2_girls_mommy
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Posts posted by 2_girls_mommy
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We have not done psychology in our homeschool, but we are using a Great Course this year for the first time. We are doing an elective on Mythology, called Life Lesson from Great Mythology. My dd is also reading the Illiad as we go, though that is more for her English credit, so we are overlapping the two. For her day to day with the Great Courses, we listen, discuss, and she takes notes summarizing the main points. I am not having her do anything more specific for that. We do look at pictures of ancient ruins online and have seen some documentaries to look at them as well to go along.
My case is different from yours though, because since we are overlapping with English, where she is reading the Illiad, there will be writing involved that goes for both mythology and English.
But honestly, I took Pyschology in high school (and college.) In high school there were no big projects or papers for psychology when I took it. Just pages and pages of notes copied from the overhead during lectures and definitions and tests on those. So for me, doing the Great Courses and notes and discussion and review of key terms would be enough, possibly finding some interesting documentaries of some of the cases mentioned to make it more interesting.
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Yes, go for it. We have somewhat followed WTM four year cycle, but we always interspersed other genres or periods in as we went. We'd do all kinds of different things. This year my dd11th is in the Ancients officially, reading the Illiad and doing a Great Courses mythology course, but we have also read the Great Gatsby, done some American Poetry from our American Literature text, and read a book on Halloween throughout time in our state. That was a really interesting book based on Halloween articles from the newspaper throughout each decade. Currently we are adding in a Martin Luther King Jr. biography on top of the IIlliad. So we have never been able to stick completely to one time period either!
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I'll post again in the grade level threads later. But for the most part I know what ydd will use:
2nd grade: Rod and Staff math, finish grade 2, start grade 3, add in the multiplication blacklines for the 2nd grade.
Rod and Staff phonics: finish grade 1, move into grade 2. Finish grade 1 reading and workbooks, move into the 2nd grade reading, w/out workbooks, just for practice and Bible when we get there. Spelling gr. 2, English gr. 2
Story of the World 2 and A.G.
Earth/Space science. Will go through our resources. I just downloaded the free TGTB space unit, but I have a million resources for both. Will sort through and pick some favorites. I might see what Schoolhouseteachers dot come has
music: What Your 2nd Grader Needs to Know and probably lessons from Schoolhouseteachers dot com
PE: co-op classes and dance classes
12th grader:
This will be a tough year for her. She is behind in math, but is finally getting Algebra after working hard on it for a couple of years. So she will be taking Geometry and Alg. 2 simultaneously from Mr. Ds online. We will start the Geometry in the spring using the self paced and work through the summer, so hopefully, she will be finished with it quickly, But there will be overlap.
Chemistry. I do not know what we will be using yet. Thinking about looking into Friendly Chemistry, but want to investigate some free online courses first.
English 4, I do not have a plan for this yet, but will be along the lines of WTM literature studies and a final paper project. She will likely not be finishing off the four year cycle in senior year, having done enough history and having such a heavy math load. We may go with English lit?
Art: this will be up to her. Possibly out of the home classes, but possibly just continue at home using Schoolhouseteachers or skillshare
PE: co-op class and dance class.
other electives? sometimes co-op has something. We shall see. She will have finished her Gold Award for girl scouts by then. and her studies are going to be tough. Plus hopefully she will be working too.
I really have most everything picked out. I do have to spend a lot of time sorting through picture books and supplemental stuff for the 2nd grader. And I do a library list each week to pick up books from SOTW A.G. But we really have most of what we need I think. I need to replace some R&S workbooks. But even those turn to mostly textbooks, so not a lot.
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Well, in the beginning of parenting/homeschooling, we had nothing on the shelves. So there was a lot more book buying. As TWTM talks about: books for presents, books for the bath, books, books, books. I bought from garage sales. My mom, a teacher, gave gifts she bought from her school sales for my kids and to fundraise for her school. I collected everything from cheap book sales and such to build our shelves.
But I was also on a strict budget. We were just starting out. The recession was very hard on our family, and the budget was TIGHT. So I didn't buy a lot of extra curricula. I bought something and stuck with it (through three kids spread very far apart at this point!) I went to convention with my list, bought the next grade level of the things we used and the consumables to replace what older had used to give to the next one. Of course, in some things, we didn't use the consumable, but wrote to notebook paper, so I didn't have to replace everything. Things I didn't buy were extras like manipulatives, science and arts and crafts kits. I made all of our manipulatives. I laminated working posters of many parts that are still in use 13 years later with my youngest.
So things have changed. Fourteen or fifteen years into this, my bookshelves are full. I buy very little books. I would prefer to buy toys that will get loved for Christmas now, because toys get passed down or sold on consignment when outgrown. Books stay on the shelves. It is very hard for me to part with books that could come in handy in the next go through of school. I also now can buy all of the fun extras for school and have gotten better at knowing how to follow sales and find manipulatives, hands on, art kits and good supplies cheaply, so we have a lot more of that stuff around. Before it was precious stuff. I saved for the convention, bought the year's papers and few new art supplies and whatnot, and tried to be very careful with it to make it all last. We asked for that kind of stuff for Christmas from grandmas too. These days we are very well stocked on all of that as well.
