Weekly Wrap-Up :: Week 22

We had a short week last week, choosing to take two days off school work to spend extra time with my husband as he is now away working in PEI.

The beginning of the week was filled with our regular work, Math and Language Arts, and with Science, History, and Geography.

We learned about butterflies and bees in Science. Adrienne had found a Monarch butterfly wing a few years ago and took it out to check under the microscope. We were all able to see the scales on the wing. I wish I could show you all what we saw! (I googled and found a good photo here.)  

Lately, I have noticed that it feels like we have just been going through the motion with most of our school work. It might be because we are more concerned about selling our house and the upcoming move, or just a case of the  "winter blahs".

Whatever the reason, I thought about mixing things up a bit. I noticed that since late fall,  we haven't been as consistent with Music and Art Appreciation or Nature Study. Friday, I organized myself and planned out our next week or two. We are putting on hold Math and Language Arts. My kids love to practice with World Maths Day, so that will continue. We will also continue with our Geography and Science studies. I am aiming to do about nine weeks worth of Art and Music Appreciation in one week or two. I think it's achievable because of the curriculum we are using.  

I don't think we will be focusing on Nature Study at this time, but I might re-assess that in the middle of the week. We'll see how much time we have left during the day and how we feel about it. I know that once we move, we will want to discover our new environment and either formal or informal nature study will happen then.

I believe that school work needs to be completed, but I have also witnessed enough times that learning should be enjoyed to be retained. If we are just "going through the motions", chances are we are not really enjoying ourselves or retaining much.

Weekly Wrap Up :: Week 21

This past week was another productive week. It's a great feeling when the routine flows well like this! We haven't sold our house yet, but we are hoping to soon. I am glad we are being productive now, because we will need some time off when we move.

This week, we continued with the main subjects of Math and Language Arts. One curriculum that I haven't mentioned a lot so far, but that we are all enjoying is  Lightning Literature. Andre and Adrienne are both using it, Adrienne is using the Grade 8 and Andre Grade 7. They have both done well with it and it has been interesting. Currently, Andre is studying a variety of poems and Adrienne is just finished her study of "A Day of Pleasure" by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The writing activities have been relevant and interesting enough to not feel like busy work. We do the discussion and comprehension together orally and they complete the worksheets on their own. The reading schedule is easy to keep up with as well. So far (we are about half way through the program), I would recommend this curiculum for junior high homeschool students.

In geography this week, we studied Australia!

This is one of Adrienne's favourite countries and we might spend next week studying it too. We didn't make any dish yet, but, along with our regular reading, we read about some local delicacies in Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects by Peter Menzel.

We also watched and listened to Aboriginal music on youtube, in particular this one:



In science, we moved on to arthropods and focused on ants this past week. We found two books at the library that were interesting to us, especially Ants by Sophie Lockwood. We explored the page on National Geographic about weaver ants and from there followed our own bunny trail watching and listening to Dr. Bugs. The library had Magic School Bus Bugs Bugs Bugs, Celeste really enjoyed watching the episode on ants! We'll watch the other 2 next week.

This week marked the start of Journey North Mystery Class. Adrienne and I completed the first week's data and graphs of photoperiods for the 10 mystery classes. We absolutely love this activity and recommend it to everyone! It's not too late to participate, go check out the website!

How was your week? Are you participating in Mystery Class? Let me know by leaving a comment!

This post is part of the Weekly Wrap Up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers. Visit her blog to read other families wrap-up posts.

Educational and Fun Events in February

February is full of fun and educational activities that you can do with your children at home! 

{photo from Mystery Class site}

Journey North Mystery Class started this past Monday, but it's not too late to register and take part. "Mystery Class is a global game of hide-and-seek. Follow photoperiod clues to search for ten secret sites around the world. Track sunlight to solve a mystery! Discover the reasons for seasons along the way".

(photo from World Education Games)

World Maths Day, World Spelling Day, and World Science Day will held again this year in March.  "The World Education Games is the exciting event for ALL schools and students around the world. It runs from 6-8 March, involving 5.5million students from over 200 countries and territories. Practice opens on 1 February. This is the global challenge to get ALL students (4-18 years of age) excited about learning, and to give the top students in each school an opportunity to see how they measure up against the best". Homeschoolers are welcomed! We have participated for the last two years and enjoyed these free events. Practice starts today!

(photo from GBBC)

The Great Backyard Bird Count is held February 17 to 20 this year. "The Great Backyard Bird Count is an annual four-day event that engages bird watchers of all ages in counting birds to create a real-time snapshot of where the birds are across the continent. Anyone can participate, from beginning bird watchers to experts. It takes as little as 15 minutes on one day, or you can count for as long as you like each day of the event. It’s free, fun, and easy—and it helps the birds".   

