Alliterative Action

We had a very alliterative to do list one day:

The stupendous surprise? A new (used) Wii with a small stack of motion-oriented games. Need to beat those winter doldrums!

Rebalancing

The last couple months have been a bit of a struggle in trying to balance The Kid's desire for more, more, more learning and input with her struggles with perfectionism and tendency to get stressed out.


I don't talk a whole lot on here about her intensity or her giftedness. They're parts of who she is, and we're constantly trying to figure out how to manage the intensity.

If something is too easy, she has no interest. If something is too hard, it can cause full scale meltdowns.

She wants much of her time filled with structured activities, but really needs downtime or she burns out quickly. She wants to learn everything, and she wants to learn it all right now.

She is five years old. She would be in kindergarten by age, but her academics aren't. If we covered all the subjects she wants in a day, we'd have 3-4 hours of academics daily. I aim for 2 hours.

We've tried very relaxed school days. We've tried very structured school days. They were both disasters. We're now back to our previous routines - math, handwriting, and Spanish daily in the morning, with other subjects generally once a week or wrapped into our project time.

Splatter Painting

We found a Jackson Pollock painting during a trip to an art museum this fall. Finally, an artist I can help The Kid mimic! We actually did this project a few weeks ago during a warmer fall day.

First, we gathered supplies for practicing:

A few colors of paint in bowls, some water to rinse brushes, a large variety of paintbrushes, and a towel to wipe hands on. Plus several large sheets of paper.

Then The Kid practices what types of marks she could make flicking different paintbrushes in different ways.

Finally, I broke out the great surprise: a real art canvas!

The final product is now hanging above our dining room table! She is so proud of it and talk about her favorite parts of it when we sit down to eat.

Ancient History: Africa/Egypt

We spent quite a lot of time immersed in Ancient Egypt. The Kid did a homeschool history fair project on mummies, so there's more of a mummy emphasis here than we may have had otherwise. I have been reminded a few times already in our study of Ancients how little information there is regarding some parts of the world, and Africa is one of them. We found what we could, but truly could not find much that wasn't about Egypt.

We started the unit by reading:

• Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History, pages 172-173
• Story of the World: Chapter 11a (we have read Anansi stories before and therefore did not do the ones in SOTW)
• Story of the World: Chapter 2

We then read one more chapter of Story of the World each week for the following three weeks:

• Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History, pages 116-117
• Story of the World: Chapter 4
• Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History, pages 134-139
• Story of the World: Chapter 12
• Story of the World: Chapter 13

Nonfiction books we enjoyed:

• Egyptology: Search for the Tomb of Osiris by Emily Sands and Dugald Steer
• Kids in Ancient Egypt by Lisa A. Wroble
• Everyday Life in Ancient Egypt by Kirsten Holm
• Top 10 Worst Creepy Egyptian Mummies You Wouldn't Want to Meet by David Stewart
• Egyptian Mummies by Henrietta McCall and Dave Antram
• You Wouldn't Want to be Cursed by King Tut by Jacqueline Morley
• You Wouldn't Want to be an Egyptian Mummy! by David Stewart
• You Wouldn't Want to be a Pyramid Builder by Jacqueline Morley 
• Top 10 Worst Things About Ancient Egypt You Wouldn't Want to Know! by Victoria England
• Treasury of Egyptian Mythology by Donna Jo Napoli - we started out loving this, though it is really long and we moved on before we got quite through. 
• Pyramid by David Macaulay

Fiction books we enjoyed:

• Funny Mummy: Over 350 Jokes From Ancient Egypt by Steve Bertman
• Casting the Gods Adrift by Geraldine McCaughrean - wonderful longer read aloud telling the story of the pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti as seen through the eyes of a boy becoming a craftsman for the royal family
• I Am the Mummy Heb-Nefert by Eve Bunting
• Temple Cat by Andrew Clements

Activities we enjoyed:

• Making a chicken mummy
• Making canopic jars from air dry clay to store the chicken mummy's gizzard and liver
• Scientific Explorer: Our Amazing Mummies model kit
• Preparing a mummy presentation for a homeschool history fair 

Following along in history? Go back to the Ancient History main page.

Kid in the Kitchen

What better week for a post on cooking and baking?

This past month, The Kid has been helping out more and more in the kitchen. She's five, and like most kids she loves to help in the kitchen. I realized recently that she could probably do a lot more than she has been if I slowed it down a bit. She now is my assistant during preparations for most lunches. Starting last week, we now swap roles for one lunch a week and Sunday brunch - she is the cook, with an adult assistant.

What do your kids start out learning to cook? I'd love to find more stuff she could actually be independent on!

Project Time

We've always had a pile of projects we meant to do and somehow didn't get around to. So we have a new "class" called Project Time! 30 minutes every school day dedicated to whatever project we're currently working on. So far, we've used this time for her history fair project and NaNoWriMo. We'll break from NaNoWriMo next week to use the time to put the wrappings on her chicken mummy.

Finally, projects that get done!

Read Aloud: The Secret Garden

The Husband and I take turns reading aloud to The Kid for about a half hour before bed most nights. Our most recent book was The Secret Garden, which is one of my all-time childhood favorites. I love the friendships between the kids, reading through the changes that occur for Mary and Colin, and the great relationship that the kids have with some of the adults. This one is a long book, and it tells its story slowly and gently, so it's definitely for patient listeners. But it can also be helped along by Inga Moore's illustrations in the fantastic version we found!

BFSU: Energy Unit

Resources: Magic School Bus episodes (these were definitely more in the "fun" than "educational" category)

Lesson 1: BFSU C-3: Concepts of Energy II: Kinetic and Potential Energy
Lesson 2: Magic School Bus Gets Charged
Lesson 3: BFSU C-4: Concepts of Energy III: Distinguishing Between Matter and Energy, part 1
Lesson 4: BFSU C-4: Concepts of Energy III: Distinguishing Between Matter and Energy, part2
Lesson 5: Magic School Bus in the Arctic

This post is part of my series on using BFSU as a science unit study.

NaNoWriMo 2015: Getting Started

The Kid loved doing National Novel Writing Month's Young Writers Program last year and has been very excited to get started again this year! Of course, being five years old, the 30,000 word count that is set as the default goal is a bit much. Last year, she set her goal at 1500 and just made it. This year, she has set herself a goal of 2500 words.

This year, she wanted to do part of the workbook that the YWP has to help young writers map out their characters and stories. So we spent a few days at the end of October, with me scribing in the workbook as she created a main character, supporting character, and villain. She made up a brief outline of her book's plot and I asked her questions to prompt her. That is all the planning she did - and it's far more planning than she's ever done before.

Her goal is for her to write (or dictate) about 20 minutes per school day throughout November. She wants to try her hand at typing it, so we may be trading off some. We have always done her previous stories with her dictating and me scribing, guided by BraveWriter's Jot It Down program, and I'm expecting I'll be doing the majority of the typing this month.

Wish her luck!

Homeschooling Confessions

Someone in a homeschooling forum recently described me as having "her daughter in about twelve things a day and STILL finds time to cover everything academic, all while being perky and well-rested to boot."

I cracked up. I am generally pretty confident in my homeschooling and parenting. Maybe I'm just in denial. But perky? Most definitely not!

