Garden Challenge

This is our first post in the Garden Challenge being hosted by The Homeschool Village.   Each month a new post will update the progress of our garden.  It's not too late to join the challenge if you're interested!

Here's our garden update:

So far we have cleared the brush and dried leaves that collected in the garden over the winter.

 

As you can see there is still alot of work to be done before we can plant anything.  We had a few days of nice weather but we are back to winter again here, so the garden will have to wait a few more weeks I think.

We also decided what we want to plant this year and worked out a plan of where to plant what. 

Ms. Q and Little M pouring over the Gurney's catalog

We are going to plant:
sweet peas
cantaloupe
pumpkins
watermelon
zucchini
lettuce
bush beans (like string beans only they grow on a bush instead of a vine)

We have a small strawberry patch we planted last year but we haven't uncovered it yet. (It's still too cold to remove the straw bedding covering the plants.)  Hopefully the plants survived the winter and we will have fresh strawberries this summer.  We are also going to try one of those upside down tomato growers, just for fun.

Ms. Q has already had a number of lesson on how plants grow, so this year she will be focusing on gardening skills.  We have planted a garden for a couple years but we always just plant the seeds and hope for the best.  This year we are going to learn more about gardening and will be reading some books to help our plants no only grow but thrive.  She is really excited about having more responsibility in the garden this year.  Previous years she has helped out but always felt that it was Mom's garden.  This year it's OUR garden. 

Here are the books Ms. Q will be using:

















Little M will be learning the basics about plants and what they need to grow.  He will be using Lesson Pathways Taking Care of Plants unit.  He is excited to go outside and play in the dirt.  He really likes to use the garden tools - he just rarely uses them for their intended purpose!

We will read these and some more fun children's books about plants together:

Exploring with Lewis and Clark

Imagine my surprise when I scheduled a unit on Lewis and Clark and my husband said "who are they?" WHAT?? I thought maybe it was just him. So I asked some coworkers and all but one gave me a blank stare. The one thought she had heard about them somewhere but did not know why they are famous. Hmm...

This unit was great for the whole family it turns out. Since we were going to be talking about exploring I bought the kids foam explorer hats I found at the craft store. They loved them and wore them everyday for two weeks, even when it wasn't "school time." Fred was really interested in learning about the exploration since he thought he had missed out on it the first time, so every evening Ms. Q got to relive the lesson in teaching it to him. We spent two weeks following the expedition.

We used the book Lewis and Clark and Me by Laurie Myers.  The author uses excerpts from Lewis's expedition journal to write adventures from the point of view of Seaman, the Newfoundland that accompanied the expedition.

Homeschool Share had some wonderful ideas for language arts activities. I gathered some more ideas from Lessonpathways and free lapbook minibooks here.

The family really enjoyed this adventure unit and here are some pictures of Q's lapbook.

Dinosaurs Unit

This unit was soooo much fun - for the whole family! Ms. Q asked for this one and I found some really great minibooks for her lapbook and some great hands-on activities at Homeschool Share. We took two weeks for this unit and tried to include all the subject areas. We used the Magic Tree House #1 Dinosaurs Before Dark by Mary Pope Osborne as our literature selection, reading a chapter each day and using the non-fiction Research Guide as well.

This is Ms. Q beginning her adventure as a paleontologist. She is digging for dinosaur bones!

She found one!

After Ms. Q found all the bones inside the box she tried to put them together. She really impressed me with this. She did not know how many bones there were supposed to be or even if she had found them all. Then she put them together WITHOUT the instructions and WITHOUT even knowing what the dinosaur was supposed to look like...just like a real paleontologist!

This is it - the Spinosaurus!

Here are the photos of her completed lapbook.

Little M started his first unit study this week too! He has been sitting at the kitchen table with Ms. Q while she does her work and I usually give him a coloring sheet to scribble on, so I thought that it would be fun for him to have coloring sheets of dinosaurs. This evolved into the letter D, which he can now identify and make the phonetic sound for. He also did some counting and gluing and we read lots of books about dinosaurs.

Here are photos of Little M's school work!


And of course no study of dinosaurs would be complete without a trip to the museum. Everyone was able to go and we met the grandparents there too. Here we are at the Delaware Museum of Natural History in Wilmington with the dinosaurs.

