Summer Planning Part I

Our first week of summer vacation! I'm doing a lot of brain storming for the upcoming school year.
I know what it is that we are doing, I just want to do some things a little different.

For A8 the 3rd grade is really a transition year. She will leave behind the things she's been doing for the first three years of school and move into things she is going to start doing in the last three years of elementary school.

For the first 3 years the focus was on learning to read, learning to write and of course math.
In third grade we will start to go in another direction. Now that she can read and write, she will use those things to broaden her learning horizons so to speak. She will be learning how to assimilate information, more specifically, information she gets from reading a book herself.

We are still going to do FIAR and lapbooks, but we'll be adding chapter books as well.

The chapter books she will be reading are part of our American history course. I don't want to do lapbooks for these books, I want something different. I'm looking into this resource book: Better Than Book Reports: More Than 40 Creative Responses to Literature. Hopefully this book will help us find different ways to present the information she will be learning from the My America books.

Like I said, it's going to be a transition year for her. As for X5, things are not going to change too much for him. We'll be doing math, phonics and lots of reading a loud with FIAR. The lapbooks will look different than hers just because he can't read or write yet. I need to come up with simpler things than she had for his lapbooks. A lot of the lessons will be oral, just like I did with her during her K year.

I've been told many times by homeschoolers with boys that they are usually behind girls when it comes to reading, but will catch up by 4th or 5th grade. I will trust the wisdom of these mothers and not panic... yet! ha ha!!

End of Clubs Picnic

This Saturday is our last Club activity, our end of clubs picnic. Normally we have a Camp out for the older kids and a picnic for the younger ones. This year not enough funds or people to have a camp out, so we decided to have everybody come to the picnic instead.

It looks like it is going to rain on Saturday, I'm really hoping it won't start raining till the evening. The picnic is from 12 to 4.

It is wonderful to see another Club year come to an end. We have some ideas on what to do for next year. Some leaders are leaving, hopefully most are coming back. What a blessing it is to have a Pastor who is really taking a interest in making Clubs better.
Enjoy the Summer brake everybody... we'll see you back in September!!

End of School

Last Week of School

Our last week of school, we have been doing our dinosaur unit study. The kids are really enjoying it! This week we are finishing the fact files activities. We took a day off last week, which means one extra day this week. We should be done with everything by Thursday, unless the kids decided to do everything in the next two days!

A8 had her evaluation, I think it went very well. Now that she is entering the third grade we have to let the local school district know she is going to be hhomeschooled. I need to send them a notarized affidavit stating she is staying home plus I need to list the objectives for third grade. At the end of the year I need to get her evaluated and she needs to take a test. Followed by a portfolio of work she's done throughout the year, plus we need to show we did school for 180 days... they don't need to know what we did each day, just show that we did school for that long.

Thankfully I've been doing all of this since she was in grade K, I wanted to get comfortable with the whole process before having to actually do it for real... The only thing I haven't done is the test. I'm going to get it online and give it to her myself just so she knows what to expect next year.

So that is it! that is all for now, we are going to take the rest of May off and I will start my planning for next Fall in June!!!(ha! no, I don't buy that either!)

School Week 35 & 36

Here we are, last two weeks of school. Both kids are done with math and handwriting, A8 is done with her spelling and language lessons book and she has one week left of vocabulary.

Both kids will be working on a Dinosaur unit study from Learning Page.com is very much like the other ones we've done in the past. We have fact files on all the different dinosaurs, we'll be doing a mural, which means the kids will be coloring all our dinos and pasting them to the mural. Then, they'll get to do different activities based on the fact files... science, lang. arts and of course math. The activity sheets are by grade, so I have activities for both K and 2nd grade.

I also have The Field Guide to Dinosaurs to read a loud and a movie. I really want the kids to watch Jurassic Park. I think it's PG13 but if I can skip the dinosaurs eating people parts it should be okay for them to watch.. I love this movie and can't think of anything better for them to enjoy dinosaurs!!!

This unit study is not going to take two full weeks, however we have three school days that haven't been counted this year(two COOP days and one field trip), so I decided to count them at the end of the year. So we'll be officially done with school on Tuesday of week 36.

After that we'll do nothing for the rest of May and come June both kids will have one day a week of review, handwriting for X5, reading, writing and math for A8. As for me, I will start my gathering(printing) of activities for each weekly folder in June. I am very much looking forward to sunny days at the pool!!

School Week 34

This week we are rowing our last FIAR book of the year, Wee Gillis. It's a short book with a really good message! it's about an orphan with a tough decision to make: whether to live with his mother's relatives in the Lowlands and raise long-haired cows or his father's relatives in the Highlands and stalk stags.

Geography: Scotland, highlanders, lowlanders
Lang. Arts. copy work, days of the week, months of the year
Science: bagpipes, lungs, fog

X5 is also rowing his last book, The Little Engine that Could.

Two weeks of school left!!!!