So, some of my homeschooling/parenting confessions:

• I hate long, involved projects. We're making a chicken mummy right now. Why? What the flip are we going to get out of this? Will she even remember it in a few years? Plus, The Kid wants to make canopic jars for the innards. Seriously? Do you actually think we're keeping mummified chicken innards long term?
• When the woman who is wonderfully heading up an American Girl book club asked parents if they would like to help, I said no. I'm sending my kid to the book club specifically so someone else can plan projects and I don't have to. I did offer to help furnish any supplies needed.
• I'm intentionally holding my daughter back in gymnastics. The level she is in meets during the daytime, when the center is nearly empty. All the later levels only meet during the evening, when the center is crowded, noisy, and has extremely limited seating and parking. She can stay with the daytime preschoolers, thank you very much.
• We barely "do" academics. Seriously, it looks like a ton of stuff when I post about it, but it's somewhere around 90 minutes a day. Plus random educational things to watch on tv and lots of books.
• My child is a great reader. Okay, that doesn't sound like a confession. But you know those history lists I put together that have a bunch of books listed? And you're maybe thinking that I read them all aloud to her? Or we read them together? Nope. She takes a stack to her reading space and reads them. We read maybe 10% of them together.
• We never did get signed up for Girl Scouts. There were a ton of roadblocks in the way. They didn't make it easy. They're all based around the schools so that girls are with their classmates. The school near us mixes all the girls ages 5-12 together and is poorly organized. The school where most her friends ended up going would be a pain to get her to. And there is no way I'm starting my own troop. No Way.
• We're one and done. The Kid will forever remain THE Kid. There will be no Next Kid. There will be no Third Kid. Yeah, we still do a bunch of activities, but I have ONE KID. If we didn't do a bunch of activities, she would want me to be her playmate and that just isn't happening. Five year old's games aren't really that interesting to me. So we go to gymnastics and book club and dance and soccer and music and park day and this and that and the other thing. Then someone else can keep The Kid occupied for a while. Bonus points if it's a drop-off activity and I can go run errands in peace!

There. That's what I can think of off the top of my head, which means there's at least five times this amount that I'm not listing :)

How about you? Any homeschool confessions?

Fairy Tale Project: The Ugly Duckling

September's BraveWriter-inspired fairy tale project was The Ugly Duckling.

We read:

• The Ugly Duckling adapted and illustrated by Jerry Pinkney
• The Ugly Duckling retold and illustrated by Roberta Angaramo
• The Ugly Duckling retold by Lilian Moore and illustrated by Daniel San Souci
• Presenting Tanya the Ugly Duckling by Patricia Lee Gauch and illustrated by Satomi Ichikawa
• Ugly by Donna Jo Napoli and illustrated by Lita Judge

The Jerry Pinkney version had my favorite illustrations, though it was also the most simplified version of the story we read. Napoli's Ugly was a random find at the library, but we ended up really enjoying it. It is an expanded version of the original story with much more detail given, especially as regards how the duckling spent his winter.

Though The Kid enjoyed the Ugly Duckling stories, she struggled with recalling as much information as she wanted when it came time to narrate. She was obviously frustrated with herself for not being able to tell the story. Though I wouldn't normally go this route with a young child, I decided to show her how to take quick notes on a book to help her keep the story in her mind. We grabbed the simplest version we had of the story (Pinkey's version), reread it, and made a quick note on a piece of paper every couple of pages or so about what was important to the story. The Kid then used these notes as brief prompts to herself when she was dictating the story to me.

We'll be taking a break from our fairy tale project for a couple of months. October is busy with an upcoming history fair and The Kid will be participating in NaNoWriMo in November!

BFSU: Living Things Unit

Resources: Magic School Bus episodes (while certainly optional, the episodes in this unit were especially informative)
                  Insect Lore Caterpillar-to-Butterfly kit
                  Blood and Guts by Linda Allison
                  Brain Pop videos

** If you wish to do any life cycle observations in conjunction with BFSU B-4 I would suggest you purchase or collect your animals at the very beginning of this unit. For the caterpillar-to-butterfly kit, I had to order the kit and wait a few days for it to arrive, then order the caterpillars and wait nearly a week for them to arrive, then it took about two weeks from arrival until release.

Lesson 1: BFSU B-3: Distinguishing Between Plants and Animals
Lesson 2: Magic School Gets Planted
Lesson 3: BFSU B-4: Life Cycles
Lesson 4: Magic School Bus Cracks a Yolk
                Related Brain Pop videos: Metamorphosis, Amphibians
Lesson 5: Blood and Guts by Linda Allison, read pages 123-127 on reproduction (We are fairly direct about human reproduction with our child, you would obviously want to preview these pages to see if you are comfortable with them.)
Lesson 6: BFSU B-4A: Identification of Living Things (Similarities and Differences)
                Related Brain Pop videos: Amphibians, Arachnids, Classification
Lesson 7: BFSU B-4B: What is a Species
                Related Brain Pop videos: Classification, Six Kingdoms
Lesson 8: BFSU B-5: Food Chains and Adaptations, part 1
Lesson 9: BFSU B-5: Food Chains and Adaptations, part 2
Lesson 10:  Magic School Bus In The Rainforest
                  Related Brain Pop videos: Camouflage, Energy Pyramid, Food Chains


This post is part of my series on using BFSU as a science unit study.

Ancient History: Persia

I love covering things in history that I know little about. I get to learn right along with The Kid! Ancient Persia definitely falls into that category and I was excited to learn along with her.

We started out by reading:

• Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History, pages 152-153
• Story of the World, Chapter 21

And then added in the following picture books:

• Forty Fortunes: A Tale of Iran by Aaron Shepard
• The Legend of the Persian Carpet by Tomie DePaola
• Ali and the Magic Stew by Shulamith Levey Oppenheim

And a magazine:

• Kids Discover: Ancient Persia

 If you are following along with us in World History, go back to the main page.

The Fairy Tale Project: Little Red Riding Hood

August's fairy tale project was Little Red Riding Hood.

We read four versions of the story:

• Little Red Riding Hood retold by by Trina Schart Hyman
• Little Red Riding Hood retold by Anthea Bell
• Little Roja Riding Hood by Susan Middleton Elya
• Lon Po Po by Ed Young

The first two versions listed are both pretty faithful translations of the Brothers Grimm tale, each with very different, very lavish illustrations. The third is a simplified and modernized retelling with Spanish words sprinkled in. The fourth is a wonderful version of a "big bad wolf" tale originating in China.

We kept it simple this month with our focus for the writing and illustrating of the story after last month's extremely detailed retelling of Puss in Boots. We kept our discussion to talking about choosing between doing a retelling of the Brothers Grimm version, the modernized version, or the Chinese tale - how each story is different, what the similarities were, and how she could choose parts of any or all of them to weave together. In the end, she chose to do a pretty straightforward retelling of the Grimm version.

Ancient History: Phoenicians

After spending so much time in Mesopotamia, I was amazed to find almost no resources in the picture book section regarding the Phoenicians. The Kid and I decided to do this as a bare bones unit and move on to Persia.

We read:

• Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History, pages 140-145
• Story of the World, Chapter 15

If you are following along with us in World History, go back to the main page.

Bugs!

Just a quick post - it seems it is the year for cicadas to be everywhere again! In the same day, we found a cicada exoskeleton attached to a deck post and then found a recently deceased cicada on the deck. So what do we do? Bring them inside and look at them under the microscope, of course!

This pic was just taken with my phone:

What nature have you found to examine recently?

Moving, Chaos, and Still Here

We moved - a while three blocks from where we used to live! I seriously underestimated and thought we'd take about a week to get settled in because it was such a little move. Of course, we still had to pack everything we owned into boxes and then unpack it all, figure out where it went, and organize it. A month later and the house is finally looking "lived in" instead of "pure chaos".

Though I haven't been blogging, we have been schooling. There should be another history unit posted in the next couple weeks, our first religion unit will be completed and posted, and we're 2 weeks in to a 6 weeks Living Things science unit.

