Feb. 28

Watched "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill"
Brain Quest workbook - digraphs and consonant clusters
BQ workbook - spelling words with short vowels
Read "Marley and the Runaway Pumpkin" aloud
Math Mammoth sheet on subtraction
looked at a dog food crumb and a feather under the microscope
Read 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' from "Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare for Children".

Saturday Feb 26 and Sunday Feb 27:

took a nature walk, collected pinecones and brought them home to look more closely at them
watched a video on mummification
used her new microscope and looked at a fruit fly, a bee's leg and a dragonfly wing
did a puzzle on ocean creatures, identified each creature
made a mask and sword out of construction paper
read the first chapter of The Burgess Bird Book for Children
looked up the wren, listened to it's call online
read The Golden Sandal, A Cinderella Story from the Middle East
went bowling
went swimming

Today Flora sat in her fort in the living room and wrote 6 questions she'd ask an alien if she met one.  They are:

1. Who is your friend is it in (an) alien?

2. What dose (does) your pets eat?

3. Where dose your pets eat?

4. Why dose alien cats eat that?

5. When it's bedtime what dose your cats do?

6. How dose a cat stay up so late?

Her cat obsession is now documented!

What we've done 2/25:

-counted in pennies and nickels
-read about warm and cool colors, looked at Tulips in Holland by Monet and A Study in Black and Grey by Whistler; drew a picture of a cat in warm colors and another in cool
- Read from 50 Famous Stories Retold  "King Alfred and the Cakes"
- did a workbook page on capitalizing proper nouns
- did a workbook page on consonant blends
- read about and then colored a picture of a wren
- read chapt 1 in The Burgess Bird Book for Children
-made a Sumerian seal from air drying clay
- did 4 puzzles from Which Way USA? Texas

all before 10am!  Flora woke up at 6am today and was rarin' to go.

What we did on Feb 23, 2011:

Spelling Pathways Lesson 22
First Language Lessons Lesson 5
Read the last chapter of Kingsley's "Perseus"
Practiced measuring in inches
Studied an egg and observed and named the holes in the shell, the shell, the white, chalaza, blastocyst, yolk
Starfall phonics
Watched a Nova show on venom

Feb 24, 2011

Proper nouns, Capital letters
Latin - learned the words for pencil, chair, table and book
Read from "Japanese Fairy Tales"
Practiced measuring in inches
Reviewed telling time
Labeled a map; Tigris, Euphrates, Mesopotamia, Akkadia, Kish
Colored a picture of Sargon
Watched our tarantula spin a web and drew a picture
Played Wildcraft
Played Chess
Read "The Little Man in the Map" and learned to identify the midwest states

Wow, have I been making things more complicated than they need to be!

I visited a homeschooling friend yesterday and saw their logs from last year.  They were so nice, and so much less involved than what I've been doing.

I woke up today and did a log for January.  Here's what it says:

January 2011  (25 days)

Math: Did pages 1-45 in Math Mammoth 1B.  Topics included: place value, counting in groups of 10, naming and writing numbers, rounding to the nearest 10, greater than or less than, skip counting, even or odd numbers.

Science and Nature Study: Studied the following birds;  mourning dove, pileated woodpecker, crow, ruby throated hummingbird, blue jay, barn owl, common grackle, rock dove.
Grew samples of bacteria in a petri dish.
Watched National Geographic The Great Panda.

History: Read Story of the World chapters 1-4.  Topics included: What is Archeology?  What is History?, The First Nomads, The First Egyptians.  Made a model of the Nile River.  Studied King Narmer and the unification of upper and lower Egypt.  Continued to work on our notebook timeline.  Read Who was Queen Elizabeth?. 

Geography:   Mapwork including: identified the Fertile Crescent and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, identifying Egypt, the Nile, and Africa.  Coloring pages on the above areas.

Art:  Did cave paintings.  Coloring pages on Egypt.  Coloring pages on the Fertile Crescent.  Drew pictures of native birds.  Drew and played with clay independently.

Reading:  Continued to work on reading proficiency by reading various books (see booklist) both aloud and independently.  Read to daily.

