see what our semester holds as we continue with Madeline’s Kindergarten year!