America Week

This week is America Week in honor of Flag Day June 14th. We will be discussing the American Revolution and the symbols of the United States of America. Here are our plans.

History
Read books about the American Revolution (for kids) that include stories about the lives of the colonists and Betsy Ross. Then add dates to our timeline.

Geography
Use a map of the United States to identify and locate the original 13 colonies.

Social Studies
Discuss ways to show respect to the Flag. Learn and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

Language Arts
See how many words you can think of that rhyme with the word "flag." Put patriotic words in alphabetical order. Write a paragraph discussing your feelings about the American flag.

Music
Listen to the "Star Spangled-Banner" and use the words for copywork. Play patriotic music while we work.

Art
Use tiny pieces of colored tissue paper or construction paper to create a flag. Make cupcakes with miniature flags stuck in them.

Math
Use cut out stars in red, white, and blue to reinforce concepts of addition, subtraction, place value, etc.

Plans for June

Yes I know we are already into June and it is a tad bit late to post about plans for the month. But I am going to anyway. We took last week "off" of unit studies for a little break after the ocean unit and to plan for the summer. We will be doing school stuff through the summer but only in the morning. After lunch is free summer kid stuff!

This is what our days will look like until September.

Start with daily warm ups (as usual) - getting the weather report and recording it on her calendar, writing in her journal, reviewing spelling and vocabulary words, and documenting the progress of her sunflower garden.

Ms. Q will continue to work in her grammar and phonics workbooks. She loves doing workbook pages but I have found some new websites with free games that she will totally love doing more than workbooks.

Both of us hate her math workbook and we actually stopped using it about a month ago anyway. So there will not be any math workbook stuff. We have partially switched to living math with manipulatives and math games and it is really much more fun. The last board game I made up about clocks she asked to play even when it wasn't "school time," so I know she enjoyed it. I do supplement these activities with free worksheets I find online, but again, she likes the worksheets. I think we will use some math online games too. I don't plan to introduce any new math concepts during the summer, just reinforce what she learned this year.

Instead of our usual unit study we decided on theme weeks for the summer. Each theme will last only for that week and will hopefully cover most of the subject areas.

Here is what the schedule looks like for the rest of June:
June 11-14 America Week!
June 18-21 Ms. Q's Birthday Week!
June 25-28 Sports Week!

We just started America Week today, so I will write another post with the plans for the week but we have some other fun stuff for the summer too.

New for the summer are Nature Walk Thursdays! Every even week we will take Thursday to spend at a park or other outdoor space. Ms. Q made up a nature journal to take along and we will be creating a hiking pack with necessary supplies like binoculars, plastic bags, a ruler, magnifying glass, camera, pencils, and crayons. Using her four senses (we left out the sense of taste for safety and grossness) she will record what ever she wants any way she wants about the day.

Also new is our goal of reading one hundred books during the summer! This was sparked by a reading list I found on the New York Public Library's website called 100 picture books everyone should know. These are some of the best children's books ever! Some of the books Q has already read or didn't interest her so we are using the booklist as a guide and adding our own. We are recording our progress on the livingroom wall with a giant bee hive. After we read a book it's name is written on a bumble bee that Q colors and adds to the wall. So far so good!

Well that's it for now but rest assured that the adventures continue.

Ocean Lapbook

Alright-here it is: The Ocean Lapbook!

On the first spread is most of the minibooks for animal classification. I found these at homeschoolshare. Ms.Q learned to classify animals into vertebrate or invertebrate groups and then into the five vertebrate and four invertebrate groups.

We created an animal classification diagram on the kitchen wall.








The next page spread has minibooks for spelling and vocabulary words as well as a listing of all the books we read during the unit study. There are some more minibooks left over from animal classification too.

We read the book Swimmy by Leo Lionni and talked about personification.

Ms. Q learned how coral reefs are made. She also learned the names of five of the world's oceans and where they are located (see the map on the right page). The picture is of the food web we created on the living room wall. See below for a larger image. I wrote about this in a pervious post.
Here are minibooks for the layers of the ocean, ocean habitats, undersea explorer Sylvia Earle, and Ms. Q's animal study about dolphins. The dolphin minibooks are from homeschoolshare too.
Here is the ocean layers minibook open.

