The start of our schooling journey...

We are going to do a little work on Thursday and Friday, learning to use the World Book Encyclopedia that I uploaded this past week. What a fun program. It has tons of videos, music, maps and of course information on all sorts of subjects. I think it's pretty easy to use myself, but I have to teach them how to search on it.

We will start with the Pacific Islands and then Australia. We will be reading The Other Side of Heaven, searching up info on the countries that make up those areas, they will pick an adventure project to do such as hosting a luau or researching volcanoes and making one. We will try some of their foods by making pasties, dandenong squares (a type of date cookie), rock cakes, yaki udon-a chicken/vegetable/noodle dish and some fish dinners. I found this great book called the Multicultural Cookbook for Students that sorts recipes by country. I also plan for us to make didgeridoos out of PVC decorating them with old aboriginal symbols.

This should be fun!

A little update of sorts....

Horray for some days of rain, but if it would keep gone this week (or atleast in the evening) I'd be glad and so would all the soccer kids that are excited to be attending camp this week. This includes my daughter. Little Man doesn't want to now, but true to form, he'll want to once he sees the other kids there. Tall Girl is so rediculously skinny that I've started making her nutritional milkshakes to drink each day. She eats like a bird most days (with soccer season coming on that won't last long).

School is almost over. We've got three weeks to finish four weeks! We are doubling up this week, doing weeks 33 and 34 in 5 days. The kids finished in record time today and with a great attitude to boot. They are glad to be finishing up and heading out on vacation for the next two weeks. We plan on seeing the Arch in St. Louis and probably riding the riverboat since they both have historic info on the time period around the 1800's which is where we've ended in our studies this year. Then it's on to historic Nauvoo where we'll sleep in a restored 1700's cabin and see bricks made, gunsmithing, shoe making, blacksmithing, bakeries, the temple, etc. I can't wait for that.

After our visit there, we'll head over to Cleveland to visit family and a few museums while we are there. It will be nice seeing everyone. We haven't been in a few years and they'll be surprised to see how big the kids have gotten! From there we'll head back home with a couple of stops on the way. It's going to be fun!

One place I'm wanting to stop if it doesn't rain too much is Squire Boone Caverns. The kids love cave formations. We've seen parts of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky and plan to do more. This one is supposed to be really neat.

Time to get dinner going....I have no idea what, but I'm sure with all the food storage I have, I can come up with something!

Outrageous!

I saw this news headline this morning on a website I visit. A girl was disrobed and search for Ibuprofen...

Many schools in this nation are absolutely ridiculous in what they can do. Recently a coach paddled multiple boys for 'wearing the wrong shorts' to class. He left bruises on them. If we paddled our children and left bruises on them, the schools are instructed to call CPS and report. Yet they can legally do that to your children. I don't think so...at least not with our children!

Another reason I homeschool...I don't trust the 'government' to raise our children the way I see fit since they seem to be doing such a great job already!

Odds and Ends...

The refrigerator dairy door came in a couple of days ago. It fits, but I'm still planning on writing to the company. Plus I think something is wrong with both of the units I just bought. Great.



We'll start school again next week. Back to the grind, but the kids are glad (to some extent!).

Thanks Hurricane Humberto!

Here's the weather in our neck of the woods today. YUCK! So no soccer practice today as of right now...bummer, since my team doesn't practice but once a week...and today is that day...

I have to run out and feed all my animals in this mess in a minute. I'm normally done by 8 am, but I've been putting it off to see if it'll clear up a little...no such luck so far. I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and head out there. (where's the rolling eyes icon when you need one!?)

We're going to take today and catch up on some reading for school and I've got to bake some more bread.

Art...

We started their new Art book today. I like this program. It's called Artistic Pursuits. There are different books for different age levels and the artwork they use can be found in the National Gallery of Arts. Chagall, Monet, Jean-Baptiste, Renoir, Signac are just a few of the ones that we'll be seeing in our book this year.

Today we studied a picture from Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot called 'The Pond', a painting of a tree lined pond with a few cows being watered and cooled off by a man sitting under some trees, who you didn't really notice except he had a small red cap on . I pulled up some of his paintings from the National Gallery of Art. That is a neat website. We talked about the details in the painting and then they were to go outside, sketch pad and pencils in hand, and find detailed things in nature...leaves, twigs, insects and then moving on up to bird's nests, trees, cloud formations, and animals. They were to draw some of the things they saw. I think they did rather well!

First day of school...

Most kids started school here on Friday the 10th, but we were a bit busy around that time and I knew we'd be busy the next week as well. So I told the kids that we would start this week. Plus I still had to organize all the books by order of usage in the curriculum so it would be easy to just grab the next one needed. I didn't do that last year and it was a bit of a pain.

We will be studying the following this year:

History:

• Fall of Rome


• Vikings


• Knights and Castles


• Religions


• Europe and Africa in the Middle Ages


• The Crusades


• 100 Years war


• Mongols


• Trade between Europe and Asia


• Gunpowder, the Compass, Printing Press


• Discovery of America and the Explorers


• Incas, Aztecs, Mayans


• Renaissance


• Reformation


• Science and Inventions


• Elizabethan Age


• Kings of England and France


• American Colonies


• Thirty Years War


• Parliament


• China and Japan


• American and French Revolutions


• Pirates, Highwaymen and Smugglers


• New Nations and Ways of Governing


• South America


• Crimean, Franco-Prussian War, American Civil War


• Europeans in Africa, India, Australia


• Industrial and Agricultural Revolution


• Transport and Travel


• Indians and Settlers in North America


• World War 1 and 2, Great Depression


• United Nations, Russian Revolution, Vietnam war
  

Science:

• Earth: land types


• Birds and Dinosaurs


• Animals of all sorts


• Things about our bodies, heart, bones, brain, hearing, balance, eating, etc


• Oceans and life in and around it


• Rainforests and animal species


• Arctic and Antarctic


• Climates


• Solar System and Space


• Methods of transportation


• Machines and circuits, Inventions


• Marie Curie


• Photography, Moving Pictures, Printing, Communication

Great Composers:

• Bach, Scarlatti, Handel, Hayden, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Beethoven, Schubert, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Etc.

French, Art, Gospel Studies from the Bible and BOM, Math, Handwriting, Grammar, Geography, many books for reading aloud and alone, as well as a few other things added here and there.