Latin:  Learned Latin for the following words; hello, goodbye, students, teacher, what is your name, my name is, how are you, I am, well, terrible, and great.

Music: Daily exposure to various styles of music.  Visited The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Phys Ed.: Played outside, jumped on mini trampoline, and played fitness games on the Wii.

How's it look?

Ancient Egyptian Lapbook

We made an Ancient Egyptian lapbook.  The topics include a map of Egypt, Flora's name in hieroglyphs, the tombs, making a mummy, making papyrus and the gods and goddesses.

I can't seem to post pictures here, or I would.  I am sure I will figure it out someday. :)  In the meantime, you can see them at our flickr account.

Lapbooking

I asked Flora if she would like to move onto the next chapter, or if she'd rather learn more about ancient Egypt.  She was very clear she wants to keep learning about Egypt. I have a couple more activities planned.

First we are going to mummify an apple.  SOTW has the directions on mummifying a whole chicken, but that seems like overkill to me.  I had originally planned to do the chicken, but... I think an apple will do just fine.

We are also doing an Egypt themed lapbook.  Flora loves lapbooks, and she still looks through the one we did when she was 5 on the 5 senses.

Lastly, we plan to make Ancient Egyptian Fig Cakes.

We have other fun things planned for this weekend - tomorrow we are going tubing!

In history, eventually we will have to move onto Sumer.  I am looking for lapbooking ideas for that now.

Yesterday we finished Aliki's Gods and Goddess of Olympus so today we started Charles Kingsley's The Heroes (or Greek Fairytales for my Children).  It is a beautiful book that we found at a junk shop for a quarter, and we are both completely enjoying it.  Today we read about Perseus and his mother, Danae, and how they were thrown into the ocean by Danae's father.  They survived thanks to the kindness of Halcyon, a bird that keeps the ocean calm.  Flora drew a picture of Perseus and Danae floating in the ocean and Halcyon flying overhead.

We are still enjoying Math Mammoth very much, and thanks to it's simple and straight forward teaching Flora can now tell time.  It's very exciting for her (and I).  We learned about the minute hand today and she got it in a snap.

Another program we are enjoying is First Language Lessons for the Well Trained Mind.  It's a simple, scripted program of memorization, copywork, worksheets and narration.  Today she learned about common nouns.

Flora's first science lab was today; learning the characteristics of living things and discerning what is alive and what is not out of a rock, plant, person and bicycle.  We are using R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey; Life Science and it has an incredible "try before you buy" offer that completely sold me on this science book.

Finally, she has been learning to play chess with her father and she really enjoys it.  I am hoping she will learn to play well enough to join the homeschooling chess club in the next month.  She pretty much has all the moves memorized.

Our Classical Education Schedule

Spelling:  10-15 minutes daily of Modern Curriculum Press' Spelling Workout

Grammar: 15-20 minutes daily of "First Language Lessons For The Well Trained Mind"

Reading: 30-60 minutes daily of reading myths and stories from ancient times, followed by her narrating a few sentences and illustrating them

Writing: 10-15 minutes of "Handwriting Without Tears"

Math: 30-60 minutes of working in "Math Mammoth 1B"

History and Geography: 1hr/ 3 days a week from "Story of the World"
Day 1: Read the text and she narrates and illustrates what we've read
Day 2: Map work and the coloring page, any additional books on the topic
Day 3: Activity

Biography:  20 minutes daily, from various sources
Read a short biography of a notable person from ancient times, narrate it back to me and illustrate. Then add that name to our timeline.

Science:  60-90 minutes/2 days a week from "R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey Life Sciences"

Nature Study: 20 minutes daily, various sources.
Read about a bird, tree or plant from our area, do a narration and illustrate.  If it's a tree or a plant find an example and paste a leaf in the nature notebook.

Latin:  20 minutes/2x weekly from "Song School Latin"

We've been following this for a few weeks now and it's been working out well.  It took us a long time to tweak things but I think we finally found what worked for us.

A few things have changed.   One was science.  I didn't like just doing an animal a week, it felt like twaddle.  Now we've switched to a science curriculum that she really enjoys.

She is still doing Mango Languages Japanese now and then.