Summer Learning

I've always homeschooled Dakota. For the most part he is where he needs to be "compared" to kids his age except for his math skills. He struggles with that and I struggle with how to teach it to him. I've been considering putting him in a summer program to jump start those math skills...I know he'll hate it but he'll thank me for it later. :-)

What about ya'll? Have any of you readers put your kids in any summer math programs before? What did you think?

Terra Cotta Army

Image via Wikipedia

We have had beautiful weather here all week. When the weather is so nice, the last thing I, or Dakota, wants to do is sit inside and do schoolwork. Wednesday was one of those days when Dakota was giving me a hard time about school. I suggested he go sit outside while writing his spelling words.

I gave him a few minutes to get started and then I joined him outside. We sat there and talked while he worked on his words. He was rambling on about anything and everything BESIDES what he was actually supposed to be doing. I was sitting there, kicked back in the lawn chair with my eyes closed, just taking in the sunshine and all of a sudden he asked me if I knew the name of the Chinese Emperor who had his whole army buried with him?

"Excuse me? Can you repeat that question?"

He says "Yeah, I heard somewhere that there is this Chinese Emperor who was afraid his enemy was going to get him in the afterlife so he had his whole entire army buried with him in a mass grave."

I looked at Dakota with skepticism and asked "Are you making this up? Or is this some myth thing you heard?"

He assured me it was the real thing. Now...this is one of the parts I absolutely LOVE about homeschooling! I said "Okay, go google it and see what you can find." So off we both went to the computer. It took Dakota about 5-10 minutes of searching before he came upon the whole story of Emperor Qin's Terracotta Army (7,000 life-size sculpted clay terracotta soldiers, chariots, and horses.) We spent the next hour reading about it, watching youtube videos and looking at pictures. This was so interesting and I had never heard of this before.

When we got done, Dakota said "I just love stuff like this, ya know...history stuff."

I included a link and a youtube video if you are interested in learning about Emperor Qin...by the way, he is the same man who created the first version of the Great Wall of China.

Homeschool: The Olympics

I just purchased this unit study & lapbook project on the 2008 Olympics from CurrClick.
It's a 58 page ebook and costs $5.75 - after browsing through it quickly I am really excited to go through this with Dakota as we enjoy watching the Olympics together. Even for families who don't homeschool their children this would be a neat little inexpensive booklet to pick up!

This is what it says on the first page:

This unit study is designed to teach kids the history of the Olympics, as well
as interesting Olympic facts using crafts, creative writing, games, puzzles,
graphing, and geography. Many of the exercises found within this study can
be manipulated into booklets for the ultimate development of a
comprehensive lapbook on the Olympics.

Though this study is geared towards the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic
games, kids can use the tools contained in this unit study to graph for
themselves the games, individual events, and each country’s medal placement
for any future Olympic games.
This unit study is also designed specifically for the summer games, but many
of the history and facts learned can be applied to the winter games as well.
This unit study can also be adapted for varying ages so that a family with
siblings can enjoy learning about the Olympic games together.

Postcrossing

Yesterday I posted a blog about how Dakota and I were involved in a yahoo group called Postcard Kids where we exchanged postcards with other families around the world. Today I stumbled across this neat website called Postcrossing.

It is the same concept only you are not exchanging postcards with another family. It looks like you send one whenever you feel like it and you never know when you are going to receive one in your mailbox....or where it will come from. Once you send a postcard you enter in your screen name on the website and put in there that you have mailed a postcard and where you mailed it to...it's neat watching the screen roll up as everyone is typing in what they are doing!

WFMW: Postcard Kids

A couple years ago I signed up for a yahoo group called Postcard Kids. The idea behind this is to see if you can trade postcards with somebody from every state and as many countries as you can. I pinned a large United States map and a world map up on our wall and everytime Dakota and I received a new postcard we would find the state or country it came from and put a small sticky flag on there. This helps Dakota when we study Geography during homeschooling. I always request the person mailing us the postcard to write some sort of interesting tidbit about their area on the back of the postcard.
Here's some of our collection and a few favorites...













This one shows the outdoor market in Malaysia.













St. Petersburg, Russia


















New Zealand - we actually traded boxes with a family in New Zealand (not just a postcard.) They stuffed a shoebox full of neat candy, books and things from where they live and we did the same thing. It was interesting to try some of the candy they mailed us.

For more Works-For-Me-Wednesday tips, head on over to Rocks In My Dryer!

Homeschool Freebies

A friend of mine sent me this cool site - Freebie of the Day - you can sign up to receive their posts by RSS and never miss their daily giveaways. (Thanks Debbie!)

This is another site I've been getting things from for about 6 months now. They just changed the name of it a few months ago to CurrClick. Once a week they will email me and let me know I can go to their website and download one free homeschool lesson/book, etc. I have gotten some amazing lesson plans from them. For example, yesterday's lesson was a 30 page copywork notebook on "The Declaration of Independence: The Cost." It discussed the details of what happened to the original signers of the Declaration...the price they paid.