So I have gone from spending most of my budget on books to buying very little. I bought dd6 one book that is out of print for a collection that I really like (Arty Facts Science and Art books...) for our upcoming unit. I bought her one unnecessary funschooling workbook that she wanted. And that was it to start this semester, besides replacing the consumable workbooks to go with the curriculum I have used as a core for all of my kids. But I just bought her two human body kits from a craft store at 90 percent off making them very affordable to me that I have been watching go on sale to go with that unit. I don't like to buy readers and beginning chapter books because they read them and are done. I learned my lesson about not filling up my shelves with all of that with my older kids. We use the library. As teens, we gave each nice editions of a few of their favorites for their personal collections of books that they will take them as they grow up. But we quit loading them down with tons of things to read at every turn.
Our library list is long. Our shelves are full. And I have a problem parting with loved books. I try very hard not to buy new ones.
And another hazard of longtime homeschooling kids of many ages; my friends, who have gone on to other things because their kids have outgrown homeschooling into college and whatnot, pass down their curriculum to me since I still have a little one. So I actually accumulate and get to read a lot of things that others talk about. I rarely switch over to anything new, but I read through to get a feel for things that are popular. I often end up sitting on them as a reference or selling them off later. But occasionally I get a gem that I love. We inherited a set of Handwriting Without Tears a couple of years ago: many workbooks, some barely used, some new, and the full wood piece set and CDs. We worked through those with ydd.
But I never did buy things that I didn't use really. I do have some Memoria Press guides for certain subjects that I never used in full. Some that I did. But I used them as spine for certain subjects. I don't plan on ordering anymore because I am now comfortable teaching on literature I am not super familiar with, from other free to me sources that I enjoy more. But I don't regret those purchases. We learned a lot from them.
I am wordy as usual, rambling, and thinking. Did I answer the question? I am not sure. 🙂
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We just did our own studies, and I created a co-op class. The core spine was a library book. I think one of mine picked out one called American Government 101. The other picked something similar, but different. They just read through these and took basic outline notes for each chapter at home.
I assigned three projects: one poster/speech project on a topic of their choice to be given at co-op. (one did marijuana laws in different states and looked at effects in our state. One did a more basic breakdown of how government works using the chapter she was studying from her book at the time.) The second project was to enter our state bar association's student law day contest. The theme that year was the 100 year anniversary of the 19th amendment, so one read a book by a contemporary woman who was opposed to the amendment and wrote an essay on that. One chose to do a painting and used photos from the time period as inspiration.
And since mine are girl scouts they were each assigned to do a five step scout badge on government. These included reearch, reaching out to lawmakers, volunteering, etc.
Since we did co-op on government that year, we also did several field trips. We toured our county courthouse and sat through a bit of some non small claims court, met a judge in her chambers, etc. We went to a speech given by a state supreme court judge. We toured our state capital and met our representatives. My one dd met up with one over zoom for some further interviewing because COVID happened and she couldn't follow through with the day of shadowing her that was originally arranged. My other dd's badge was more about elections and had research on past elections, comparing past party platforms to current ones, interviewing poll workers on election day and other actvities. We had as a family toured Washington D.C. a few years ago, but we focused our tours that year more on American History than government, so I listed those activities as part of our American History class. For those not scouts, you could just look for some other activities to include instead. That is just what we have access to, and they are great plans to include for projects for any subject we are studying since my kids are scouts anyway.
And in our actual co-op get togethers on government which was multi grade, we did activities that were mostly focused at the middle grade range but that definitely enhanced our studies. We did a government escape room day. We did lesson plans found in state government websites on how government reacts to natural disasters and did mapping exercises. We did reenactments of debates from some random library books of activities for civics classes. We wrote a basic outline of what we would cover each month, very vaguely, and about a week before the day of the class, we would search the library or internet for lesson plans or activities on the topic. We found lots of fun free or inexpensive group activities.
Lastly, one of my dds did a student government class on How a Bill Becomes a Law at a homeschool convention a couple of years ago, so I counted that class as part of her Government hours. It was a very hands on, acting out every part of the process class. It in itself was like 15 hours of classtime. But even without it, the above activities were plenty for a half credit. I just listed that class in her class descriptions in her records too since she had done it.
This may not be helpful for someone just looking to purchase an all in one curriculum. But it might help someone with ideas who is comfortable putting together a credit for themselves or who is looking for a way to put together a class without spending a ton on curriculum. There are a lot more free or subscription online classes out there this year too to supplement most subjects. I am sure there are some government ones, or there are the Crash Course as listed above on all topics. My dd did some online interactive free classes from VarsityTutors online and from the Ford's Theater over the summer and this year to supplement some history and speech topics. She is also doing a free Master Class from our local Shakespeare in the park class. We are finding so much like that for the lecture portion of some classes or just for extras lately.
