Here are some pictures of Lola's Lapbook.
Showing posts with label school stuff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label school stuff. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Lola's Election Unit
In honor of the election last week Lola and I did a Literature unit based on the book Ballot Box Battle. We learned a great deal about the history of the Women's Suffrage movement here in the USA, along with lots about Elizabeth Cady Stanton. We also did some research about the (then) current presidential candidates, looked into what the job of President actually involved and the historical nature of this election. The unit culminated with watching President-elect Obama's speech late on Tuesday night. Lola was excited that 'her' candidate won....competitive as ever!
Here are some pictures of Lola's Lapbook.
Here are some pictures of Lola's Lapbook.
Our leaf unit!
We had a great time on our leaf unit a few weeks back. We read lots of books about leaves and fall. We learnt about photosynthesis, types of trees and types of trees. We had fun looking at leaves and using them in our art activities. Here are some pictures!
Lola's Front cover.
Inside Lola's Lapbook.
Tayo's Front Cover.
Inside Tayo's Lapbook.
Playing in the leaves is so much fun!
Cracking Pecans we picked!
Funny faces!
All the books we read this week.
Fall in our neighborhood.
This tree was just spectacular up close...
Lola's Front cover.
Inside Lola's Lapbook.
Tayo's Front Cover.
Inside Tayo's Lapbook.
Playing in the leaves is so much fun!
Cracking Pecans we picked!
Funny faces!
All the books we read this week.
Fall in our neighborhood.
This tree was just spectacular up close...Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Our Chocolate Unit!
We had such a great time with our unit on Chocolate! It was another from Homeschool Share... Here are some of the yummy highlights!
I surprised the kids with a chocolate breakfast - chocolate bread straight from the bread machine along with chocolate milk! What a great start to the day!
Chocolate math!
Making Chocolate pudding.
Making chocolate from scratch -
lots of stirring involved and it certainly helped us exercise our patience!
I surprised the kids with a chocolate breakfast - chocolate bread straight from the bread machine along with chocolate milk! What a great start to the day!
Chocolate math!
Making Chocolate pudding.
Eating the most delicious chocolate pudding I have ever tasted!
Making chocolate from scratch -
lots of stirring involved and it certainly helped us exercise our patience!
Monday, August 25, 2008
A week in review...
We are already in week four of school can you believe it. We've a had a great time so far and I just thought I'd update what we've been doing. We have just finished a great two week unit from Homeschool Share on Dinosaurs which we all had a great time with. I will add pictures of the lapbooks they created at the end of this post. As for their individual work:
Lola - She is doing great with Multiplication, MUS still seems to be the best math program around here! She continues to work on her Cursive handwriting with HWOT and regular copywork is helping her learn to tale her time and produce neat work which is an area she needs to really concentrate on. She is doing well (and loving it too!) with Sequential Spelling. Generally speaking she is a reluctant speller - tending to not want to try to spell a word she is unsure of in case she makes a mistake, but this program is already helping her with her confidence and teaching the spelling rules gives her the skills she needs to tackle spelling any word. I would definitely recommend this program to others.
Rod and Staff English is another new curriculum this year and Lola is being challenged by this is a good way. It is at a pretty high level and coming from First Language Lessons last year which is a gentle introduction to English this is a bit different. She is getting the hang of this workbook style curriculum and although it is taking her a bit longer than she is used to each day, all in all it is a good fit. I like it anyway!
We have begun to use a new language program that I found online and Lola decided against learning Spanish and opted instead for French. Since she was interested in this and motivated to learn I went with it. This is a great site and has saved us the $300 we were planning on spending on Rosetta Stone (at least for now). Lola loves her time on the computer each day and since it emails me weekly reports I can see how she is progressing. The good thing about her wanting to learn French is that I took this in school so it is coming back to me - I can quiz her a bit which is something I have never been able to do when we were doing Spanish. Lola originally wanted to learn Japanese like her babysitter (she speaks fluent Japanese, is studying it at college and just came back from a trip there) but after trying to take the first lesson we decided to wait a few more years. The Japanese word for boy must have been at least 20 letters long! eek!
As for writing we are trying a few different things I am giving her two writing assignments each week which may include book reports, journal entries, blog entries, creative writing exercises or written narrations. I have also found a creative writing program that I may try with her. I am still playing with ideas for this, but as it is my main area of focus for her this year I am sure it is something we will be doing lots more of.
