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What do you require from history and science...


Marsha
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We do narrations, lab work, map work, timelines, creating experiments/projects based on the books..lots of things. For example currently DS is reading about Galileo for science. During the book he has written summaries, done a timeline of his life, visited Pisa, recreated some of the more famous experiments and is currently working on a moon phase chart, which will bring him into the next topic in his science: astronomy. At that point he'll go back to Greek mythology, match constellations to reference cards, do a project on the Big Bang theory, explore Einstein's theory of relativity, etc. His written work will include lab write-ups, summaries, and being able to apply what he learned in the real world.

Living books are only a tool, so we don't rely on them for more than 50% of the work. While there are summaries and papers written, the other half is projects and hands on work.

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I have a 2nd grader, so we just do narrations or maybe some notebooking (draw a picture and write something about what he learned). We do history 3 days a week and science 2 days a week.

I do this with my dd. If we do an experiment then I will either take a picture or she draws what we did. She then narrates what she did and the outcome and why (I act as scribe).

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For the grammar stage, I read the books to them and we discuss it. Also, we'll do some notebooking or copywork from the reading. If it's a historical novel, they read it on their own and we discuss it. We decide together on projects or if they want to do a unit study, etc. We've been trapped in the American Revolution for about 4 months now...so we bought those American Revolution coloring books and they've been asking to do that with our reading.

 

For logic stage, I plan to follow the WTM recommendations: outline, narrative summary, literary essay...

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We do narrations and notebookiing. My younger children narrate orally. My 2nd grader tells me his narration, I write it on the board, and he copies it into his notebook. My oldest does 3 written narrations per week.

 

In our notebook, I might print out a picture for them to color. I do a vocabulary page, they look up definitions. I have them do maps in their notebook too.

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Discussion and narrations are definitely good, but I also like to do some form of writing down the main points and principles to help make the information stick better.

 

For science, my kids each have a notebook with dividers for the major areas of science. After each lesson we talk about, I write out a few of the core principles they learned, have them copy it, and have them draw pictures to illustrate the concept from what we have talked about or the experiment we did. We periodically review our notebook to help remember the principles.

 

For history, I like to read through a world history or American history overview book along with the living books. This gives a good framework to the history. We also keep a timeline of the most major events to keep a general perspective of the basic cilivilzations of world history. The best activity I have found for history, however, is lapbooking. When the kids do a lapbook on the subject we read about (say Ancient Egypt or the Civil War), they retain a tremendous amount. The lapbooks I have used most are from Hands of a Child and the Homeschoolshare website.

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I kind of mix Main Lesson Books (Waldorf) with notebooking for this. I read aloud from the living books, they narrate. Ds10 does written narrations, dd narrates and then copies what I write down from her narration. They draw pictures.

We also do map work, and ds10 is starting a Book of Centuries. We do historically based crafts as well, and then pictures go in the notebooks.

For science, it is much the same at this point.

Here are some samples from the Christopherus site of what completed work in Main Lesson Books looks like - these are not my kids' work. The first is a 5th grade sample, the second is a 3rd grade sample.

 

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if you use Living Books? There are no questions and answers, so do you just use narrations from your history and science?

Also, do you do every subject daily?

 

Discussion mostly with some projects or experiments. We do history 1x a week and science 2x a week in big blocks of time.

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