Fun with science: inclined planes

Since today was another gorgeous Indian Summer day, we did our Fun With Science day outside. The topic was inclined planes, aka ramps and slides. After reading the sections of his book introducing simple machines and inclined planes, my son did the top part of a worksheet I made up. Then I took him and [...]

09-10 homeschool 2 month update

Where did the last 2 months go? It seems time just flew by. We got off to a bit of a rough start as the kids settled into school. Recently, they were sick then I went away for a 3 day weekend, so we’re a few days “behind”. I try to do school 5 days/week, [...]

Fun with science: gears, wheels, axles

The science order from Rainbow Resource arrived today. Yeah! It looks just perfect for us this year. We’ll be studying matter & physics for science and the human body for health.
Rather than just reading the books and taking tests or doing worksheets, we will be making practical applications whenever possible. So today we started playing [...]

Math is here

Richard’s math arrived today. Good timing because we do math on Tuesday’s and Thursdays so we can start tomorrow. He actually watched the first lesson video tonight and seemed to understand it.
He’s doing Math-U-See Gama which covers multiplication. He’s had a vague idea of what multiplication was, but this first lesson explained it well. The [...]

2009 homeschool week 1

Today ends our first week of 2009-2010 homeschool year. It had its ups and downs as expected.
Karen did the first 6 lessons of Learning to Read. She learned letters d, s, m, f, and short a. It was hard for her to learn to listen for sounds in words but by the end of the [...]

Almost ready for school

This afternoon I spent some time organizing our homeschool materials getting ready to start school on Monday. I straightened the beginning readers. I took everything off the shelf that held the teacher guides, work samples, and other things I use in the administration of my homeschool. I threw out old papers and duplicate catalogs, packed [...]

3rd grade science

My son loves science, but not the watered down science textbooks for elementary students. He wants more detail then they usually provide. I looked through the 8 content standards he needs to cover for the next 2 levels. He does half this year then half next year. We decided to focus on physical science this [...]

2009 CLE ordering

Today was the used curriculum swap and ordering for Christian Light Education. There weren’t as many people selling stuff as the past few years. Still, the kids found a few things they spent their allowances to get. Karen got 2 wooden puzzles. One is ABC’s the other numbers 0-9. Richard got a 3D horse puzzle, [...]

Planning for ‘09-’10 school year

It’s that time of year again. Time to plan and begin ordering for the next school year. This year both kids will be doing school regularly. That will take extra planning and coordination. I have a good idea of what I want to order for most subjects. As usual art is still up in the [...]

3rd grade and beyond plans

Now that I’ve decided on science, I have most of next year (and likely beyond) figured out. Yeah!
I think we are finally on track as far as curriculum goes. These align with state standards to progress through his correspondence school district’s goal levels, and his learning style. This may change of course as [...]