Tayo - Tayo is doing great with MUS Alpha. Lots of it is review of the Primer program we did last year so she is speeding through it so far. Math seems to be a strength of hers. She is working slowly through Reading Made Easy at a a pace of half a lesson per day three times per week. Other reading activities we are doing include reading Bob books and other readers, worksheets and online reading programs like Starfall. She is making great progress and surprises me at times as I don't think she is getting it at all and then the next day she reads something I thought she'd never get.
Handwriting is a favorite subject of Tayo's and she loves her HWOT Printing Power book, if she could she'd do at least two of these per day! I will be starting some copywork with her soon.
Niyi - Of course he is not in school right now, but I have been making sure I spend a part of the morning reading with him each day and he really seems to be enjoying it! The past week we have been reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear and doing a few activities related to this. He is doing well at learning his colors and can name all the animals in the book. We will continue with this book for a little while longer and I plan on making a Tot Book to go along with this as well. Niyi really enjoys our circle time and sits well for stories too. So all in all he is doing great!
Other subjects - We began Mystery of History last week and I plan on using this jut as a read aloud. I may add in a few of the activities if they seem interesting, but right now I think this is plenty. I like that the reading itself is pretty short, and I get both s to narrate back to me once we are done. Art has not yet begun as things seemed to get in the way of it, but I plan on it being a twice weekly thing. We will participate in Sketch Tuesday and also do a lesson per week possible related to our artist study of the time. I hope things allow us to begin this week!Our current read aloud is Alice in Wonderland and the s are enjoying this!
So that's about it! Life is definitely busy this year with two in school a rambunctious toddler and a newborn, but we have settled in well and are getting lots accomplished.
Now here are some pictures of our Dino lapbooks. We learnt lots with this unit and the kids can now pretty much identify most dinosaurs (well the ones we studied in depth anyway!). We discussed Creation and the Great Flood, learned that there is at least one dinosaur mentioned in the bible, discussed reptiles and their characteristics and began our Animal classification notebook. We also researched a number of the dinosaurs and made a book about them. We had a dino-packed two weeks!
The s playing Dino Concentration memory game.
The two finished lapbooks plus Lola's book of Dino research.
Inside the first flap of the double lapbook - minit books about Behemoth, reptiles, Paleontologists, a map noting where Dino fossils of specific Dino's have been found, Dino cards and a wheel noting what could have happened after the flood.
The second flap with the six days of creation minit book, a chart of Dino heights, and a book about the dinosaur diet.
Dino height chart opened up
Various minit books opened out.
Lola - She is doing great with Multiplication, MUS still seems to be the best math program around here! She continues to work on her Cursive handwriting with HWOT and regular copywork is helping her learn to tale her time and produce neat work which is an area she needs to really concentrate on. She is doing well (and loving it too!) with Sequential Spelling. Generally speaking she is a reluctant speller - tending to not want to try to spell a word she is unsure of in case she makes a mistake, but this program is already helping her with her confidence and teaching the spelling rules gives her the skills she needs to tackle spelling any word. I would definitely recommend this program to others.
Rod and Staff English is another new curriculum this year and Lola is being challenged by this is a good way. It is at a pretty high level and coming from First Language Lessons last year which is a gentle introduction to English this is a bit different. She is getting the hang of this workbook style curriculum and although it is taking her a bit longer than she is used to each day, all in all it is a good fit. I like it anyway!
We have begun to use a new language program that I found online and Lola decided against learning Spanish and opted instead for French. Since she was interested in this and motivated to learn I went with it. This is a great site and has saved us the $300 we were planning on spending on Rosetta Stone (at least for now). Lola loves her time on the computer each day and since it emails me weekly reports I can see how she is progressing. The good thing about her wanting to learn French is that I took this in school so it is coming back to me - I can quiz her a bit which is something I have never been able to do when we were doing Spanish. Lola originally wanted to learn Japanese like her babysitter (she speaks fluent Japanese, is studying it at college and just came back from a trip there) but after trying to take the first lesson we decided to wait a few more years. The Japanese word for boy must have been at least 20 letters long! eek!
As for writing we are trying a few different things I am giving her two writing assignments each week which may include book reports, journal entries, blog entries, creative writing exercises or written narrations. I have also found a creative writing program that I may try with her. I am still playing with ideas for this, but as it is my main area of focus for her this year I am sure it is something we will be doing lots more of.