Homeschooling Help

Dakota is being double-teamed! Dum de dum da daa

Hahahahahahaaaa **this is me laughing evil**

I have been overwhelmed the last few months with everything "on my plate" so my mom asked me a couple weeks ago if she could help me with Dakota's schooling. I wasn't sure how this was going to go at first because they tend to butt heads when working together - but actually it has gone very well! I am so excited!

There are things I have been wanting to do with Dakota but I just couldn't fit everything in and now I can see the light at the end of the tunnel - I have help and I have time on my own to work on some other things I need to work on as well.

The Great Sunflower Project

I recently joined this - The Great Sunflower Project - by requesting a packet of sunflower seeds. I thought this would be a great Science project for Dakota and I for homeschool. The idea behind this project is an environmental study and we are supposed to grow these sunflowers and count the bees that are attracted to them. All of the seeds and educational materials will be sent to us. I've always thought sunflowers were so beautiful so I'm looking forward to growing some of these!

Homeschooling Overload

I should be working with Dakota right now but frankly I am exhausted today! I'm just having one of those days where I am too tired to deal...of course HE LOVES THAT! LOL
We started a Bible study yesterday on the life of Paul. I love learning about Paul and his conversion from persecutor of Christians to the first Christian missionary and I wanted to teach my son all about his remarkable life. The first part of our study dealt with Paul/Saul as a baby and how he was raised in a strict Jewish household and how he was circumcised on the 8th day according to Jewish customs. I had to explain what that meant to my darling son - he didn't want to hear anymore! LOL It was everything I could do to regain control of our Bible study after that point.

We moved from Bible Study into handwriting/copywork - I let him write verses from our Bible study that morning. Dakota hates writing and this is always a chore to get him to complete all of his writing without complaining. I've learned though to tell him that I'll just add more writing if he complains and that has helped somewhat. I only had him write 5 verses of scripture but it took him an hour and a half to do that because he fiddled around so much - ugh! I just kept checking on him while he worked and I finished up some things of my own on the computer.

After his handwriting work was done we moved into Geography where he has been working on European countries and learning where they are on the map and having to label them. He has a test next Tuesday at his CAPERS class he attends so we are trying to prepare for that. That took awhile trying to finish memorizing and labeling all the countries. He is getting them down pretty good though - I have to admit I am impressed!

Spelling was next - still working on words from last week - he is struggling on a few words still so I had him write them 4 times each as well as spell them over and over and over to me. I was planning on having him make sentences with them but it was getting close to time to get ready for church so I figured he could work on that later.

Last but not least was math - just called out math facts - no written work. Ran out of time. We still needed to read some of his book too "Around The World in 80 Days" but we ran out of time for that too...had planned on doing that when we got home from church last night but we met my step-daughter at Whataburger after church for dinner because it was her 16th birthday and we gave her her gifts so we got home too late. I had not spent any time with dear husband - I just let Dakota go to his bedroom and play a game on his computer while hubby and I spent some time together before bedtime around midnight! Ugh, no wonder I'm so tired!!

Homeschool - The Search Begins....

Since I have chosen to homeschool our youngest child, Dakota, I have to decide every year about this time exactly "how" I am going to homeschool him for the year. This will be our 6th year together in this schooling journey and we have done it all from totally unschooling to an online private school. Last year we tried Blended School which is an awesome program that Okaloosa County has here in FL to help homeschool parents teach science to their kids. They have teachers set up in different cities on different days of the week throughout the entire school year and the day is set up like a typical school day in regular public school (although much more relaxed!) and the focus of the whole day is on science related topics. Dakota went to a church last year on Thursdays from 9-3:15. He changed classes throughout each day - had 4 different teachers - and different subjects but all the subjects for the day revolved around the particular science topic they just happened to be studying that day. He loved Blended School!

He'll be doing that again this year on Mondays. The first part of the year (at least until Christmas) we were still doing his online private Christian school. He got bored with that though. I think the work was too boring for him....too babyish or something. I pulled out the textbooks after Christmas and we just worked together on his reading, writing, spelling and math in regular textbooks.

I started looking this week at different options because I think he is wanting to become more involved again with a homeschool club to do field trips and outings like we have done in the past. We quit doing that the last year or so because we had so much going on between family and church activities - there was never time! Now though with all the kids moving away, I think Dakota is needing some friends around. I found two places that sound real promising yesterday...one of them is Freedom Academy of Learning and the other one is CAPERS - going to check these out more and I think sign up for them. There is a local homeschool convention this weekend I think I will attend....Greg will be going out of town to visit his son at FSU so I'll have the morning free to roam through the convention at my leisure! :-)

I always throw all Dakota's stuff in a file folder or in a bag at the end of each year. I don't have any kind of order to his school stuff at all! I found this organization system that looked pretty neat! It's called The Full-Year Notebook System and it has all kinds of extras included to help with finding FREE curriculum at the library!

Okay, well I guess I'd better get on with my searching....TTFN