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I know nothing about what is on Sonlight's list for high school readers. I will say we used the WTM style of history throughout high school for one of mine (along with lots of projects, field trips, documentaries, contests, and outside classes and experiences.) And it worked really well. We didn't do it exactly as in WTM. We actually only used one of her high school/adult history books as the spine one year that she read and took notes from, did the context pages, used the Timline book, and created reports about. Other years we used other materials as the spine or did units throughout the year, using different nonfiction texts as the spine for just that particular unit like an encyclopedia on World War 2. But we used TWM for how to do English alongside history and the booklists from it for the literature as well as some chronological literature textbooks I have and The Well Educated Mind. It all works really well. If you have your spine text from Sonlight (a text or an encyclopedia I am assuming,) and you are just asking about using it to branch out from to do context papers on and then papers on the literature portion for an English credit, I don't know why that wouldn't work. The context background papers are plenty for history if you are reading a non fiction book as the spine. The fiction readers are more english than history but give historical background and interest. That is basically what WTM does, but takes you through the actual great books vs modern historical fiction. Again- I have no idea what the Sonlight readers are, but if they are included for high school credit, I am sure they are fine.
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If he is going to continue latin further, I would say you need to learn it, unless you are going to enroll him in an online class with a teacher who knows the material. If you just facilitate, it would be like handing a kid an Algebra textbook to figure out on his own. Yes, some kids could read the text and grasp it. But most need a teacher to work out practice problems with them and to help correct work and to know what they are looking at. (when you grade Latin translations, there can be different translations that are correct. You don't want to be counting off because it doesn't look exactly like the book's answer if it is correct, etc.) He might do fine this year. I am just thinking about as you get deeper into it. We went through Henle 3 over the course of high school with my dd for Latin credits of 1-4. We also prepped for the National Latin Exams each year. If I wasn't working the material and learning it with her, I would have most definitely needed to pay for an expensive online class to teach it at some point.
The MP guides for Henle that I have seen (just for Henle I, I don't know if they have them for after that?) are good. They break it down into lessons similar to their Form series which is an even better program for beginners. First Form uses their own exercises and uses Henle I as well. We did First over two years for Latin 1 and 2 in 8th and 9th grades for high school credit it was so good. And dd scored amazingly on the NLE exams for levels 1 and 2 with it.
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I am with you. I am not an early morning person, just due to my dh's job and our family routine, but I am an early morning person compared to my family So I use my mornings to get up and do housework and errands. I set the tone for the day to be productive while everyone is still sleeping and just starting to get around. So we are not productive with school in the mornings.
Then around lunch time (an early lunch time) the kids have eaten, are dressed, and we start school. Because of this schedule, our work is not done until dinner time. But we work straight through. My kids, especially teens, are just not productive in the mornings. I feel their slothliness in the mornings makes things take longer than they do in the afternoons when they are fully awake and functioning and are in better moods. So this has always been our best schedule since we started school really. There were years that because of out of the house classes in mid afternoon that we needed to do school early in the mornings and finish by a regular schooltime to get to those classes, and the days never went smoothly for us.
This later morning start or afternoon start time works best for us, partly because of my dh's non traditional work hours. We do not eat dinner early or even have dh home many evenings, so we tend to have later bedtime than many. But this is how I have worked out my morning person-ness. I accomplish things. I get my quiet time to myself. I get the house in order, start the laundry, do any decluttering or house projects that I want to that day, run errands, etc. My 6 yr old gets up leisurely, has tablet time (in the old days when my bigs were little they watched Sesame Street in the mornings and when it was over that was the signal that it was time for school, lol. Those days seem to be over with this little one. She watched PBS on demand on her tablet.) I have them both get dressed. If I want to run out to the store or something it is the perfect time to do it because I can go alone which is more quick than taking them and it is early so the stores aren't crowded. If we have a library run, I get them ready and we all go, etc. Today is library morning, so we will do that, but it doesn't cut into our regular school time.
Then in the afternoons, I sit with them and work through our stuff, probably like you do in the mornings. I have my stack of books, my computer, and we get to it, working through.
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On 1/9/2021 at 2:20 PM, Matt Layman said:
Can you explain what makes this important to you? I have some guesses, but I don't want to project my thoughts and opinions on what your real reasons might be.
They have different funcions. A full page spread of a calendar gives you a space to see the month all at once. The daily pages are more of the daily to dos. If I am trying to remember which day we have a conference call or a one day zoom class, if there is no monthly calendar where I can see the whole month at once I would have to flip through and search every weekly page for where I wrote down the call information. On a monthly spread I can put appointments, field trips, what have you, as they are scheduled. Then each week as I plan out the current week, I can refer to the monthly calendar to see what is on the schedule, especially out of the ordinary, one time things like dr. appointments, etc.
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Covid hit last year just as the last semester of senior year hit for my odd. Luckily, she had finished taking her ACTs and was in the middle of applications and interviews for college. She had gotten to take the college tours over the course of the year before and the first semester of senior year. Everything got so crazy that last semester (no graduation, everything canceled, etc.) that I can't even imagine what it has been like for this year's seniors who didn't even get a first semester.