Meanwhile, here's the new homeschool space:

Looks rather like our old homeschool space. That's the fun of modular furniture. Actually, there's a big difference. Before, homeschool and play space were all together in one room. This house has a big enough bedroom for The Kid to hold all of her toys and her art desk! The homeschool desk is tucked in a corner of the dining room, still central to our daily living. It was a bit interesting to sort out what went into her room and what went into the homeschool space. Which space does the Lego Education kit go in? How about the Snap Circuits? Do we put all the books in her room or in the living room or dining room? A few weeks in, everything finally has a place and I can even mostly remember what went where!

Fairy Tale Project: Puss in Boots

July's fairy tale project centered on Puss in Boots. The Kid loved this story so much that even though I only meant for her to choose about 3 of the versions I picked up from the library, she read all 5! Here are the versions we read:

• Puss in Boots translated by Malcolm Arthur, illustrated by Fred Marcellino
• Puss in Boots retold and illustrated by Steve Light
• Puss in Boots retold and illustrated by Paul Galdone
• Puss in Boots retold and illustrated by Jerry Pinkney
• Puss in Cowboy Boots by Jan Huling and Phil Huling

I note that there is a DreamWorks movie named Puss in Boots. However, that character of Puss isn't really related to the classic story but rather a prequel to the Shrek movies. I my daughter wasn't so very sensitive to violence in movies, we probably would have watched it anyway!

She would talk about even small differences between versions, like which title Puss gave his master. We spent a lot of time appreciating the illustrations in the books - I especially liked Fred Marcellino's and The Kid was especially drawn to the swirls in Steve Light's. By the time we got to the narration, she had to spread it out over two sessions because she gave such a detailed account of the story.

The skill I chose to work on with her for this narrative was chunking a story into "parts". Because she gave such a detailed retelling, I asked if she wanted to do multiple illustrations and make a full Puss in Boots book of her own. She did, so then we talked about dividing up her narrative onto separate pages, one "chunk" of related narrative for each picture - kind of like the forerunner to understanding dividing a long story into chapters. Along with this, we discussed how stories are set up, the action builds, there is a climax, and then things are wrapped up.

Ancient History: Sumer and Akkad, Babylonia, Assyria

I started out meaning to do this as three separate units: Sumer and Akkad, then Babylonia, then Assyria. But so many of the resources we used discussed all of the civilizations together, so I ended up doing the same.

We started the unit by reading:

• Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History pages 110-113
• Story of the World: Chapter 3
• Story of the World: Chapter 5

After that, we went through one of the following periodically while continuing to work our way through other resources of interest:

• Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History page 132
• Story of the World: Chapter 7 
• Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History pages 146-149
• Story of the World: Chapter 8
• Story of the World: Chapter 16
• Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History pages 150-151
• Story of the World: Chapter 17
• I note that Chapter 17a is about Nebuchadnezzar's insanity. SOTW uses the Bible as a primary source for this story, and it is the only historical reference that seems to refer to his madness. While I did include the story here, I discussed it as one of the places where the historical narrative may be true or may be myth.

Nonfiction books we enjoyed:

• The Tigris and Euphrates: Rivers of the Fertile Crescent by Gary Miller (956.7 Mil)
• Write Around the World: The Story of How and Why We Learned to Write by Vivian French and Ross Collins (411 Fr)
• The Ancient Near East by Rebecca Stefoff (939.4 Ste) - Chapter 1 covers Mesopotamia

Fiction and myth books we enjoyed:

• Pepi and the Secret Names by Jill Paton Walsh and Fiona French
• The Three Princes retold by Eric A. Kimmel (398.2 Three Princes Kim) 
• Ishtar and Tammuz: A Babylonian Myth of the Seasons by Christopher Moore (398.2 Ishtar Moo) 
• The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor retold by John Yeoman, illustrated by Quentin Blake (398.208 Arabian Nights Yeo) - this was done as a longer read aloud 
• The Gilgamesh trilogy by Ludmila Zeman: Gilgamesh the King, The Revenge of Ishtar, The Last Quest of Gilgamesh (398.208 Gilgamesh Zem)
• Note: I would have liked to have included an Aladdin story, but my daughter was pretty much done with this time and place, so we moved on.

Documentaries we enjoyed:

• Ancient Civilizations for Children: Ancient Mesopotamia (935 Anc) - This has several bibilical references

Activities we enjoyed:

• Making a clay tablet with air-dry clay and trying to write in our own form of heiroglyphics
• Baking sebetu rolls (recipe found on page 80 of Ancient Egyptians and Their Neighbors

Following along in history? Go back to the main Ancient History page.

The Fairy Tale Project

I'm a big fan of the BraveWriter Lifestyle. We do Poetry Teas. I would relax on grammar and writing instruction a la BraveWriter, but The Kid won't stand for that - she wants more more more. But the only "formal" writing projects for first grade will be NaNoWriMo and a huge fairy tale project. The general idea of BraveWriter's fairy tale project is to read and/or watch multiple versions of a fairy tale, then have the child narrate the fairy tale and illustrate it. I decided to have this one project from Jot It Down take our full year, with one fairy tale per month.

Month 1: Rumpelstiltskin


Month 2: Puss In Boots

Month 3: Little Red Riding Hood

Month 4: The Ugly Duckling

Month 5: Cinderella

Yet to come: Three Little Pigs, Jack and the Beanstalk, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Rapunzel,  Hansel and Gretel

Fairy Tale Project: Rumpelstiltskin

Our first BraveWriter fairy tale project subject was Rumpelstiltskin. While I've always kind of liked this story, it turns out that The Kid does not. We therefore only read two versions:

• Rumpelstiltskin adapted and illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky
• The Girl Who Spun Gold by Virginia Hamilton, illustrated by Leo Dillon

This did give us two stories that are similar in basic narrative but very different in cultural background.  After reading them both, I asked The Kid to narrate the tale. She grumpily told me that she did not remember the story. I asked her to just start talking about anything in the story and she did give me about 8-10 completely disjointed sentences, covering the basics of the story.

So the skill we ended up focusing on this month was ordering. I took the disjointed sentences of her narrative, printed them out and cut them up - one sentence per strip. I then asked her to help me put them in order, like a puzzle. Did this event happen before or after that one? I read it out to her after she put them in order and she was satisfied with her story, which I then reordered on the computer, printed out, and she was happy to illustrate.

Spanish Immersion

I probably should have written this post a couple of months ago, before details could start fading from my mind. This past February, The Kid and I took off for an adventure - four weeks in a foreign country, just the two of us.

We started out by flying into Guatemala City. We were met there by a driver who had been arranged in advance for the ride to San Pedro La Laguna on Lake Atitlan. The ride was supposed to take three hours but somehow ended up taking five and we arrived well after dark. Fortunately, The Kid was work out from a day of traveling and slept at least half the drive. We were brought to the homestay we would be living in for the following three weeks. We briefly met some of the members of the household, then went to sleep.

For three weeks, I walked to a Spanish language school for four hours in the morning. A few minutes before arriving at my school, I would drop off The Kid (who was 4 years old at the time) at a small local preschool. The preschool was Spanish immersion for The Kid simply by way of no one there speaking any other language. After school I would pick her up and we would do the walk up the ridiculously steep hill to the homestay.

After a couple days of preschool, The Kid was expressing a lot of frustration. She already knew the basics in Spanish, but the rapid speaking pace and not being able to switch to English was taking its toll. This was when I realized that the survival skills that came more naturally to me had to be explicitly explained to her. When she didn't know how to say something well in Spanish, she didn't even know where to start. If she wanted to play on the slide, but didn't know the word for slide, I taught her that she could point, refer to its color, and use me gusta (I like) or quiero (I want). To this day, The Kid swears she learned no Spanish at the preschool because there was no direct Spanish instruction. But by the end of the three weeks of homestay and preschool, she was regularly correcting me and supplying me with vocabulary.