Tower of Freedom statue in Windsor

Black History Month is in February as well. Black History Canada has an interesting website with teacher resources. Family Education also has excellent resources with many links: Celebrate Black History Month. I have a few reading suggestions from my past Book Sharing Monday posts here including related links.

Homemade Valentines 2011

Valentine's Day is February 14 and so many sweet ideas are floating around, especially on Pinterest! We liked making these valentines in 2010. 

Groundhog Day is tomorrow, February 2nd! Kaboose has a nice page of the history, activities, and crafts to do.,

So much to do this month! I hope you have a wonderful time with your children learning and discovering together! 

Weekly Wrap Up :: Week 18

We are fully back to our regular school routine now, even Adrienne. Her unschooling experiment is done and we both learned a lot from it.
In case you haven't read my last post, we will be moving in the near future from South Western Ontario to Prince Edward Island for my husband's work. This will be the biggest move we have done as a family (I don't count my move from France to Canada!). We are all looking forward to it and somedays feel like Celeste who said "can we go NOW?"!! We do have a house to sell first, but my husband will be there as of the end of February and we will be following not too long after hopefully.

Back to our routine, with two days completed last week and this week a full week.

Smurfette helped Celeste with her schoolwork ;)

We completed all the main subjects, language arts and math and also managed to include science, world geography and cultures, history, and a new small literature study.

Here are some highlights:

In Geography, we studied India this week. We learned about their culture and religion with the help of the books in the photo above. Adrienne and Andre completed  notebook pages about the country, Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism. We also listened to some traditional Hindu music on youtube. We will be trying some food next week before moving on to Greece. The video below is one that we listened to:



  
Adrienne is back to her regular schedule, which includes high school biology. This week, she learned about DNA. We used a simple kit from Home Science Tools to help us visualize what we learned.

Andre and Celeste finished their study of the human body with a fun study of fingerprints!

We also had a lot of fun, even though we spent some time decluttering and cleaning our house! We went to see The Adventures of Tintin, which we loved! We have enjoyed the books over the years, I used to read them when I was little, both Andre and Adrienne like them too. We saw it in 3D, which we don't normally like, but it was fine this time.

The girls have been having fun with their AG dolls. We gave this book to Celeste at Christmas and it has been a great inspiration. They made most of the food you see with foam sheets. You can get big packs inexpensively at most craft stores.

There's our week back in a short post! How was your start of the new year?
If you would like to read more weekly wrap up posts by other homeschoolers, visit Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

African Dinner by Adrienne

One of Adrienne's projects for her unschooling experiment was to research and learn more about Africa and Australia. She also wanted to try some food from these two continents. She chose a couple of books from the library and selected three different recipes. Last night, she cooked everything for us for dinner. I helped her only a tiny bit, she did amazing! 

She made a Moroccan Carrot Salad as an appetizer. She found this recipe in "Cool African Cooking" by Lisa Wagner. I really don't like coriander, but I could handle it in this recipe. She boiled the sliced carrots for about 10 minutes until just tender and then let them cool. The dressing was made with 3 tablespoons of lemon juice, 3 tbsp of olive oil, 1 tsp of paprika, 2 cloves of garlic minced, 1 tsp ground cumin. The dressing was whisked then mixed with the cooled carrots. Then she added the chopped cilantro, mixed everything and put in the fridge to chill for about 1 hour. 

The main dish was Palaver Chicken. The cookbook she used, The Complete Illustrated Food and Cooking of Africa and the Middle East, explained that there are many variations of this dish existing in Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Adrienne made hers with chicken, tomatoes, and spinach. She served it over brown rice. This stew had peanut butter in it, but we couldn't really taste it, it was delicious though and Celeste (my picky eater!) ate it and even said it was good!

Adrienne made a dessert too! I told my kids last night that if they wanted to be competitive with dinner, that was fine with me! Andre was already talking about what dessert he will be making next Tuesday to go with his dinner....


For dessert Adrienne made a Tropical Fruit Salad. The recipe is super simple and came from the little Cool African Cookbook. It was very refreshing and tasty. She mixed 3 sliced bananas, 2 cubed mangoes, and 2 cups of cubed pineapple (she used canned pineapple tidbits) with the juice from 1 lime. She made this salad first and put it in the fridge to cool. It was in there for a little over 1 hour. She took it out when we were eating the chicken and just before serving added unsweetened shredded coconut on top. Delicious! 