Luckily for us, we had already decided she had taken most things, so she was just in a finishing up mode. We actually decided not to do dual enrollment the 2nd semester, so that we had freedom for one last semester at home. She worked part time, got her driver's license (we did home taught driver's ed,) and we had time as a family to take a trip, do some bird watching, watch documentaries to go with our studies, and for her to read a lot.
A lot of scout clubs that she was in tried to go virtual or just canceled, but she stayed as active as was possible. When COVID first hit, nobody knew what was happening, and for a couple of months, everything just went dead, then they tried to figure out how to do things virtually, but by then she was working her full time over the summer before college as planned anyway. Things have a way of working out. Mine was waitlisted at a top school across the country. Last year I would have thought we might have been more disappointed if she didn't get in after all of her hard work. This year, I am SO happy to have her closer to home in honors college not far with all of the virtual college and craziness going on.
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I do a giant bulletin board in our home, like schools do. I tend to do it for holidays or by seasons or months. So currently we have it for new years. I have a big Happy New Year banner dipping across it, and we made a poster of stars. Everyone filled out a star and wrote their New Year wishes, kind of like resolutions. The poster says 2021 wishes. They range from dd6 saying she wants another cat (not happening, lol) and that she wants grandma to visit to my resolutions like read more, exercise more, etc. So you could maybe have the kids each fill out a wish.
For February... hearts of course! (some years we have done presidents or February birthdays, but that is more schooly.)
March- spring, in like a lion, out like a lamb, or kites or umbrellas. April... April showers, spring flowers,
So many fun ideas.
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We used the book recommended in the Well Trained Mind- I think it was called Adventures with Atoms and Molecules? It was a very inexpensive book. It was just experiments and explanations.
Later my kids used the elementary Apologia books with co-op. They were very expensive and basically had the same experiments. So I preferred the inexpensive one. But either worked.
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BTW, even many of us who weren't unschoolers have kids who are "behind" the usual high school sequence for whatever reason. We work with the kid in front of us, where they are. I have one I have homeschooled from the beginning, daily, intentionally that is way behind the usual high school math progression towards college. We have to deal with it. Now that she is making progress and algebra is starting to click, she will need to make decisions. Does she want to double up on math her senior year to get the required credits? (required here for a particular state scholarship that we qualify by income for, but that she cannot get without certain requirements, one of which is what maths have to be taken in high school.) Will she decide to take an extra semester or year of high school to finish? (has some benefits. She could do some dual enrollment, work a lot of hours to save money, and get to be a year older and more mature,) or does she just work through summer really hard to finish a full credit in the summer then a full credit next year?
So lots of us deal with these things. If he is behind, start with preAlgebra before hitting the higher maths, or even a year or arithmetic.
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I have one visual speller who can. That is how we know she has learned a word, when she can spell it backwards. The rest of us are "natural" spellers or phonetic spellers, and never worked on this trick, so no, we really can't.
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thank you. I will be looking at it even with my high school and college kiddo!! My college kiddo just asked me when it was time for the eagle watch in our area, and I just looked it up, and it is this weekend. This is something we do as a family often in January. Thanks for the web cam!
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I prefer paper. I use the High School 4 year planners by Well Planned Day for my high schoolers. I like them because I can 1. handwrite. (i journal after the fact for daily stuff, but I can plan generally in advance on pages that where I can list credits, extra curriculars, awards, curriculum, literature read, etc.) 2. I like that it lays out things to do each semester as they go through high school to get ready for college. 3. that it has a full page calendar spread before each month. I really like planners with the full page calendar before the daily pages. This is SOOO important.
Before high school most any planner works for me. I use whatever pages they have in the front for teachers to list my planned curriculum and the extra curriculars that particular child is involved in. Then I use the planning pages to record each day what the child has done. Easy peasy.
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You all are so talented! I don't have a lot of talent. I enjoy scrapbooking and drawing and paper crafting type stuff, but I don't know a lot. I made dd18 a scrapbook of her senior year for a Christmas present, but I didn't get to any pages about her senior trip. I got her graduation ceremony in, pages of her in dance and scouts. So I would like to get some picture printed up from her trip and get those done, or else I never will, lol.
I also like to buy grab bags from Michael's and then challenge myself to use what it is in them. I had some Christmas boxes from last year and some cool crafty things from their after fall boxes that we were able to make into Christmas gifts. I made my mom a wreath with wooden elf ornaments that I painted to look like each of her kids. The kids painted some pottery home decor stuff for my grandmother. I made a snowman wreath for our door which is so cute that I don't want to take it down, lol. The boxes should come out later this month from this year's Christmas clearance, so I will begin planning some projects when I see what is in them. Even the scrapbook and scrapbooking supplies were from a Michael's grab box, so I just never know what is in them. Then I rabbit trail down Youtube to see what people do with the paper supplies, to learn techniques. I would like to collect enough after Christmas balls to do an ornament wreath, the kind that is all of the ornament balls hot glued together.