There were a couple things I hadn't taken into consideration before going. The first one to become apparent was a difference in safety standards. The bathroom in the homestay was up a set of stairs - very steep, uneven, stone stairs with no railing. Those stairs made me nervous, but for The Kid they were simply impossible. We quickly came up with her being able to walk up them but needing to go down by sitting on them and scooting down on her butt - something she hadn't done since she was a year old at home. There are no sidewalks, no shoulder to the roads, and drivers are... unpredictable.

But worst of all for The Kid was the lack of parks - there was one teeny playground, but no green spaces. No where other than stone floors or the street to practice cartwheels. Technically, there was a "park" in front of the church, but the actual green spaces were all roped off to keep them pretty and people were only allowed on the stone paths. There were none of the child-friendly spaces that we are so accustomed to at home - no children's museum, no library, no public pools. Our afternoons consisted of taking a walk to get ice cream or go to a restaurant for an afternoon snack and maybe a bit of wifi. We could watch the boats on the lake, but the lake was not really safe for swimming. The area was very polluted in general and The Kid developed a cough she couldn't fully shake until we left San Pedro.

The homestay was fantastic. They were helpful, they all doted on The Kid, they patiently helped us along with our Spanish. Maria was a great cook. The Kid is an adventurous eater and found a lot of new foods to enjoy (and a few she didn't care for so much). Really, the people in general for fantastic. The teachers were very helpful. Random strangers on the street would stop to talk. The people made this trip fantastic.

For the next part of the trip, we took a shuttle van to the airport and flew to Flores. Flores is a really neat little town in the middle of a lake. It's a bit more touristy, and therefore somewhat less good for immersion because many people would just switch to English when they heard me struggling along in Spanish. But the lake was clean and easily swimmable, the weather was a bit warmer, there was a bit more to see and do... Unfortunately for us, The Kid took sick the last day in San Pedro and was pretty worn out, so we were limited. But we enjoyed what we could.

Then another shuttle van to Tikal. We stayed in a hotel just outside the ruins. The first day we took a guided tour and then the next two days we just paid our entrance fee and hiked around. Tikal is a fantastic Mayan ruin site situated in a tropical forest. Climbing one of the temples was a highlight of the entire trip for The Kid - you could see the entirety of the Gran Plaza from up there!

The Kid just reminded me: Though Lake Atitlan is high elevation with no malaria risk, Tikal was lowland tropical forest. There were definitely mosquitos! And the malaria risk meant she had to swallow malaria pills; this was the first she had ever had pills that needed swallowed. It was a bit of a trick to get them down at first.

After Tikal, we returned to Flores for one night and caught an early shuttle to Belize City - five hours in a van with the oddest border crossing setup I've ever seen. In Belize City, we met up with The Husband in the airport, took a short hop over to Ambergris Caye, and enjoyed a week of fun and sun.

I love travel - getting to stay in a place long enough to get to know it. This trip was successful enough that we're planning to do a similar one next year.

BFSU: Time and Maps Unit

Resources: Magic School Bus episodes, just for fun

Lesson 1: BFSU D-2: Day and Night and the Earth’s Rotation
Lesson 2: BFSU D-3: Read and Draw Maps, part 1
Lesson 3: BFSU D-3: Read and Draw Maps, part 2
Lesson 4: Magic School Bus Sees Stars
Lesson 5: BFSU D-3A: North, South, East, and West, part 1
Lesson 6: BFSU D-3A: North, South, East, and West, part 2
Lesson 7: Magic School Bus Gets Lost in Space
Lesson 8: BFSU D-5: Time and the Earth’s Turning
Lesson 9: BFSU D-6 Seasonal Changes and the Earth’s Orbit
Lesson 10: parent-drawn "treasure map" of house or yard marking the location of a small hidden prize to be found by reading the map

This post is part of my series on using BFSU as a science unit study.

Homeschooling Budget

This question comes up with a lot of new homeschoolers: How much does it cost to homeschool? I'll start by admitting that I find the question confusing. I mean, I understand all the words, but the answer is dependent on so many factors. The easiest was to answer this would be to research curriculum and other resources, choose what you would want, and then add up the total.

But I've decided to list out my budgeting here, just as one example. These are projections for first grade; I've used my resource list from last week to help show costs.

Language Arts - $711
$150 Michael Clay Thompson Island Level - Teacher Manuals only, plus Mud trilogy
$40   BraveWriter Jot It Down
$0     BraveWriter-style Poetry Teas - we'd be eating the food and drinking the drinks anyway
$0     Participate in NaNoWriMo
$13   Suppose the Wolf Were An Octopus
$500 Literature List - maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less
$0     New American Cursive handwriting - bought for kindergarten
$0     StartWrite software - bought with previous year's budget
$8     Rummy Roots - bought used

Math - $242
$170 RightStart Math (Level C and part of D)
$0     Time-Life I Love Math series - bought with previous year's budget
$0      Penrose the Mathematical Cat - bought with previous year's budget
$12    Singapore Challenging Word Problems 1 (and maybe 2)
$0      Highlights MathMania magazines - bought with previous year's budget
$40    Sir Cumference books - we already have a few, this will buy the remainder
$20    Zaccaro Primary Grade Challenge Math
$0      Variety of living math books from the library

Science - $610
$0     Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding - multi-year curric, purchased last year
$0     Lego Education Basic Structures - bought with previous year's budget
$0     Lego Education Early Simple Machines - bought with previous year's budget
$0     Snap Circuits - bought with previous year's budget
$0     Zometool - bought with previous year's budget
$0     The Private Eye - bought with previous year's budget
$30   Happy Scientist videos
$0     Carson Zorb Microscope - bought with previous year's budget
$20   Caterpillar-to-Butterfly Kit
$35   Thames and Kosmos Crystal Kit
$25   Rock On! Geology Game
$125 ASK Rocks and Minerals Kit
$125 ASK Seeds Kit

$0     Kids Discover magazines - bought with previous year's budget
$0     Click magazine - gift subscription from relative

$0     Magic School Bus episodes - part of Netflix subscription, priced below
$0     Blood and Guts by Linda Allison - already on our shelves
$250 Memberships to local children's science museum and zoo

History - $300
$200 Mom-constructed Ancient History - approximate cost for non-library books and project materials
$100 Netflix subscription - used for multiple classes, just listing it her, we would not have this if not for homeschooling

Spanish - $175
$0     Salsa Spanish
$125 Scholastic Spanish books
$0     DuoLingo
$0     Spanish-language shows on YouTube
$0     Spanish music by Jose-Luis Orozco - already own this
$50   I have Spanish for Children and may or may not decide to use it - bought used
Tentative plans for an immersion trip to Honduras in February/March 2016 - we have a separate travel budget for this

Art - $20
$20    Art Tango Kindergarten level - curriculum free, we owned most of the supplies alrady
$0      Usborne Big Drawing Book - already own this

Music - $806 plus an instrument
$6     Music Theory Made Easy
$0     Finish Story of the Orchestra - already own it
$800+ "Meet the Instruments" lessons followed by instrument lessons in her choice of instrument - this is the cost of the lessons, plus the cost of whatever instrument she chooses
We might choose to add SQUILT

Typing - $10
$10    Keyboarding Without Tears

Physical Education - $800
$200   Gymnastics Lessons
$300   Dance Lessons
$300   Various sports seasons

GRAND TOTAL: $3674

Actually, that's not as bad as I thought. Still less than half the cost of the private school we might otherwise enroll her in, and if she went there she wouldn't have the time for gymnastics, dance, instrument lessons, and travel. And definitely helped by the fact that we spent about the same last year, front-loading costs of things like fun science toys.

