Common nouns, proper nouns, and the United States of America

The Boy is reviewing the differences between common nouns and proper nouns and one of his lessons centers on the state he lives in.


"I live in ___________."
"____________ is a proper noun."


Then we discussed the fact that Hawaii is a state and that there are 50 states. We discussed the fact that the word "state" is a common noun and that "Hawaii" is a proper noun because it is the name of a state.


We have a floor map puzzle of the United States so we brought it out and put it together and talked about the states where friends and family members live.








Which led into a game of "Guess which state is missing."





Which led into a nice discussion about where we'd all like to live next. Short day today and we are now off to the library and Jamba Juice! Yay for Tuesdays!





Pau.





- hfs

Building the Nile

Currently, we are in the midst of ancient history - working our way from the earliest nomads to the last Roman Emperor. One of our lessons in our history text, Story of the World, was on the Nile river. There are a variety of activities to be had at the end of each lesson and we chose to build a model of the Nile river.


Here is The Girl with her river. We will "flood" them once a week and watch in hopes that the grass grows along its "banks".



This is The Boy and his Nile river. I"m not sure if they had more fun collecting the rocks and pebbles to line the model or "flooding" the river!



This week, we are making our own cuneiform tablets and learning about the first forms of writing. Next week we will move on to PYRAMIDS!!!


I also stumbled across a wonderful blog by another homeschooling mom named Carrie. Her blog, "Live, Learn, and Love Together" is an incredible resource of homeschooling ideas and insight. So I did what any creatively-challenged homeschooling mom would do and "borrowed" some of her great ideas! Her idea for an Independent Notebook/Folder was perfectly timed - we were having trouble making the transition from waking up/breakfast to school and the notebook idea fit right in! And her pictures of the projects that her children did when working through Story of the World, Volume 1 help me think beyond just the basics (compare her pictures of their Nile rivers to the pictures of OUR Nile rivers and you'll see what I'm talking about! She's much more creative than I am.).


So thanks, Carrie, for the incredible resource that is your blog!


For now, it's quiet time here in our house so I'm off to read a book!




Pau.




- hfs

Curricula

Rather than delve into the reasons why we've chosen to homeschool, I'd much rather discuss what curricula we are using - it's just much more interesting and muce less stressful. For as different as The Boy and The Girl can be, their learning styles are similar which is a blessing. It's made it pretty easy to choose curriculum and kept me from having to buy different ones for each of them in each subject.


Keep in mind, we're only 2 weeks into the year (our first) so I don't have a lot to say about most of our choices at this point. We are what you would call an "eclectic classical homeschooling family" meaning we are implementing a classical education but we're not using an "out of the box" curriculum. In case you're wondering what a "classical education" is, it is based on a three-part process of training the mind called the trivium. The trivium involves three stages: the grammar stage (K-5), the logic stage (6-8), and the rhetoric stage (9-12). According to the website, The Well-Trained Mind,

Classical education is language-focused; learning is accomplished through words, written and spoken, rather than through images (pictures, videos, and television).

With that in mind, and my well-worn copy of "The Well-Trained Mind" in hand, here are the choices I made for curricula:


LANGUAGE:
Writing: The Complete Writer/Writing with Ease (1 & 4)
Grammar: First Language Lessons (1 & 4)
Spelling: Spelling Workout (A & E)*

MATH:
Math-U-See (Alpha and Gamma)**

HISTORY/GEOGRAPHY:
The Story of the World: Volume 1 - Ancient Times

SCIENCE:
Real Science 4 Kids - Chemistry (Pre-Level 1 & Level 1)

FOREIGN LANGUAGE:
Latin for Children (Song School & Level A)***


* ~ The Girl is quite good with words - in any format. Spelling has never been a challenge for her and, in looking at the 4th grade spelling book, I knew she'd get bored with it. So I bumped her up to the 5th grade book and she's enjoying the more difficult words. The Boy was also bored with the "easy words" that he was dealing with in Kindergarten so I didn't hesitate to jump ahead several lessons in his book to words that were more challenging. For both of them, I let them take a pretest at the beginning of the week (without having looked at the book). If they spell all of the words correctly, they do not have to do the spelling lesson and are free to either use that time to read or they can move on to the next lesson - it's their choice.


** ~ Though The Girl is good with words, her math skills are shaky. I'd get into the reasons why but that is another post/rant for another day. Suffice it to say, she needed more work on multiplication so I ordered the Gamma curriculum from Math-U-See, even though that is *technically* a 3rd grade level of math. They take a pretest at the beginning of the lesson and if they score 90% or higher on the pretest, they are free to move on to the next lesson. Each lesson comes with 6 worksheets - 3 that are nothing but problems from the lesson and 3 that have problems from the lesson AND review problems from previous lessons. The first 3 worksheets are required (assuming they don't test out of the lesson). The remaining 3 worksheets are optional. A score of 90% or higher on the lesson test is required before we move on to the next lesson. The nice thing about Math-U-See is that I can go to the website and generate more worksheets if either of them needs the additional practice.


*** ~ I have not yet decided whether we are going to dive into a foreign language this year or not. I don't want to overwhelm either my children or myself. We're all of two weeks into this school year and, while the days have been short and relatively easy thus far, I know we haven't really gotten into the meat of it all just yet. Nor have we started Co-Op yet so that will be another factor to consider before we try to tackle yet another subject. We'll see.


So those are our curriculum choices for the year. We are also a part of a local homeschool cooperative (henceforth known as "The Co-Op") that I've actually been involved with for a few years. While my children were in public school, I taught PE and facilitated a high school Anatomy class for The Co-Op which is made up of many of my friends from church. This year, we'll be doing PE, Chemistry, art/crafts, and a writing workshop (Institute for Excellence in Writing). That should round out our year!




Pau.




- hfs

The adventure begins

In for a penny, in for a pound I suppose. When you've already created 9 different blogs, what's one more, right? I figured I needed a way to chronicle our homeschooling adventures and what better way to do so than in front of God and the rest of the world via the internet?


So here we are. MacGyver and I decided to homeschool The Girl and The Boy this year for reasons that I will delve into in a later post. We've committed (yes, I think that word might have more than one meaning for us in the coming months) to doing so for one school year. After that, we'll re-evaluate where we stand (literally, figuratively, etc.) and decide whether we want to continue homeschooling or put The Boy and The Girl back into a "regular" school setting.


Some of the topics I want to cover on this blog are our reasons for deciding to homeschool, the different curricula that we have chosen to use, different books that I have read or am reading that have played a part in this decision, and some of the topics that are often debated when it comes to homeschooling.


For now, I'll wrap this up because there is a model of the Nile River that needs to be created.




Pau.




- hfs