The final section is two full sized books Ms. Q made during the unit study.

Her creative writing story titled Sea Water is about a turtle and a sea dragon.



And here is her book about the items she collected during our trip to the beach.
She did a wonderful job!!!

New Unit Ideas

This week has been really hectic. I have had two changes in my work schedule, both reducing my day time hours at home this week. Luckily we did get to squeeze in enough time on Tuesday afternoon to make it to the library, our usual Tuesday adventure.

While at the library, Q mentioned that she would like to start learning about electricity in school. Then she saw a movie about dinosaurs and thought that we could use it in school to learn about them. Then she added jazz would be a good topic to learn about. Perhaps we could learn about how bees make honey? Then at home she was looking through a National Geographic magazine and was really interested in the polar bears, and the article about a fungus that is killing frogs around the world. We used the time line to figure out when a Pharaoh, whose remains have just been identified, lived and she delighted in showing everyone the gruesome picture of the mummy and pointing out how long ago she lived. So I asked her if she was done with oceans. And yes, she is officially tired of them she said. We have a few things to finish up and she is ok with that, but what to do next? She has so many ideas she seems to be running in a million different directions at once, but it is so wonderful that she is exited to learn things. That's why we homeschool in the first place, right?

Recently I overheard her on the telephone talking to a friend she used to go to public school with. Q was telling her friend all about the ocean activities she was working on and pretty much bragging about her cursive handwriting skills. She said "yeah I know you don't know how to write cursive but I wanted to learn how so I am. I get to learn whatever I want in school now." She also added that we spent the whole day at the beach on a school day and it actually counted as schoolwork! I thought wow instead of bragging about her new designer sneakers (doesn't own them) or getting the hottest toy (doesn't own this either) or playing video games my daughter is bragging about cursive writing and field trips to the beach. Man I hope this lasts.

Ocean Unit

I have been thinking about creating a lens about this unit on squidoo, but I think I will actually finish the unit and see how it goes first before I commit to too much with. Especially a Squidoo lens. The ladies in the Unit Studies group on Squidoo are really thorough! Anyway, here's what I was thinking about including. We will not be able to cover it all I'm sure before Q looses interest in it and wants to do something else but at least I have a lot of ideas to work with.

Science
animal study
animal classification
food chain/web
habitats/ecosystems
human/nature connection
waves, currents, tides, salty
water cycle

Geography
identify and locate 5 oceans
map reading skills
landforms

Language Arts
vocabulary and spelling
creative writing
compare and contrast
alphabetizing
personification

History
explorers - undersea and over sea
human uses of the sea

Art and Music
crayon resists
mobile
mosaic
diorama
not sure of the music part just yet

Math
Q is working on:
1 digit addition and subtraction
patterns
graphing
place value
I figure we can use her shell collection and goldfish crackers for manipulatives as well as some undersea stickers I found at the craft store.

There are so many trips that we can take I'm not sure how we'll decide where to go. Of course we have to go to the beach, that was one of the reasons Q wanted to do this unit in the first place. Down the shore there is also whale watching cruises, aquariums, and a marine mammal stranding center. This should work out wonderfully.

Flat Stanley - the lapbook

Ok so Q finally finished Flat Stanley. Even I was getting a little bored with it. She finished putting together the lapbook today. During her lunch break she started playing with the neighbor and so I asked if she would like to help Q make her lapbook. While they were putting it together Q was explaining all the mini-books and telling the neighbor what a good book Flat Stanley is. I was really proud. So here it is -

There is a mini-book about manners around the world, some stamps Q created, a pocket for her "Greek" myth, a graduated book about clouds and one for measurements, as flat as Stanley mini-book, and a spelling pocket. She decorated the cover and the inside pages with pictures from the art museum map we brought home from our trip.

This is Q with her mythological creature the raymakzola.

Here is the Olympics of the Bean mini-book, a Venn diagram for planes and trains, money practice with the cost of stamps, a map of the world, onomatopoeia, and vocabulary.

More practice counting money, a mini-book of abbreviations, and some about California.

This is the back. It has a picture of a violin and bow, another mini-book about measurement, and a foldout of Q's aerial view drawing.