Saturday, February 1, 2014

Homeschool Week in Review: On the Go

Jan 27-31
Man this was  a difficult week to stick to our school schedule!  Our house is for sale and we had three showings and a Realtor Tour.  I don't think we had even one full day at home.  We had to get a little creative to fit school in.

Bible
I have gone back and forth and tried out all sorts of ideas for what to do about Bible learning in our homeschool.  This week I finally decided to go with Good Morning Girls as their kid's study mirrors mine. If you sign up for their e-mails, the links at the bottom of the e-mails have the adult and kid's studies.

I print off the bookmark for the week's reading and my daughter keeps it in her Bible.  After breakfast she is to look up the Scripture for the day and then write out her S.O.A.P. verse in her Bible notebook.  Then when we start school I read it again to everyone and we talk about and do the activities in the study guide.

Math
We use Rod & Staff.  This week I started backing off on some of the instruction time unless they are introducing a new concept.  I'm still trying to find a happy balance between daily work on memorization skills and overwhelming my daughter because it's written for a classroom she's my only student and therefore gets the entire focus rather than distributing the work between multiple students.  We also don't do all of the writing in the workbook.  I allow her to "build" her answers with felt or foam blocks and beads or to just answer orally.

Literature
We worked on finishing Charlotte's Web this week in preparation for an Ocean Unit Study we are starting in February.  We made a lap book for Charlotte's Web, our first, and it really revealed a passion in all of us to continue on with that sort of thing.

One of the perks of homeschooling, I still get to participate in Art class!

The kids love re-reading their Narrations and checking out the activities they have put together.



We learned more about spiders one day which resulted in all of us getting distracted this week when a spider kept falling off the bathroom ceiling because the steam made it lose it's grip.  We watched it catch itself with it's web multiple times and climb back up.  I blew it over to the wall at one point and with the help of a magnifying glass we identified the eyes and spinnerets and talked about what kind of spider it was.  Then it fell again and barely brushed my daughter's hand and the fun was over! 

Unit Study
This is new territory for us.  We follow Ambleside Online and like it but we just felt like we needed something else. I'm not very good about doing Nature Study consistently, or Handicrafts.  So our curriculum was a little lackluster.  As I said above we recently jumped into a lapbook which lead to the idea of doing a Unit Study.  My daughter was reading a book on sharks that one of her siblings had picked up at the library and was super interested in them.  Which led to the idea of doing an Ocean Unit Study.  To say we are excited about it is an understatement.  She's been telling friends about it and poring over the books I've gathered.


She's helped me plan activities and come up with some great ideas.  I'm putting together a 6 week unit study that I'll be sharing as we go.  In fact, it will be the majority of my weekly review for awhile.

Creative Schooling
This week we ended up doing school at grandma's house and in a quiet room after Co-op.


We dumped money out on the floor and talked about the coins and what they were worth. We put together a book called All About Me.  My daughter saw one that my mom saved from when I was 6 and wanted to make one of her own.


 And we read books.  For being so unstructured, I am pretty pleased with how much we have learned.


What did you do this week?


Want to see more of how others homeschool weeks went?  I'm linked up athttp://www.greatpeaceacademy.com/2014/02/this-week-homeschool-goes-on.html

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Katrina!
For having so much Realty activity you did a lot. Using co-op facilities was brilliant. Looking forward to seeing your Ocean unit. I love units! We are doing Swimming Creatures this year from Apologia so I'm looking forward to seeing what I can gather from your plans.
Thanks for linking up "This Week @ Great Peace Academy"

As He Leads is Joy said...

Glad you are having some showings on the house. I will pray it sells quickly. It looks like you were creative in where you did school. I love your daughter's excitement about the ocean study.

Rosevine Cottage Girls said...

we nominated you for the Liebster Award, here is the link to the Award. Blessings ~ The Rosevine Cottage Girls

http://rosevinecottagegirls.blogspot.com/2014/03/ive-been-nominated-for-rom