Thursday, June 17, 2010

Journal Update

The notebooking journal for My America books is done! I created 114 pages for 15 books. I will be taking it to Staples to get it spiral bound!

Yes, this is the cover of the journal! I was able to make it into a pdf file for when I need to use it with X5.

It was a lot of work, I spent 3 to 4 hours a day just working on it. I was obsessed! I now need a nice long brake from my computer...

By the way, we are all set to go for next year! I went to our local school district office and brought all the paper work needed to homeschool A8 next Fall since she is now going into the 3rd grade.

They were very helpful and pretty much told me how easy they make it for homeschoolers in this area. They don't require too much of us which is great. Even better news, I can administer the end of year test myself, no need to go some place else for it!

Friday, June 11, 2010

Oops..Update

I haven't blogged for a while so here is an update on what we've been up to in the last couple of weeks. The kids are enjoying their summer now that the neighbor kids are done with school as well. The pool is open but it's been raining, hopefully today we can go since tomorrow it's supposed to rain again.

I have all of A8's lapbooks done! Like I said before, she has 16 FIAR Vol 4 books to do lapbooks for and they are all done!

X5 has 34 books, however I am not doing a lapbook for every book. Some books will have coloring pages, others will have games, art projects and for a couple of books we are just going to read and enjoy, no activities. I'm 3/4 of the way done with X5"s lapbooks.... a few more to do and I'll be done!

I've come up with great ideas for American history using My America books. I'm going to do a journal style notebook, just like the ones from Apologia elementary science. There will be questions about the books, she will get to draw in some pages and I will have a few lapbook type mini books. I will also have pages with historical names.. for example in the Jamestown books Pocahontas and John Smith are mentioned. I can have a page where she gets to write a few sentences about who these people were.

This journal is going to be a sweet challenge for me! I haven't decided whether to do it in a three hole binder or to have the whole thing spiral bound. We shall wait and see how this thing ends up looking like!

For X5 I'm going to be working on how to make Reading Made Easy a fit for him. This coming school year is going to be all about getting him to start reading!