Tayo - Tayo is doing great with MUS Alpha. Lots of it is review of the Primer program we did last year so she is speeding through it so far. Math seems to be a strength of hers. She is working slowly through Reading Made Easy at a a pace of half a lesson per day three times per week. Other reading activities we are doing include reading Bob books and other readers, worksheets and online reading programs like Starfall. She is making great progress and surprises me at times as I don't think she is getting it at all and then the next day she reads something I thought she'd never get.
Handwriting is a favorite subject of Tayo's and she loves her HWOT Printing Power book, if she could she'd do at least two of these per day! I will be starting some copywork with her soon.
Niyi - Of course he is not in school right now, but I have been making sure I spend a part of the morning reading with him each day and he really seems to be enjoying it! The past week we have been reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear and doing a few activities related to this. He is doing well at learning his colors and can name all the animals in the book. We will continue with this book for a little while longer and I plan on making a Tot Book to go along with this as well. Niyi really enjoys our circle time and sits well for stories too. So all in all he is doing great!
Other subjects - We began Mystery of History last week and I plan on using this jut as a read aloud. I may add in a few of the activities if they seem interesting, but right now I think this is plenty. I like that the reading itself is pretty short, and I get both s to narrate back to me once we are done. Art has not yet begun as things seemed to get in the way of it, but I plan on it being a twice weekly thing. We will participate in Sketch Tuesday and also do a lesson per week possible related to our artist study of the time. I hope things allow us to begin this week!Our current read aloud is Alice in Wonderland and the s are enjoying this!
So that's about it! Life is definitely busy this year with two in school a rambunctious toddler and a newborn, but we have settled in well and are getting lots accomplished.
Now here are some pictures of our Dino lapbooks. We learnt lots with this unit and the kids can now pretty much identify most dinosaurs (well the ones we studied in depth anyway!). We discussed Creation and the Great Flood, learned that there is at least one dinosaur mentioned in the bible, discussed reptiles and their characteristics and began our Animal classification notebook. We also researched a number of the dinosaurs and made a book about them. We had a dino-packed two weeks!
The s playing Dino Concentration memory game.
The two finished lapbooks plus Lola's book of Dino research.
Inside the first flap of the double lapbook - minit books about Behemoth, reptiles, Paleontologists, a map noting where Dino fossils of specific Dino's have been found, Dino cards and a wheel noting what could have happened after the flood.
The second flap with the six days of creation minit book, a chart of Dino heights, and a book about the dinosaur diet.
Dino height chart opened up
Various minit books opened out.Monday, August 11, 2008
Our first week of school...
We're back with a full school schedule and had a great time last week! The week started off slowly with unanticipated trip to the grocery store and day out with Daddy so really we did just three days last week but that was a good thing after all as we were all wiped out anyway! We have been enjoying our Olympics unit and I hope to post pictures of our completed lapbooks tomorrow once we get them finished off. We have learnt all kinds of great things about the Olympics, China and sport and had so much fun on Friday - we cooked a Chinese meal and tried (and failed!) to eat it with our chopsticks and watched the opening ceremony. If you didn't get to see it I would definitely encourage you to find it online - it was AWESOME! England is going to really do some work to top that in four years!
Here are some pictures of our week!
Here are some pictures of our week!
Kemi enjoying tummy-time!
We finished up our ice cream unit with an ice cream soda! Yummy!
Yum-O! Ice cream is so tasty!
Niyi is was so tired he fell asleep in Tayo's bed the other morning!
Lola got her hair cut! The first time ever - and she looks beautiful!
Circle Time:
I enjoy reading a blog entitled Preschoolers and Peace and got the idea for Circle time from Kendra. You can read about the idea here, but basically it is a time in the day where I get all my children (eventually it will be all four) together to start our day! When I began implementing this I wasn't sure if it would work out for us, but it is a huge hit around here! No matter what the kids are doing when I shout "circle time!" they come running! We have been playing with this for a few weeks now and I think we have figured out how it is going to work best for us.
Each circle time starts out the same with Praise and Worship, with lots of vigorous dancing, and a time of prayer. We then move on to bible time, either a devotional (right now we are talking about anger and how to deal with it) or a story from the bible with coloring sheets. I am planning on switching up this bible time to fit what we need to work on. We may work on character stuff with these character lapbooks, study select proverbs or parables or read through chronologically. After this we work on memory verses, then each day we do something a little different. On Mondays we do some math drills and talk about the upcoming week (my expectations, any assignments or trips out etc), on Tuesdays it is poetry and Spanish drills, Wednesdays are map work and another poem, Thursdays we will work on our Mystery of History index cards for memory work and read another poem and Friday is Artist Study and math games.