First Grade Curriculum and Resources

Last week, I posted our kindergarten wrap-up. We school year round (or at least take our breaks differently than the norm), so this is the first week of first grade! As seems to happen, I have more resources than I know how to fit in. It looks like a crazy amount, in part because we set our "school days" to be under 2 hours per day and then fill our lives with much educational enrichment.

Language Arts (5 days per week for 30-45 minutes)
Michael Clay Thompson Island Level - our planned path through this
BraveWriter Jot It Down
BraveWriter-style Poetry Teas
Participate in NaNoWriMo
Suppose the Wolf Were An Octopus
Literature List
New American Cursive handwriting (continue book 1, then move to copywork in cursive)
StartWrite software for additional handwriting practice, copywork
Rummy Roots

Math (3 days per week are RightStart, 2 days are other items from this list, 20-30 minutes per day)
RightStart Math (Level C and part of D)
Time-Life I Love Math series
Penrose the Mathematical Cat
Singapore Challenging Word Problems 1 (and maybe 2)
Highlights MathMania magazines
Sir Cumference books
Zaccaro Primary Grade Challenge Math
Variety of living math books from the library

Science (1 day per week of BFSU, the rest gets pulled out fairly regularly)
Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding - details on our path
Lego Education Basic Structures
Lego Education Early Simple Machines
Snap Circuits
Zometool
The Private Eye
Happy Scientist videos
Carson Zorb Microscope
Caterpillar-to-Butterfly Kit
Thames and Kosmos Crystal Kit
Rock On! Geology Game
ASK Rocks and Minerals Kit
ASK Seeds Kit (might save this for 2nd grade)
Kids Discover magazines
Click magazine  (might switch to Ask partway through year. Or not.)
Magic School Bus episodes
Blood and Guts by Linda Allison
Memberships to local children's science museum and zoo

History (1 day per week scheduled, the rest as desired)
Mom-constructed Ancient History

Spanish (5 days per week for 20 minutes)
Salsa Spanish
Scholastic Spanish books
DuoLingo
Spanish-language shows on YouTube
Spanish music by Jose-Luis Orozco
I have Spanish for Children and may or may not decide to use it
Tentative plans for an immersion trip to Honduras in February/March 2016

Art (1 day per week for 15 minutes)
Art Tango Kindergarten level
Usborne Big Drawing Book
The Private Eye (also listed under science)

Music (1 day per week for 20 minutes, daily instrument practice once she chooses an instrument)
Music Theory Made Easy (finish book 1, move onto 2)
Finish Story of the Orchestra
"Meet the Instruments" lessons followed by instrument lessons in her choice of instrument
We might choose to add SQUILT

Typing (1 day per week for 10 minutes required, more as desired)
Keyboarding Without Tears

We are taking the summer off from most lessons. Starting in the fall, she will have instrument lessons, seasonal sports, and up to two other lessons of her choice (I'd guess dance/gymnastics).

First Grade Literature List

Poetry to add to our shelves and use during poetry tea times:

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost, illustrated by Susan Jeffers
Paul Revere's Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
My Parents Think I'm Sleeping by Jack Prelutsky
New Kid on the Block by Jack Prelutsky
Pizza the Size of the Sun by Jack Prelutsky
Something Big Has Been Here by Jack Prelutsky
Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein

Books to read aloud, enjoy together, and discuss during school reading time:

Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears by Verna Aardema
How the Leopard Got His Claws by Chinua Achebe
Ugly Duckling by Hans Christian Anderson
Story of Babar by Jean de Brunhoff
Day's Work by Eve Bunting
Pop's Bridge by Eve Bunting
SOS File by Betsy Byars, Betsy Duffey, and Laurie Myers
Story of Ruby Bridges by Robert Coles
Strega Nona's Magic Lessons by Tomie de Paola
Big Anthony and the Magic Ring by Tomie de Paola
Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato by Tomie de Paola
Jamie O'Rourke and the Pooka by Tomie de Paola
Legend of Old Befana by Tomie de Paola
Legend of the Poinsettia by Tomie de Paola
Legend of the Bluebonnet by Tomie de Paola
Stone Fox by John R. Gardiner
The Wolf Who Cried Boy by Bob Hartman
Saint George and the Dragon by Margaret Hodges
Little Red Riding Hood by Trina Schart Hyman
Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson
The Stray by Dick King-Smith
The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf
Henry's Freedom Box by Ellen Levine
Micawber by John Lithgow
King and the Seed by Eric Maddern
Six Men by David McKee
Tikki Tikki Tembo by Arlene Mosel
Three Questions by Jon J. Muth
Raising Dragons by Jerdine Nolen
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff
Cinderella by Charles Perrault
Puss in Boots by Charles Perrault
Aunt Minnie McGranahan by Mary Skillings Prigger
Apple-Pip Princess by Jane Ray
The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka
The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales by Jon Scieszka
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
Brave Irene by William Steig
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
Many Moons by James Thurber

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst
Biggest Bear by Lynd Ward

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams
Owl Moon by Jane Yolen
Rumpelstiltskin by Paul O. Zelinsky
Rapunzel by Paul O. Zelinsky

Books for family read aloud time:

Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
Tumtum and Nutmeg: The Rose Cottage Tales by Emily Bearn
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Ralph S. Mouse by Beverly Cleary (we read the first two in the series last year)
Ramona and Her Father by Beverly Cleary
Ramona the Brave by Beverly Cleary
Robin Hood retold by Paul Cresswick
The Magic Finger by Roald Dahl
The Giraffe, the Pelly, and Me by Roald Dahl
The Enormous Crocodile by Roald Dahl
Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl
The Twits by Roald Dahl
The Tale of Desperaux by Kate DiCamillo
Complete Book of Dragons by E. Nesbit
The Littles by John Peterson
Aesop's Fables retold by Jerry Pinkney
Encyclopedia Mythologica: Fairies and Magical Creatures by Matthew Reinhart and Robert Sabuda
The Little Mermaid retold by Robert Sabuda
Cricket in Times Square by George Selden
All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein

Kindergarten Wrap Up

We are finishing up kindergarten this week and it's time for some reflections on what has worked well for us and what hasn't.

The Good:

1. Grammar: I finally decided to ignore the age recommendations and we used Grammar Island from Michael Clay Thompson. The Kid loved this! She learned quickly and has so much more fun with Mad Libs now that we don't have to review each part of speech for each and every blank! She liked it so much I went ahead and bought the rest of Island Level and we'll be using that as our main Language Arts program for first grade.
2. Spanish Immersion: We spent four weeks in Guatemala. Three of those weeks were in a host home while I attended Spanish language classes and The Kid attended a local Spanish-only preschool. I'm pretty sure we each learned more Spanish during that time than we had in all our previous studies put together. We're already planning our next immersion trip!
3. Unit studies for science: It was hard for me to wrap my head around the flowcharts in BFSU until I finally realized that I could break it all up into units. The Kid would especially list all the science kits and hands-on we've done as the "good part" of science.
4. Our prehistory year: The Kid has never been really into dinosaurs, which were covered extensively this year. After this, though, she chose a dino-themed week of summer camp to attend - she is that excited about the topic! I learned that The Kid can tell me all sorts of things she has learned from the books and documentaries, while barely even remembering that we did any activities. Go figure. I've started some book-and-documentary-focused Ancient history with her since.

