Hooray! After two practice weeks, we've successfully made it through our first official week of the new school year! Dale has begun 2nd grade, and Alan is doing real-live preschool right along side us.
We celebrated our first day with a special breakfast (pancake-sausage sandwiches) and a small gift assortment of novelty school supplies for the boys.
I am very excited about our "Social Studies" curriculum this year. I use the term loosely because I'm not a big fan of social studies per se, but I love our version of it. For one thing, my mom has put together a notebook for us full of general interest articles from newspaper and magazines. Things that make great conversation. Things that broaden your horizons a little bit. This week we read about an 85 year old retired pastor and Navy Vet that has a collection of over 3000 pencil sharpeners. Our lesson involved some dictionary skills, learning about the Navy's saying to "Look Sharp", and designing our own pencil sharpener. I'm looking forward to more articles in the weeks ahead!
Alan got started on the Bible and Rhyme curriculum at Hubbard's Cupboard.
Tuesday involved shaving cream, brought to you by the number '1.'
Tuesday was also Davy Crockett's birthday. Which brings me to the other half of what I am calling our Social Studies. I've marked a calendar with all those National this and that days one always hears about.
So far we have celebrated Smokey Bear's birthday, Play in the Sand Day, Davy Crockett's birthday, and National Aviation Day. August is also American Artist Appreciation month and Inventors month.
Some combination of a library book or two, a youtube video, an online printable, or an activity from our own toy box or backyard, and we find ourselves on an adventure we wouldn't have thought up on our own. And we usually learn something along the way. Personally, I'm looking forward to Banana Split Day!
Wednesday will forever be known as The Day Mama Panicked and Thought the Computer Was Being Attacked by a Virus Again and Refused to Turn it On All Day Until Daddy Came Home. We managed to muddle through school just fine without it, and -thankfully!- the virus thing was a false alarm.
Thursday brought my first try at showing a 'learning' video. I found it slightly boring and incredibly cheesy, but the boys seemed riveted and Dale made a reference to something from it today (a day later) that he thought was interesting, so... hey! Works for me! I would definitely try something similar again. Do you use the tv for learning? What are some of your favorite resources?
Friday is a really light day for us. We mail our letters we've been working on all week, and have a Bible lesson and a math lesson.
We won't every week, but today we went light on math and played an addition-subtraction domino game:
Friday is also Library Day! Yay! Here is this week's haul:
5 comments:
Sounds like an exciting week. I love celebrating those different holidays. We haven't done that in a while; I think I should start again.
Excellent stack(s) of library books! I like your domino game. School is so much better when it's fun. (or as I sometimes call it, "tricky")
I love the pile of books. Looks like a good week.
You all survived your first week too! Looks like you did much better than me!! Friday is our light day and library day too.
Also, I wanted to let you know, I just gave you a blog award. :o) You can see it here:
http://learningathisfeet.blogspot.com/2010/08/sun-shines-late-at-night.html
I actually do use tv/dvds for learning if it has to do with our subject matter. The History Channel and Discovery Channel have great shows. About once a week I do a general search on DirectTV of our subject matter (i.e. Egypt) and see if anything pops us. Then I record it for use later. I have two in the hopper right now.
Then when we start a subject I do a media search through our public library system and request any videos that correspond. I have a Bill Nye the Science Guy video about deserts on the way.
And even if there is a fun movie that has to do with our subject matter, we might rent it and watch it on the weekend. For instance, we watched The Mummy (my 13 year old) because we have been learning about mummification in Ancient Egypt. It was a leisure movie, but still talked about mummification so for the first time I actually saw the educational side of it.
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