I bought a lot of after Valentine's clearance last year that it is time to get out. So in all honesty, I likely won't get to the Christmas stuff until later in the year, but we will start some card making and possibly banner making and such with the supplies I got once I pull them out and see what I have.
My kids do cross stitch and have more talents than I do. I made them learn a lot of that, or at least introduced them to different things along the way, so that they could pick up any crafting that they enjoyed. But I never have had time to try it. Would love to.
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For me, that would be a great time to do state history and government. It would be a perfect year to go really in depth. Then when you get to needing it for a high school credit, you have really done it in full, and just need to refresh a little for that credit, which is nice when high school can be so intense.
But for a cool, something different, if your child is into theater or costuming or fashion, we just did a year (really more like a year and a half!) of the history of fashion. We did start with a premade, amazing unit study that covered the history of fashion, fine arts, We found it on Schoolhouseteachers dot com, and it is one of the best courses we have found on that site. It was designed to be an 11 week half credit, but we paired it with history, with a funschooling journal, with reading an additiional text (one suggested in the course for high schoolers wanting English credits with the course...) and a final year long project, plus we watched a video per decade of films to see the fashions and to experience some classic movies or lit made into movies along the way. It made for a great year. I added in a funschool fashion history journal. I believe there may be some funschooling dance journals that might help guide you through designing your own jazz history course. We could have used just the funschooling journal, but the predesigned unit study made a lot of the research into what books and projects to do much easier, plus included worksheets and vocabulary and all of that, even some Word tutorials to get the student working in Word a bit more. That was good for this particular student who doesn't teach herself those functions on her own like my other did
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Didn't read all of these, just wanted to share our schedule or "non" schedule. We have always been pretty non traditional. We don't start school first thing in the morning. We never did for elementary school until schedules demanded it like when my older elementary/middle schoolers had outside classes in early afternoons. So it made more sense then to start school somewhat early, break for lunch and outside and classes, and then finish up at night.
But our more regular routine that we are back to this year thankfully goes more like this: School starts around 11:00 or so. No set time. We do chores, errands, projects, whatever needs to be done in the mornings. Sometimes this is school related and gets logged as school time, such as yesterday when that morning time included putting together the new school bulletin boards and calendars and planners for the year. The kids don't think of that as "school." It isn't the stuff that their to do lists include necessarily, but it is stuff of value. Today we went to the library and picked up books, returned books, and picked up to go activity packs that our libraries are doing. The activity pack for my 6 yr old included a New Year's writing/art project that we did before "school" officially started. But it was writing and was logged as such in her school journal. Other days I may be doing planning, cleaning, emails, errands, whatever on my own. DD6 is not allowed free reign on electronics because it is a school day, so she will find unschooly type things she is allowed to do, or toys, or whatever.
So school starts around 11-12. Lunch is either before or after we have started, but then school gets underway for an hour or so in full. Then I switch to working to with the teen, and elementary kid gets free time. Then we later finish up whatever we need to. So breaks happen naturally.
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I second the others that say look into the Core Knowledge Sequence. It is already designed for schools. I do think SOTW is ok for public schools. In fact, one of my sisters used it for 6th grade social studies when she taught. There are public school lesson plans and tests designed somewhere out there for that. She wasn't even aware that SOTW was a homeschool text, and she had never seen the A.G. She just happened to see the set on my bookshelf, and we got to talking about it. We usually don't have any curricula in common. So I don't see anything wrong with using it in schools. I do know that growing up in the gifted classes, we had plenty of take home projects. That was just part of our school. I was in full time gifted classes for a few years, on a trial of that system. Other years in elementary it was just pull out enrichment. But especially in the years I had the full time class, we had tons of projects at home. I remember them very fondly. I don't know about how others feel about them. They were just my norm.
But Core Knowledge is already designed for schools and has the content wanted, so look into that. Certainly, using CK and SOTW together can be a good fit. I do it at home and have for the entirety of our homeschool (I am in year 14 or 15 of homeschooling now??)
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I only have one in K-8, a first grader. And we are in US, so this is 2nd semester of her 1st grade year. But since 2021 is the start of 2nd semester, I am in planning mode for changes to the new semester. So for Spring semester 2021 my 1st grader's plans are:
Rod and Staff 2nd grade math. Starting from the beginning. She is finishing the 1st grade this month.
Rod and Staff 1st grade phonics, reading, and worksheets. She is almost done with unit 2, so our goal will be unit 3 and as much of 4 as we can get in. Will just continue unit 4-5 in 2nd grade. Then in 2nd grade (fall 2021) she will read the 2nd grade readers and do the 2nd grade phonics and spelling, but I will not continue the reading workbooks when she completes the 1st grade reading workbooks. She will start the 2nd grade English in fall 2021 as well.
SOTW1. The plan is to complete this before August. We are in chapter 13 this week. We do the readings, mapwork, extra storybooks, very occasional project. In the summer, wherever we are, I will drop all extra work and just read from the book.
Science: We will start a WTM style human body study. I have a human body coloring book, the Usborne Internet Linked 1st encyclopedia, various human body games, skeleton model, etc.