The Bad:

1. All the rest of Spanish: This year alone, we've tried and discarded Risas y Sonrisas (a total disaster), DuoLingo (moved too fast), Song School Spanish (too basic - we finished it but she didn't learn much), and The Fun Spanish (no real practice and not very fun). Is a progressive foreign language course that starts at kindy and goes up through mastery really too much to ask?
2. Spelling: Too tedious for her age and/or level of patience. We'll revisit in the future if we need it.
3. Handwriting: sigh. I know The Kid is a young student. Her handwriting is probably now on par for her age, whereas her fine motor skills were delayed to start the year. But we're still nowhere near being able to do copywork and dictation to start first grade.

Access to Art

I just looked and found I have only one post regarding art on my blog. How can this be? Art is so constant around here it is like breathing! Oh, wait, that's why I don't have any posts on it - my posts tend to be about things I plan, not things that just happen. So this is the first post in what I plan to be two or three posts on integrating art into your child's experience.

I'll start with access to art and the setup of The Kid's art space. Any desk will do, though I certainly prefer child-height desks. Ours is from the Elfa line at Ikea. Because it is height-adjustable, it can grow with her.

The majority of her art materials are easily within reach. Below the desk is a paper organizer that holds construction paper, copy paper, writing paper, and some coloring books. On top of the paper organizer is play dough and play dough cutters/rollers, a small potholder weaving loom, stapler, tape dispenser, hole puncher, crayons, glitter glue, and pens. Over to the side are larger painting papers and a pitcher of chenille sticks. On top of the desk is a pencil sharpener, large crayon caddy, and the "parts cabinet". On top of the parts cabinet are stencils and a drawing book.

The parts cabinet is a wonderful idea that I snagged from somewhere. (I've seen it several places, no idea where first!) You can pick these up in any hardware store. In our small drawers are a wide variety of stickers, special crayons, pom poms, googly eyes, sequins, and other bits. The larger drawers contain glue, markers, big foam stickers, chalks, fabric scraps. The variety is what is so wonderful about these. There is no need to fill the drawers up to the brim, just put enough out to catch attention.

Which brings me to conservation of materials. The Kid has completely free access to this desk and the things on it. If I want to limit something, I simply don't put it all out. Yes, she asks for more when she runs out and I tell her I'll get around to it later and she has plenty of other options for now. I refill when I get around to it, rarely immediately, rarely even on the same day. I believe it encourages exploration of other materials to wait just a bit to refill a drawer.

As for what is NOT on the desk: paints, glitter, ink pads for stamps, and charcoals. I withhold these items to save my sanity. I will get out the stamps, paints, or charcoals by request; I simply want to know when they are being used so I can supervise/run interference regarding the cleanup. And a very special note on glitter - if she wants to add sparkle, she has glitter glue, glitter markers, and sequins. While I know parents who allow free use of glitter, loose glitter is for outdoor projects only in my household. I used it once inside in the last house I lived in and I was still finding it during our move-out cleaning!

Spanish Plan: Advancing Beginners to Intermediate

The Kid now has a pretty good Spanish vocabulary including many nouns, quite a few adjectives, and a solid handful of verbs. She understands that verbs are conjugated differently in Spanish and has started learning how to change the verb to match the noun. She has mastered the content of introductory curriculum and because there isn't an intermediate curriculum written for young children, we are leaving curriculum behind this year. We are essentially about to start the second year of a three-year plan to become conversational in Spanish.

Resources for this year:

Salsa Spanish. I had almost dismissed this as being "too easy", but upon rewatching I realized how much vocabulary and sentence structure is in the conversation. The focus words are certainly simple (basic numbers, colors, and nouns) but using the scripts I can come up with quite a bit of new material for us.

Spanish books. I bought a box of 50 Spanish books written at a kindy-1st grade level from Scholastic. We've started reading through these. The plan is to add one new book from the box to our bookshelves each week, carefully looking up the words we don't know. Then we take one of the older (and simpler) books each week to practice reading fluency. The reading fluency book is read a few times throughout the week - first to remember the story and vocabulary, then to listen carefully to the sounds, then for The Kid to read aloud to me once or twice.

Spanish music. This will include children's music like the stuff from Jose-Luis Orozco as well as just having a Pandora station full of Spanish-language pop music.

YouTube. There's quite a lot here. Plaza Sesamo is as good a place to start as any!

DuoLingo. I use this for myself. The Kid tried it last year and it moved too fast for her, but it is a little more manageable now. We'll still be going through at a snail's pace, but it includes a variety of exercises.

We've switched a number of iPad apps into Spanish language mode just to continue surrounding ourselves with the language. She also has the BrainPop Espanol app to have another source of hearing Spanish regularly.

And I'm still considering Spanish for Children. If I find we need more structure to our studies, I may add this. If we are making good progress with what we are doing, then I won't.

Immersion. Just as immersion is what moved us from "beginner" to "advanced beginner", I believe that it will take a period of immersion to move us from "advanced beginner" to "intermediate". We are starting to plan a trip to Honduras for February/March 2016.

BFSU: Matter and Magnets Unit

Prerequisites: Foundational Units

Resources: None other than BFSU needed. We already had the Learning Resources Primary Science Magnet Kit, which provided more than enough magnets. We also had the Usborne Science With Magnets book on hand, which provided further exploration.

Lesson 1: BFSU A-4: Matter I: Its Particulate Nature, part 1
Lesson 2: BFSU A-4: Matter I: Its Particulate Nature, part 2
Lesson 3: BFSU A-5: Distinguishing Materials, part 1
Lesson 4: BFSU A-5: Distinguishing Materials, part 2
Lesson 5: BFSU A-5A: Magnets and Magnetic Fields, part 1
Lesson 6: BFSU A-5A: Magnets and Magnetic Fields, part 2
Lesson 7: BFSU A-5A: Magnets and Magnetic Fields, part 3

This post is part of my series on using BFSU as a science unit study.

Spanish: Beginners to Advanced Beginners

Last week I wrote my complaint about the lack of good foreign language programs for younger children. We tried several resources not listed below which ranged from ineffective to miserable, but that's not for this post. This week, I'm going to write about what has worked for us.

Little Pim. This is great for preschool aged children. It is vocabulary only, but there is quite a lot of vocabulary in each episode.

Vocabulary-focused books. We started with the My First Bilingual Book series and then moved on to the English-Spanish Foundations Series. The My First Bilingual Book series is one work per page, translated with a clear picture. Great for just starting on vocabulary. The English-Spanish Foundations Series is a bit variable on how much vocabulary and sentence structure is in each book, but they have quite a bit more than the other series.

Salsa Spanish. This program is deceptively simple and merits many viewings. We used it initially for solidifying basic vocabulary - colors and numbers are often emphasized within the episodes. However, once you have those down, go back and rewatch paying more attention to the words that aren't emphasized. They speak in full conversational sentences, with common verbs and verb tenses, and a lot more vocabulary than what they emphasize. We are still using this as more advanced beginners.

While I was doing the above with The Kid, I was also working in DuoLingo for myself. DuoLingo is not appropriate for young children due to the fast pace and requirement for strong reading and spelling skills. But it gave me the skills to use the vocabulary we were learning in the children's programs and work on using Spanish in our speech.

Immersion. This would be what moved us from "beginner" to "advanced beginner". There is simply no substitute. For us, immersion was three weeks in a Guatemalan homestay while I took Spanish language classes and The Kid went to a local Spanish-language preschool.


Next week, I will write about our plan to move from "advanced beginner" to "intermediate" level.

Why is Foreign Language So Difficult?

I don't post often about teaching foreign language. Actually, have I ever posted about teaching foreign language? I might not have. That's odd considering how big a focus it has been for us.

The Kid seems to have her dad's aptitude for languages. She certainly didn't get it from me. She has requested to learn Spanish, French, and any language with a non-Western alphabet (a squiggly language, in her words). We've been focusing on Spanish with a bit of French thrown in here and there.

