What are Your Ideas for Making this School Year Exciting?

So, What are Your Ideas for Making this School Year Exciting

and Different?

Here are some of my ideas:

Start a Nature Journal

Once a week go outside and study something in nature (We take Fridays for our nature study.) Give your kids a notebook with some blank pages, you may want to print out some free nature or animal pages also, and take one day a week to just go outside and see whats happening in your own backyard.

One year we studied spiders, and it was the best year of nature study we ever had! Spiders are everywhere and it didin't take the kids long to find 5 different types of spiders in our backyard. We watched them and even caught a few and learned so much through our own observation. We journaled everything in our notebook. Three years later my kids still love to get their spider notebooks out and read them to me or dad. That years is definitely remembered as our "Spider Year."

Use the internet to teach a subject

Something as simple as using the internet to teach or reinforce a subject can break up the monotony and bring new life to your classroom.

If you usually teach math or grammar from a textbook, why not take a semester and let your kids learn these subjects using an online program. If they like it then you might consider sticking with the program all year.

Using the internet to help teach your older students also frees up teacher time to work one on one with younger students.

Some other ideas are:

• switch up your subject order periodically
• Let your older students teach a subject to younger students one day a week
• Take a break from your regular studies and try a unit study for a few weeks
• Instead of having older students read silently, try reading a classic aloud to the entire family. This is a great opportunity to talk about elements of a story (setting, plot, characters) and have family discussion about the story...include dad too!
• If you've never notebooked a subject before...why not start now? Pick one subject and start a notebook for it.
• If you have used notebooking before, try taking a subject like math and notebooking it for a month. You will surprised of all the notebooking ideas you and your kids can up with for math.

Please Post your ideas in the comments section. I will include your ideas in my upcoming newsletter.

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My plan for using Teaching the Classics

I am using "Teaching the Classics" this year with my second and fourth graders. I am really excited about this program. It's not a curriculum per se, but rather an outline for the teacher on how to teach your students to analyze and dissect any literary work. I have been watching the videos and reading the manual for about a week now. I think I'm ready to start our first book and discussion. Here are my plans:

week 1

Read "Where the Wild Things Are" and use the Socratic method to analyze Setting

Read "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" and use the Socratic method to analyze Conflict and Plot

I am also going to introduce them to a couple literary devices such as alliteration, Imagery, Smilies and Personification. We will find examples of these literary devices in the reading and start learning to recognize them in future books and poems.

week 2

Read "Brave Irene" and use the Socratic method to analyze Characters

Read "Horton Hears a Who" and use the Socratic method to analyze Theme

Depending on how all of this goes we will either keep practicing on these elements seperately (setting, conflict, plot, characters, theme) using a selected reading to study each one, or we will move on to reading a longer book and looking at all 5 elements in that one book.

I have a plan. Now let's see how it works!! Will report on our results soon.

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Finally Getting Started

Well, we just officially started our new school year today. Yea! We were supposed to start three weeks ago but unfortunate circumstances seriously delayed us. This is the latest we have ever started a school year, but that's the great thing about homeschooling, you can always rearrange your schedule when things come up and still make it work in the end.

We are kind of starting off slow this week, just getting back in the hang things. We got our student planners ready to go. I printed out all of our pages and put them in a notebook for each child. We went over the pages and the kids looked at what is required of them everyday. The great thing about this planner is that it's so easy to use and the kids enjoy keeping a planner in a notebook like mom has.

In the planner there are pages for budgeting money. My kids are really excited about this. They each started a savings account( in a glass jar for now) and have agreed to save at least 10% of their money for an entire year. They get an allowance and these budgeting pages are really gonna help them see where their money is going. These are life lessons that will hopefully last them a lifetime.

Student planner sample pages ( boy/ girl)

Purchase planners

We also started Apologia: Exploring Creation with Astronomy. We made a cover sheet for our notebooks and read most of lesson 1. Evan has already fallen in love with it. I started making Notebooking pages to go along with the curriculum, so those will be up for sale sometime by the end of this school year.

We started copywork and dictation today. I have made copywork pages for Psalm 121. We've never used dictation in our school before so I am curious to see how it goes. I have heard it helps with spelling and punctuation, which Evan needs to work on, so I am excited about it. Evan is now using the smaller primary lined pages. I am trying to get him ready for regular lines by the middle of the year. Juliet is still practicing cursive. She is doing well, just still writing very big. She was using regular lines but I am switching her to small primary lines so she can remember to keep her cursive small.

Started using IEW's "All Things Fun and Fascinating." Evan is starting to just do the key word outlines orally. He will probable be doing this for several weeks or maybe months before he is ready to move on.

That's about it! We will be starting math and grammar next week. After doing science for a while we will start geography. Looking forward to this year even though we got off to a late start.

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