Homestead Acres

Posts Tagged ‘Homeschooling’

While I’m busy working on lesson plans, I stumbled onto  this funny vid!  The song I Will Survive redone about homeschooling.  Just had to share it!

While each day is unique in itself it helps to have a pattern or routine to follow.  Over time I’ve found that fixed schedule just does not work well for our family.  What I do like is a routine, then no mater what time you get started your day still has a flow to it.  When something happens to interrupt your day, just start back with the next to do on the list.  And interruptions DO happen don’t they.  It can be anything from someone dropping buy to visit, an unexpected appointment, illness or a fussy toddler.  I find these things so much easier to work around if I’m not worrying about the “schedule”.

Our routine might get some tweaking this year.  But this is basically how it’s been working for us.

Get up, dressed and have breakfast.  After breakfast we do morning chores.  This is washing the breakfast dishes, starting some laundry and getting the table reading for lessons.

Dh does Bible study with the kids.  Then we do map time.  This is something dh started doing with them last year.  We have different maps on our living room walls.  He started teaching 1 country at a time last year, adding a new 1 each day.  The children now know a large number of countries, all the continents, oceans and provinces/territories of Canada.  These get reviewed every day, they love seeing who can get the answer first.

After that we head out to the table and start math.  This is followed by our LA activities, copy work, spelling, grammar.  Then we will take a snack break while I read our FIAR (Five in a Row) title.  After that we’ll do the FIAR activity for the day.  Then read about what ever country we are currently studying and do an activity with that.  I have been using Galloping The Globe along side FIAR and it’s a wonderful complement to each other.

We take a break for lunch and after that read our science or history section.  Then do any activity or copy work relating to that.

That is about the end of our formal lessons.  Most of the time we are finished by noon or just after.  The afternoon is saved for crafts and nature studies.  We also have family reading times in the evening.  We are currently working our way through the Little House On The Prairie set.

Last week the nice weather came early.  Temperature climbed up to the low teens!  The day was just to nice to be inside so we headed to the park for a nature walk.

While we were there we found trees that a porcupine had been chewing.   Some deer tracks and one I think is a raccoon track?

Raccoon Track?

Deer Track

Porcupine Damage

Damage to a tree. Another Porcupine perhaps?

Tree Damage

St. Patrick Day is approaching, what fun activities do you have planned?   CurrClick has some great freebies up right now.

Notebooking is a big part of our lessons.  It really brings facts alive for children.  Little ones just love putting together a journal of what they’ve learned.  Check out these free notebooking pages! St. Patrick’s Day Notebooking Pages

Shamrocks and Shillelaghs is a free ebook by Teachers Book Bag.  It gives the history of many Irish and St. Patrick’s day symbols.   Also included are some poems, calendar cards and activities.

St. Patrick: The World’s Greatest Missionary is a great little book.  It’s full of stories about St. Patrick, picture studies, map and copywork.  And a recipe for Irish Soda bread to!

If these aren’t quite what your looking for  CurrClick also has these books on sale at a great price.

St. Patrick’s Day Lapbook with Study Guide

Celebrating St Patrick & St Patrick’s Day [BUNDLE]

Connect The Thoughts – Saint Patrick’s Day Creative Writing/History Unit

Recorded Class! – St. Patrick’s Day

March Book Bag, 2009

Now that we have a break in the cold weather hubby decided to take the older kids for a nature walk!  The -25C windchill’s we’ve had the last few weeks are just to cold for little ones.  Well it’s to cold for ME to! They had a wonderful time looking at the deer and finding different tracks.  Afterward it was time for hot chocolate!

It’s a big change from our fall nature walk you can also see one of our winter walks from last winter.

This is a sulfur spring, it’s a really interesting nature study area.  In the summer because of the sulfur water bugs don’t lay their eggs there.  It also runs year round with out freezing.

Kid’s found some mouse tracks!

A little while ago our dd7 brought hubby a graph she made.  She explained to him it was “the economic collapse”.   This short video clip shares some of the kids thoughts on the current economy.  We’ve been studying the depression on and off for a while and it’s interesting how they see similarity’s.

CurrClick is having a huge Christmas sale!  I’ve found many great deals to stock our shelves with and wanted to share this with you.  Click here to visit CurrClick and check out hundreds of titles up to 50% off!