I have tried and failed many times to fit Artist and Poetry studies into our day, so circle time seems to be the answer for me. I am planning an artist, a poet and a composer to last six weeks. Right now we are studying Van Gogh, Robert Louis Stevenson and Bach (we are not listening to Bach during circle time, but during lunch). We are doing this in a very laid back way just as Charlotte Mason encourages us to, I am providing the books and the CD's and we are enjoying them. Occasionally I may read from biographies, but mostly we focus on enjoying the art...
The pictures below were taken on Friday - we are studying Van Gogh right now and the kids spent over 30 minutes just enjoying the books. We found some great little books called Touch the Art at our library and that is what you see the kids enjoying along with some other art books.
I enjoy reading a blog entitled Preschoolers and Peace and got the idea for Circle time from Kendra. You can read about the idea here, but basically it is a time in the day where I get all my children (eventually it will be all four) together to start our day! When I began implementing this I wasn't sure if it would work out for us, but it is a huge hit around here! No matter what the kids are doing when I shout "circle time!" they come running! We have been playing with this for a few weeks now and I think we have figured out how it is going to work best for us.
Each circle time starts out the same with Praise and Worship, with lots of vigorous dancing, and a time of prayer. We then move on to bible time, either a devotional (right now we are talking about anger and how to deal with it) or a story from the bible with coloring sheets. I am planning on switching up this bible time to fit what we need to work on. We may work on character stuff with these character lapbooks, study select proverbs or parables or read through chronologically. After this we work on memory verses, then each day we do something a little different. On Mondays we do some math drills and talk about the upcoming week (my expectations, any assignments or trips out etc), on Tuesdays it is poetry and Spanish drills, Wednesdays are map work and another poem, Thursdays we will work on our Mystery of History index cards for memory work and read another poem and Friday is Artist Study and math games.
I have tried and failed many times to fit Artist and Poetry studies into our day, so circle time seems to be the answer for me. I am planning an artist, a poet and a composer to last six weeks. Right now we are studying Van Gogh, Robert Louis Stevenson and Bach (we are not listening to Bach during circle time, but during lunch). We are doing this in a very laid back way just as Charlotte Mason encourages us to, I am providing the books and the CD's and we are enjoying them. Occasionally I may read from biographies, but mostly we focus on enjoying the art...
The pictures below were taken on Friday - we are studying Van Gogh right now and the kids spent over 30 minutes just enjoying the books. We found some great little books called Touch the Art at our library and that is what you see the kids enjoying along with some other art books.
Even Niyi can appreciate a good piece of artwork!
I am trying to keep the books out on display.So that has been one very busy week in one very small nutshell! See you soon!
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Our Tornado lapbook...
Front covers
Inside of Lola's
Inside of Tayo's
Our Tornado project
Our 'pet' Tornado!Well despite having a new baby in the house we have been getting a fair bit of school done and we have just finished our Tornado lapbook. We used the unit found at homeschool share and had a great time doing it. Here are some pictures of our finished product. You can find instructions for making a pet tornado here.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Lola's Writing Curriculum
My focus for next year's Language Arts is to really get Lola writing well. A friend of mine told me that she was planning on getting her son a blog to practice writing and since I love to blog I immediately thought that was a super plan!
Of course when discussing next years plans with Lola I mentioned this and she jumped on the idea, so I agreed that we could start one this year. So far we have just done a few things, but to my amazement she is just loving it! I require her to write the piece out first on paper, then we go through it for errors in grammar, spelling and composition and once that is done, only then can she post it on her blog. This week she wrote a short piece about our field trip and did great. I required a minimum of four sentences and she gave me more than that without complaints (and remember getting this girl to write can sometimes be worse than pulling teeth!) I think we are on to a winner here!
So far my plans for this are book reviews, field trip reports and short stories, but I can see it growing to far more things once we really get going!
Here is Lola's blog...
Of course when discussing next years plans with Lola I mentioned this and she jumped on the idea, so I agreed that we could start one this year. So far we have just done a few things, but to my amazement she is just loving it! I require her to write the piece out first on paper, then we go through it for errors in grammar, spelling and composition and once that is done, only then can she post it on her blog. This week she wrote a short piece about our field trip and did great. I required a minimum of four sentences and she gave me more than that without complaints (and remember getting this girl to write can sometimes be worse than pulling teeth!) I think we are on to a winner here!
So far my plans for this are book reviews, field trip reports and short stories, but I can see it growing to far more things once we really get going!
Here is Lola's blog...
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