Music, continue the SHT 1st grade music curriculum from their 1st grade in a box set.
PE: dance and co-op classes.
Extras: I actually haven't seen what classes are planned for her co-op for next semester yet. Hopefully that schedule is out this week. This semester she had a great storytelling class. They learned parts of stories and did hands on activities that got them writing their own stories. She learned a lot. She had a hands on science experiment class. She loved it. And PE. I am fairly confident PE will still be on the schedule.
Girl Scouts. She is a daisy scout. There isn't much going on, and she is actually the only Daisy in our troop. The council has been offering some (expensive IMO) zoom activities. We have skipped those. She has met with the Brownies of our troop a handful of times this year for a field trip and a few meetings. We are doing her badge requirements on our own. It is what we can do this year. Not much troop activity.
Art: we have done a few Drawing with Children projects. Will continue some of that. Her R&S has a lot of little artsy things. We do a lot of seasonal things, some nature journaling. Her science this semester was animal science, and we used a Thinking Tree Nature journal that has lots of drawing prompts. We will be dropping that for human body this semester, but I did buy her a core TT journal for next semester. I haven't decided how I am going to use it, but there is usually quite a bit of drawing opportunity there.
I am thinking of doing a page a day from the journal to mix things up and get in extra writing and reading. She can use the Sotw and science readers we get from the library and do the little pages in it. Or we can just use it officially on science days and only for science as we did the Nature journal last semester. I am going to have to look through it to see how it work best. (they are really just a nice set of guided notebooking pages you can pair with anything.)
Anyway, I planned dd16 this morning. It is good to think this out and type it up. I feel very accomplished today. 🙂
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I was so upset that there wasn't an 11th grade planning thread most of the spring/summer, and I missed this one when it finally came up! Since it is time to start planning the new semester, I will put what we have been doing, and what I think the new semester will look like.
So:
math: mine is finally getting Algebra. She has to get through Geometry and Alg 2 still to get the state college tuition scholarship that we qualify for by income here. But I am just so glad that she is finally getting this! So right now we are closer to done with this course, then we will move into Geometry. We are leaning towards adding an extra year of high school for her to get caught up here, but aren't sure yet. We will wait and see how she does on ACT in the coming semester after some geometry. We plan to work through the summers to get the last two courses in, but if it is just too much, then we will add another high school year. She is not against this. She could work a lot of hours, save some money, and really only work on math and art and dance and theater that year. It would be a good semi gap year.
English: we have used an American Literature, a Chronological Approach book very sparingly, mostly for poetry this semester. She has read one novel and written a fantastic essay for that. We have read a couple of novels aloud together, and we are currently working in depth on poetry units that include writing poetry. She has done a lot of journaling and writing prompt type writing. We have not done much grammar review this semester, and I might add that in coming up. She also uses Dyslexia Games journals for some basic vision therapy exercises and their spelling journals for working on spelling, which is a need for her. Sometimes we throw in some Spelling Power activities from an old activity card set we have. She has continued to read through The Well Educated Mind this year. I believe she read the novel section when she did the Well Trained Mind style work on The Great Gatsby. I need to have her read the poetry section since that is what we have focused on this semester.
Spanish 2: This is her 2nd year of Spanish, but we are still working through a Spanish 1 course from Schoolhouseteachers dot com. She will finish it by Christmas and start the Spanish 2 over the 2nd semester. We have been working through a CD course that I have for listening and pronunciation practice and she does Mango lessons free from our library. I have stacks of children's books in Spanish that she reads aloud as well.
Economics: This is one course that we are actually doing in its assigned one semester time frame (not the norm for us. We start subjects and take as long as want on them, studying them, stretching out curriculum, as we want or need to. I will often give a one semester credit for a subject we work on all year, because we do it once a week or something instead of completing it in the one semester.) Anyway, for her basic text she is reading the basic, Whatever Happened to Penny Candy. Then she has a Thinking Tree Economics journal that assigns projects like researching and setting up a budget, a business, doing definitions, watching YouTube videos on certain topics. I really wish I had had this for my odd. It makes a nice full course. I did find a unit in an economics course on Christmas economics that I am going to have her work through this month. It includes a lot of graphing and other skills work.
Art: We don't follow a prescribed course here. I do assign projects at times, or have her work with me as a family, but for the most part, she explores different media and skills on her own. So far this year she has built a miniature "room" from a cardboard box completely decorated and furnished. She made all of the miniatures in the room from magazines, cardboard, paint, and things from around the house. Very cool. She works on small drawings and paintings with us in our nature journals as a family (we did a unit on acorns last month that was fun.) DD6 is doing Drawing with Children, so she has done a couple of projects with her. She is finishing a large scale acrylic painting which is actually a painting of a collage that she made earlier this year when she was into collage that she really liked. She is entering one of her pen and inks from earlier this year into a homeschool art show this month. We usually enter several of her favorites into the state fair creative arts contests each fall, but of course that wasn't an option this year. She will put them in next year. This is her real passion, along with dance/musical theater/costuming. She is just an artist! I think for her senior year art I will assign some learning to make an art portfolio, art journal, and how to prepare pieces properly. Those would be new skills for me. We did some of it in high school art a LONG time ago, so I remember some tricks. I did three years of high school art, so she gets a lot of her love of art from me, but I never went on and did any in college or after, besides just enjoying it with them. I think she will pursue the arts in some way. Next semester, I have no plans. She will come up with projects of her own. I did print out lesson plans from Schoolhouseteachers dot com from their Teen Studio Art course. We have done lesson from it before, it is art and literature together with some art history. I chose a unit on Snow and Ice that I thought she could work through when she finishes some other things if she is interested.