If you ask about beginning Spanish material for young kids, you can get several resources - Salsa Spanish, Little Pim, a variety of vocabulary board books, Song School Spanish, The Fun Spanish...  So once you get through those, where's the list of intermediate/advancing beginner resources? I've researched, asked, begged, and so far the crickets are chirping in response. Nothing.

It's even worse for French, when even the suggestions for beginner level materials are scarce. I'm glad we decided to wait on anything else, as I doubt Arabic or Mandarin would yield better results.

This is really just a little mini-rant. I'll come back in the next few weeks and post what we have done and are doing for Spanish, just in case it is helpful to anyone else. If anyone wants to write a good foreign language program that starts around kindy level and progresses through fluency, I'll buy it. I don't even care what language it teaches.

BFSU: Sound and Vibrations Unit

Resources: Magic School Bus episode (this one was very basic, may be good if this is the first time this topic has been introduced to your child, otherwise just for fun)
Science in a Nutshell kit: Sound Vibrations
Blood and Guts by Linda Allison

Lesson 1: BFSU C-2: Sound, Vibrations, and Energy (I covered this in one day due to my plan to use a kit for demonstrations. If not using the kit, cover in two lessons and do demonstrations.)
Lesson 2: Magic School Bus In the Haunted House
Lesson 3: Science in a Nutshell kit: Sound Vibrations, activity 2
Lesson 4: Science in a Nutshell kit: Sound Vibrations, activity 3
Lesson 5: Science in a Nutshell kit: Sound Vibrations, activity 4
Lesson 6: Science in a Nutshell kit: Sound Vibrations, activity 5
Lesson 7: Science in a Nutshell kit: Sound Vibrations, activity 6
Lesson 8: Science in a Nutshell kit: Sound Vibrations, activity 7
Lesson 9: Science in a Nutshell kit: Sound Vibrations, activity 8 and 9
Lesson 10: Science in a Nutshell kit: Sound Vibrations, activity 12
Lesson 11: Blood and Guts by Linda Allison, read pages 97-104 on Ears/Hearing
Lesson 12: Blood and Guts by Linda Allison, do any chosen demonstrations on pages 97-104

This post is part of my series on using BFSU as a science unit study.

Ancient History: Stone Age

We started the unit by reading:

• Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History pages 108-109
• Story of the World: Chapter 1

Nonfiction books we enjoyed:

•  It's Disgusting and We Ate It!: True Food Facts From Around the World and Throughout History by James Solheim (641.3 So) - pages 16-25 cover some foods eaten in Ancient and Medieval times 
• You Wouldn't Want to Be a Mammoth Hunter! by John Malam (930.12 Ma) 
• Horrible Histories Savage Stone Age

Fiction books we enjoyed:

• Magic Tree House #7: Sunset of the Sabertooth by Mary Pope Osborne
• Ug: Boy Genius of the Stone Age by Raymond Briggs - silly cartoon-style book about a boy who keeps trying to invent things that won't be invented for thousands of years after the book is set, and the people around who think he is ridiculous for doing so
• Stone Age Boy by Satoshi Kitamura - a modern boy falls into cave times. Light reading with brief factual bits about what people did and ate.
• Boy of the Painted Cave by Justin Denzel - tells the story of a boy who wants to be a cave painter even though his lineage doesn't allow for it. This one is a longer, more complex story aimed at ages 8+ but worked well as a read aloud for us.

Documentaries we enjoyed:

• Cave of Forgotten Dreams - a little lengthy for The Kid, we watched about half of this. She and I both liked seeing the video of the pristine images from so long ago.

Activities we enjoyed:

• Cave Painting 

Following along in history? Go back to the main Ancient History page.

Cave Paintings

We are getting underway studying Ancient History, beginning with a unit on cave dwellers and the Stone Age. We took advantage of a lovely spring afternoon to get a little messy with this project!

Our "cave" was a large piece of packing paper taped to the shed:

Our painting materials:
- A large bowl of mud mixed with a bit of Crisco (in place of animal fat)
- A bowl with a bit of crushed charcoal. We added some crumbles of charred wood from the fire pit once we took these outdoors.
- A bowl of blackberries to smush up to add some color

And some cave paintings!

Ancient History by Region

We have completed our prehistory study and plan on covering Ancient History region by region during first and second grade. I'll list the best resources we find as we go along. The outline is on this page and the resource lists will be linked from here.

I know it is more common and popular to study history chronologically rather than regionally, and there are many programs and schedules available for this. For this first pass through Ancients, I decided to focus on the culture of Ancient people rather than the timelines. We are using a timeline to add events to in order to see the progression through history.







Note: Because of a big shift in how we approach our schooling, including a heavier emphasis on child-led and child-chosen subjects, this history sequence has been abandoned. I will leave the completed parts here, but don't want anyone to start on them thinking more are coming!

I don't schedule most of the resources we use. When we start a unit, I gather books and documentaries and we jump into the pile and go through things by interest. We do start each unit with reading from the Usborne Encyclopedia of World History and Story of the World to give us a basic framework. We are a non-religious family and all materials are fully secular unless noted individually otherwise. Because religion plays an important part in history, we are doing a separate World Religions study and omitted the sections of Story of the World that were primarily religious in nature.

• Stone Age
• Southwest Asia/Near East
• Sumer and Akkad, Babylonians, Assyrians
• Phoenecians
• Persia
• Africa/Egypt
• East Asia/China
• South Asia/India
• Americas
• Europe
• Europe
• Greece
• Rome

Michael Clay Thompson: Island Level "Schedule"

Michael Clay Thompson loves language and this is clear in his educational materials. I have to assume he does not love schedules because in the many books in Island Level, there is not one schedule. We completed our main lesson once per week, with the extra practice or Practice Island scattered in on other days. See additional notes at the bottom of the list.

1. Grammar Island 5-28
2. Grammar Island 29-44
3. Grammar Island 45-64
4. Grammar Island 65-74, extra practice on page 169 in TM
5. Grammar Island 75-87, extra practice on page 171 in TM
6. Grammar Island 88-94, extra practice on page 173, 177, 189 in TM
7. Grammar Island 95-114
8. Grammar Island 115-126, extra practice on pages 179, 190 in TM
9. Grammar Island 127-135, extra practice on pages 181, 191 in TM
10. Grammar Island 136-158, extra practice on page 192 in TM
11. Music of the Hemispheres 1-37
12. Sentence Island 7-56
13. Building Language 3-39
14. Sentence Island TM 268-269, one assignment of student's choice
15. Building Language 40-48
16. Sentence Island TM 268-269, one assignment of parent's choice
17. Music of the Hemispheres 38-47, pages 162-163 in TM
18. Sentence Island 57-108
19. Building Language 49-56
20. Sentence Island TM 278-279, one assignment of student's choice
21. Building Language 57-64
22. Sentence Island TM 278-279, one assignment of parent's choice
23. Music of the Hemispheres 48-63, refer to pages 154-155, 164-165 in TM
24. Sentence Island 109-146
25. Building Language 65-74
26. Sentence Island TM 292, one assignment of student's choice
27. Building Language 75-81
28. Sentence Island TM 292, one assignment of parent's choice 
29. Music of the Hemispheres 64-79, refer to pages 154-155, 166-167 in TM
30. Sentence Island 147-188
31. Building Language 82-85
32. Sentence Island TM 304, one assignment of student's choice
33. Building Language 86-93
34. Sentence Island TM 304, one assignment of parent's choice
35. Music of the Hemispheres 80-103, refer to pages 154-155, 168-169 in TM
36. Sentence Island 189-226
37. Building Language 94-101
38. Sentence Island TM 314, one assignment of student's choice
39. Building Language 102-109
40. Sentence Island TM 314, one assignment of parent's choice
41. Music of the Hemispheres 104-105
42. Sentence Island 227-256
43. Building Language 110-117
44. Sentence Island TM 324, one assignment of student's choice
45. Building Language 118-125
46. Sentence Island TM 324, one assignment of parent's choice 
47. Music of the Hemispheres 106-116, refer to pages 154-155,170-171 in TM
48. Building Language 136-128
49. Music of the Hemispheres117-130, refer to pages 154-155, 172-173 in TM

