Last night at PWOC, the topic briefly hit on homeschooling as several are considering entering the ranks of homeschoolers. A comment about "one room schoolhouses" has stayed with me. I thought it would be fun to give you a glimpse into our one room schoolhouse.
Jamin & Jared school on their own. We study the same topics each week. The younger ones focus on facts. Arielle is starting to reason it all together. The older ones work on being able to assimilate the info, logic and persuasion. We use Tapestry of Grace as our core. For years I tweaked various programs to allow us to all study the same subjects. TOG has allowed me to focus more time on hands on learning; less time on finding materials to coordinate from kinder - 12th grade. LOL
All the children have level-specific work for Math and Language Arts.
History, Literature, Geography, Bible, Art and Science we do together (with the above mentioned exception of Jamin and Jared).
We've been DOUBLE STEPPING here in our home. We had slowed to a crawl to allow lots of exploration of fun rabbit trails. Now that we know a move is honestly going to happen this summer we are picking up the pace. We've cut out many hands on activities...and are focusing on core books and lapbooks.
We LOVE these new to us lapbooks that coordinate with Apologia Elementary Science. Last week we saved all the work on the mini-books for Friday afternoon/Saturday. This week we are doing a couple of books a day. There are a LOT of books for lesson 6.....
Here it is - how one Science text is working for a pre-school, 1st grader, 4th grader and 6th grader.
We read the text.
We totally explore the photos.
We work on our mini-books.
Zander narrates the answers to me.
Nolan narrates his answers to me and then copies the sentences into his mini-books. 
Arielle composes and writes her own answers in her booklets.
Since the others have so much writing to do, and Zander loves scissors, he does most the cutting. We've also discovered he has an aptitude for figuring out the folds that stump the rest of us. I hand them to him and say - see if you can fold this so it works right. ::snort::
We've also been pouring over books on Japan. We watched a travel video from Japan. We have visited a few blogs written by those living in Japan. I've downloaded various things to use for a Resurrection Lapbook.
Choosing Joy!
©2009 D.R.G.
6 comments:
BTW not sure if you have heard, but Jeannie has come out with new Notebook Journals I think she is calling them. They are pricey though ($25 a piece). But Astronomy is coming out next month & the rest will be out by the end of the summer. PLUS she is coming out with an anatomy book by the fall. I'm super excited. ;-) You can find a link to the new notebooks on her blog.
I'll have to check out the notebook journals. These little "lapbooks" are really mounted on cardstock and put into a notebook.....It really is helping us to do more review and grasp the info than simply reading the text and answering the questions. LOL
Glad to hear you've got a resident lapbook mini book folder expert. Every family needs one, LOL. Hayley is our expert folder somehow making sense of the folds that baffle me.
Fun post.
I am beginning to rethink/relook at our homeschooling. This year with two high schoolers, we ended up with little time for fun Mon-Friday during the day... I'm going to figure out how to carve out some time next year even though I'll have two high schoolers again.
It's hard to find a balance, Renee. Basically our high school students don't have a lot of "fun" but the younger ones and I do.
With that said - they are pursuing their interests so they do find that "fun" - but not the "make a model of London Tower" kind of fun. LOL
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