History: So we have always followed the WTM history schedule and a lot of the style of work. My odd graduated doing WTM cycles completely. This one always followed along, and my ydd is in 1st grade, and fit perfectly into the cycles to start an ancients year this year. So we are in SOTW1 with her. This SHOULD be an ancients year for dd16. But truly- she has enough history/social studies to graduate already. Last year was heavy with Am. History, State History, and Government credits. Plus she had the year before that for a year of World History, early moderns. So what has actually happened is that she has just continued forward in Am. History from where we were last year. She said every time we go through Am. History, we hit the early times then all of the wars heavily, and just have to breeze through a few small readings and topics of the 20th century. Not untrue. So she decided to keep moving forward. Last year she got a half credit for the History of Fashion. We used a Fashion History unit study course that was AMAZING. It was meant to be an 11 week one semester course, with added projects for art, English, cooking, museum studies, computer projects, and a final project assignment for high school credit. You could pick which way you wanted to lean with it= more towards someone interested in theater costuming or museum studies, or art and handicrafts. Well, we did it all. My dd was dancing in a community theater production over the previous summer and volunteered in the costuming, so she had experience and interest in that. We had attended a seminar at Mt. Vernon on seeing history through the Washington's clothing, and we were just fascinated with it all. So she used a Thinking Tree fashion journal which incorporated small history assignments and a history textbook over the course of the entire year. We chose a movie per decade to go with it to watch. She has designed and drawn fashions and read a history costuming book. She has just continued with the fashion journal and history book after she completed the unit study book for this semester. I don't know if she wants to continue this or or do a semester humanities course for next semester in the ancients. I bought several Great Courses sets on different topics that she could do. But she is really enjoying what she is doing. I will just have to decide how to assign a course title for this year for this. Last year she got her full credit of Am. History and a one semester credit for The History of Fashion as a fine arts elective. So I need a title for this year... Maybe History of Fashion 2? Simple enough. I am obviously thinking all of this through as I go here.
elective: Human Development/Child Development. She is doing these courses from 7sistershomeschool with a co-op class. They do the projects and activities there. She does the reading at home. They have a preschool class there to observe and do projects with. They are two separate one semester courses, one this semester, one next.
Driver's Ed. I do give a one semester credit for this. We put in the time. She is about to take her driver's permit test this week. After that it is just driving practice and the AAA parent taught course videos and final test. But it is a course that she works through.
Speech/Theater. I think I will just call this speech/rhetoric. She did two online courses over the summer. One was a VarsityTutors course on the works of Frederick Douglass. Then she did a summer program through Ford's Theater on the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. Both required a lot of reading, writing, and speaking. Currently she is doing a weekly Masterclass on zoom with our state's Shakespeare in the Park on different topics to do with speaking, acting, and even the business side of being an actor. She is participating in a co-op play this year too. It is booked to be performed on a college stage in May (we will see if that happens. Her friends' production was recently canceled.) But I think I will keep the play as extracurricular along with the other productions she has done. She has done enough work for a speech one semester credit.
PE/dance I give a half credit (one semester) credit each year for this because of the hours she and my odd put into this. This year has had limited hours because of studio closings. (Try keeping in shape over zoom in a 1000 sq. foot house when you are taller than the average size woman...) and of course limited performing opportunities. Usually she is dancing in fairs, videos, on stages, in nursing homes, and things all year. But it isn't her fault. She is there and doing all that she can. So she'll get her half credit still. She still volunteers in younger classes as a volunteer teacher too when the studio is open.
So this semester changes:
She is mostly done with economics and speech. So she can put those aside to put more time in on Spanish and Art. We will just move forward in math and English. We need to decide what to do in History. Her choice there. I don't have a lot of plans for English yet. I have doing about a month in advance of plans so far and that seems to work for us to have wiggle room. It will kind of depend on what she chooses for History too. If she chooses to stay in Am. History we will choose more modern works, at least two novels and more poetry and short stories. If she wants ancients, then I will probably just choose one important work and do it in depth over the semester with her.
She will move from the Human Development course to the Child Development course at co-op.
Spanish 2: move into the actual Spanish 2 coursework, but keep up the extras we are doing.
Math. finish alg. 1, start Mr. D's geometry
Driver's ed: do the required driving and take the driver's license driving test and the final AAA test to pass that course are the ultimate goals.