Notes:

• I include the extra practice in Grammar Island within the lesson in the list, though we did them during a different time slot than the main lesson. 
• We did not do all of the extra practice, just enough to know my daughter understood. 
• Likewise, we did not do all the writing activities in Sentence Island, just enough to have fun with the concepts.
• We do BraveWriter-style poetry teas. We talked about what we had learned from Music of the Hemispheres during the poetry teas and related it to the poetry we were reading.
• Beginning with week 11 (as soon as we had finished Grammar Island) we completed two sentences from Practice Island per week.
• If you are looking to do copywork or dictation, the sentences in Practice Island can be used for short passages.
• I do realize that 49 lessons does not fit into most people's "school year". I don't really think in school years, so this simply doesn't matter to me.

BFSU: Foundational Units

These three mini-units can be done in any order. Keep them simple. They are meant to help lay a foundation for later concepts, so they must be understood, but they will be reinforced repeatedly as you progress through the program.


Introduction to Gravity
Resources: Magic School Bus episode (was a good example of gravity having an effect on weight)

Lesson 1: BFSU D-1: Gravity I: The Earth's Gravity. Horizontal and Vertical. Part 1
Lesson 2: BFSU D-1: Gravity I: The Earth's Gravity. Horizontal and Vertical. Part 2
Lesson 3: BFSU D-1: Gravity I: The Earth's Gravity. Horizontal and Vertical. Part 3
Lesson 4: Magic School Bus Gains Weight


Introduction to Energy
Resources: Magic School Bus episode (just for fun)

Lesson 1: BFSU C-1: Concepts of Energy I: Making Things Go, part 1
Lesson 2: BFSU C-1: Concepts of Energy I: Making Things Go, part 2
Lesson 3: BFSU C-1: Concepts of Energy I: Making Things Go, part 3
Lesson 4: Magic School Bus episode: Getting Energized


Introduction to Living Things
Resources: None. I did use the Science in a Nutshell kit: Is It Alive? for this, but can not recommend it for several reasons. I recommend doing this lesson as written and saving the possible expansions for later topics in Thread B.

Lesson 1: BFSU B-2: Distinguishing Living, Natural Non-Living, and Human Made Things, part 1
Lesson 2: BFSU B-2: Distinguishing Living, Natural Non-Living, and Human Made Things, part 2
Lesson 3: BFSU B-2: Distinguishing Living, Natural Non-Living, and Human Made Things, part 3

This post is part of my series on using BFSU as a science unit study.

BFSU: States of Matter Unit

Resources: Magic School Bus episode (optional, for fun)
                  Science in a Nutshell kit: Gases (exceptionally good, very educational)
                  Science in a Nutshell kit: Liquids (good but not exceptional)

Note on resources: We dwelt on this unit for quite a while. There is no need to do so. I did find later when discussing topics in the Matter units that the work we did here made those units really easy and we could refer back to things learned with the kits. However, you could easily cover the BFSU lessons in 5 lesson times and move on!

Lesson 1: BFSU A-2: Solids, Liquids, and Gases (I covered this in one lesson without doing the demonstrtions due to using kits. If I were not using the kits, I would have separated out  Part 1 and Part 2 and done the demonstrations.
Lesson 2: Science in a Nutshell kit: Liquids, Activity 1
Lesson 3: Science in a Nutshell kit: Liquids, Activity 2
Lesson 4: Science in a Nutshell kit: Liquids, Activity 3
Lesson 5: Science in a Nutshell kit: Liquids, Activity 4
Lesson 6: Science in a Nutshell kit: Liquids, Activity 5
Lesson 7: Science in a Nutshell kit: Liquids, Activity 6
Lesson 8: Science in a Nutshell kit: Liquids, Activity 7
Lesson 9: Science in a Nutshell kit: Liquids, Activity 8
Lesson 10: Science in a Nutshell kit: Liquids, Activity 9
Lesson 11: Science in a Nutshell kit: Liquids, Activity 10
Lesson 12: BFSU A-3: Air is a Substance (I introduced this in one conversation only, due to using a kit. If I were not using the kit, I would have separated out the three parts of this lesson and done the demonstrations.)
Lesson 13: Magic School Bus Makes a Stink
Lesson 14: Science in a Nutshell kit: Gases, Activity 1
Lesson 15: Science in a Nutshell kit: Gases, Activity 2
Lesson 16: Science in a Nutshell kit: Gases, Activity 3
Lesson 17: Science in a Nutshell kit: Gases, Activity 4
Lesson 18: Science in a Nutshell kit: Gases, Activity 5
Lesson 19: Science in a Nutshell kit: Gases, Activity 6
Lesson 20: Science in a Nutshell kit: Gases, Activity 7
Lesson 21: Science in a Nutshell kit: Gases, Activity 8
Lesson 22: Science in a Nutshell kit: Gases, Activity 9
Lesson 23: Science in a Nutshell kit: Gases, Activity 10

This post is part of my series on using BFSU as a science unit study.

Using the math balance to show that an inflated balloon is heavier than an uninflated balloon - all matter has mass!

Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding in Units

BFSU can be an overwhelming resource. After using it for a while, I realized that many of the topics are set up to flow in mini-units, or flowing chunks of information. Thinking of it this way helps organize it into topics, schedule lessons by interest and availability of materials, and cover prerequisites. I will post and link our plans here as we work through BFSU.

A note on resources: BFSU has extensive book lists at the end of every section. I tended to reserve all of them that my library had and have them in the book bin to go through at our leisure, but did not formally include them as part of science class. The books are a fantastic addition to teaching and I highly recommend including them. In addition to BFSU, I occasionally use prepared science kits, Magic School Bus episodes (often available streaming on Netflix or for purchase on Amazon), and the book Blood and Guts by Linda Allison. None of these resources are required to use BFSU and I will make notes of where I think they were more and less useful.

All of BFSU starts with lesson A/B-1. That lesson is a prerequisite for just about everything and you should start there. I don't list it as a prerequisite below because I just assume it was done first.

Foundational Units - These should be done before moving on, as they are prerequisites for most further lessons. They may be done in any order.
Unit: States of Matter
Unit: Introduction to Gravity
Unit: Introduction to Energy
Unit: Introduction to Living Things

BFSU K-2 - These lessons assume you have covered A/B-1 and the Foundational Units above. Any other prerequisites are listed next to the unit.
Unit: Sound and Vibrations
Unit: Energy
Unit: Matter and Magnets
Unit: Living Things (note: best done during warm months when animals/plants can be easily observed)
Unit: Time and Maps
Unit: Physics (prerequisites: Energy unit and Time and Maps unit)
Unit: Air (prerequisites: Energy unit and Matter and Magnets unit)
Unit: Rocks and Crystals (prerequisite: Matter unit and Air unit)
Unit: Plants (prerequisites: Living Things unit and Land and Rocks unit; Note: best done in spring/summer, when plants can be grown and/or observed)
Unit: The Human Body (prerequisites: Living Things unit and Land and Rocks unit)

 Then wrap up using BFSU D-9.