We need to add test prep and schedule her first ACT to get a grasp on where she is. She only needs a certain score and the required classes to get the state tuition scholarship. We need a baseline for her, but she can retake over senior year to get to the required score if needed. And as I said, if necessary, we aren't against giving her another year of high school. She is a late summer bday. She has dyslexia. She would benefit from the extra time.
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We are members of Schoolhouseteachers dot com. They have a holiday section with all of their separate units, plus the units from full curricula on the site that have to do with each holiday, broken up by suggested age levels. It is so nice to have. One year we did a Shakespeare literature study of his Twelfth Night play which was a blast.
For this year for my dd16 I have picked out another Shakespeare Christmas unit that does not go over one play, but does something each day from history. I don't know. I haven't looked at it in awhile since I printed out the plans, but it looked interesting, and like my 1st grader could follow along too, really. It was small things. I chose a unit from the Art and Literature course for her that was about Snow and Ice. It has poetry, art history, art assignments. Then as a family, we are doing some Advent activities. I just printed out a freebie Advent Bible reading plan for the month for daily readings for my dd16. My 1st grader has an advent that her Sunday School teacher made that has a scripture from Creation to Salvation over the month. It has a giant Christmas tree poster with sticky velcro. Each reading has a velcro picture to go with it that she puts daily on the tree.
My older kids made one similar to that in a co-op one year that had a poster with a Christmas tree shape formed from mini envelopes. In each envelope was an activity to do each day until Christmas. It had things like make and mail a homemade card. Make homemade hot chocolate. Make a Christmas Ornament. Learn a new Christmas carol, etc. It was a lot of fun, maybe not super educational, but was great for memories.
For my 1st grade dd, I have a file folder of preprinted things I have collected over the years, but most could be homemade. So far she is enjoying a pattern making game. The pattern cards are stockings, several different sets of matching ones. Then there are cards that say make an ABBACABBA pattern, or whatever. The board for it is a cardboard piece with a fireplace background, with room to "hang" the stocking by the fire. She does her Advent calendar, follows along with the adult advent readings, and has a large laundry basket full of Christmas story books to read through from the library.
On weekends we are all Christmas crafting. We are making gifts for family. I buy items after Christmas each year and save for the next year for this purpose. But there were plenty of lean years when my bigs were older that we used whatever scraps we had around the house to sew handmade ornament sets for gifts and packaged them really nicely. We make handmade cards to go with. We look up how to make ornaments on Youtube and have made some really amazing ones even from toilet paper tubes. We enter some of our creations each fall the following year in the state fair young arts and crafts division and the kids earn money on their prizes. (Sometimes we Christmas craft early in August for the fair in advance of it and then have those new items for Christmas later in the year.)
Anyway, I know my kids aren't your same ages, but we always find something to do that is useful and fun. Good luck to you!
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2 minutes ago, domestic_engineer said:
My kiddo asked today why the “a” in the word “strange” is long. (His first attempt was str-ang-e.) Can anyone help me with an explanation? I’ve already looked in the dictionary, and it gave the etymology as [Middle English “straunge” < Old French “estrange” < Latin “extraneus.....]
Is this just a exception/twist on being a CVCe word?
That's probably what I would say to my kiddo, not knowing for sure. I would tell her I am not completely sure, but that possibly the n and g are kind of together for the ending sound, and the silent 3 is still making the vowel long. I have no trouble telling my kids good question, I don't know the answer 😛
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How do you (personally) handle your state's "fluff" requirements at the high school level?
in High School and Self-Education Board
Posted
OP, on your music question, yes, I would listen to music and read some basic books or lesson plans on genre, movements, composers, etc. Nothing major. Easy to add in. It just says including music. I have a basic curriculum with CD from RainbowResources that says for grades 1-12 that is basically listen to the CD, read about the composer and includes some worksheets like word finds about the reading. I would do something like that as an add in every now and then, if you have nothing else going on. But there are also musicals to listen to and watch and so many other ways to learn some music. It doesn't have to be theory.
For us:
I did give my odd a health credit because she took a health course at co-op that covered some things. Plus she is a scout and keeps her first aid/CPR current, etc. I don't even know if I will end up giving my current high schooler a health credit or not. She never did the co-op class, but has all of the CPR/first aid/safety babysitter certification etc. covered with scouts, so I know she has covered the important stuff. I just know when they did a class in co-op they covered some other things.
PE, both of mine are dancers. I gave each a half credit of PE a year, even though they clearly do more than just 1/2 credit hours. I counted the rest as extra curricular. They have done musical theater, been in a video, been volunteer teachers, on top of regular classes and rehearsals for recitals. That being said, I did have odd do some research on ballet and do a paper once, and both have done PE classes at co-op that cover other skills. Currently, my high schooler's PE class at co-op is doing Tai Chi.
Fine arts: my odd did take Piano for years, so she actually got a half credit of music/piano for three years of high school plus a half credit of art, because we too do a lot of art. My current kiddo did a year of piano lessons in high school, so that is her including music. (though we do other things too.) She is very into art and gets a half credit each semester, even though, honestly, this year, she has done so much, I am considering giving her a full credit. She really devotes a lot of time to it.