Dinner by Andre

A couple of weeks ago, Andre received a book he had been asking for a long time: The Usborne Cookbook for Boys. {That title seems to be out of stock/out of print through Usborne but I noticed it in a Scholastic Book Club flyer}. I think it's funny and so fitting that on the Usborne site, the review from Bookfest for that cookbook says "An excellent book for budding Jamie Olivers. We're big fans of his cooking! 

He spent a long time reading through the cookbook then announced that he would like to have one evening a week to cook dinner for all of us! I quickly agreed to this arrangement! We agreed that Tuesdays would work for us, then he planned out the two meals he would start with and I made sure he had the ingredients. 

Tonight was his first night cooking. He made pizza, including the pizza sauce and dough. He also made a green salad with a delicious French jam jar dressing from Jamie Oliver. There was a lot of chopping involved, mixing, measuring, etc...

Dinner was delicious and he was very pleased that everyone loved it. All my kids enjoy cooking, but it has been mostly baking in the past. In my opinion, cooking dinner is an important life skill! I think it's wonderful that he took the initiative and is learning about planning meals as well as cooking them. We are looking forward to more dinners by Andre! 

Weekly Wrap Up :: Week 16 and H.S. Unschool Week 4

December is here! Celeste has been waiting for this time to come! We wait until December 1st to decorate our house for Christmas and she was counting down the days since Thanksgiving (our Canadian Thanksgiving!). We spent most of Thursday decorating our house and tree. This year, I had three very helpful elves! I think they did a great job on our tree. Clara agrees and is really happy to have the tree skirt as her personal blanket again!

The rest of our week was quite productive. We completed our Math and Language Arts lessons.

We also did Ancient History, learning about Ancient India and reading Buddha stories. We are continuing with the Classical House Learning Literature curriculum (free here) . It uses Story of the World as a spine and since I still have the Activity Book from SOTW, I also use it.

Celeste and I finished the dolphin lapbook we had been working on for the last few weeks. We used homeschool share for the mini books. We read many books about dolphins! We all enjoyed the Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell. There is a great resource page for that novel here. Be sure to visit the Teacher's Page (link at the bottom of that page) for further instructions and resources. We haven't used this one yet, but we will on Monday.

On Wednesday evening, the kids and I attended a free presentation of the Mysteries of the Great Lakes documentary. This was an interesting documentary and even Celeste enjoyed it. We learned a lot about the Great Lakes, the lake sturgeon fish, and bald eagles. We were also shown how pollution and men affected the lakes. There are educational resources available at the Mysteries of the Great Lakes Educator Guide site. The guides are divided into primary, junior, and intermediate. They are available in English and French. All have printable worksheets, power point style presentations and suggested book lists. Next week, we will be doing a mini unit study on this subject with those guides. Our local library had most of the books suggested, what they didn't have I was able to find similar titles. I chose titles from all 3 levels since we will be doing this together. You can see a few of the books we will be reading in the photo below the video.

Adrienne's fourth week of her unschooling experiment went well. She is continuing to record her daily activities which really helps show her (and me!) what she spends her time doing. She completed three math and spanish lessons again this week, and continued with her makeup study. She started reading "Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry" by Stacy Malkan. She also found out about making her own makeup, in particular lip balm. We'll need to find the ingredients so she can try making some.

We worked together on her career counselling course with "What Colour is Your Parachute for Teens".  This week, we worked on identifying her transferable skills. She had to make an inventory, with the help of three charts as well as thinking back on five projects she has done, of her skills with things, with information, and with people.

She exerciced every day and also read every day. She spent time drawing for Sketch Tuesday. She also researched recipes for her Africa and Australia culture and food project.

I think she is doing well with her unschooling experiment, but I am not sure if we could do this all the time. I would be concerned about what she is not doing. I do love how she is taking initiative about what she does want to learn though, and she is very independent learner so I don't need to remind her or encourage to do things. My hope is to come to a nice balance for her when the experiment is done.

How was your week? Did you start decorating for Christmas as well? Are you taking a long break in December?

You can visit Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers to read more weekly wrap-up posts.

Weekly Wrap Up :: Week 15 and High School Unschooling Week 3

I am a little late with our wrap up! Last week was another good week, a bit mellow, but we still managed to get a lot of school work done...even when our pets have other plans! This happens regularly, Celeste is used to it!

Adrienne is continuing with her unschooling experiment. Week three was a little lighter for her on the reading and writing, but she still completed three math and spanish lessons, spent time drawing, sewing Christmas presents, and exercising.

Late for Sketch Tuesday, but Adrienne still wanted to sketch something with a logo.

Wednesday was a busy day for us. Nana and Papa came by in the morning on their way to Ohio. We also had a total of 19 kids (and their moms)over at our house for some homeschool board game fun!

Adrienne also babysat for our cousin for a couple of hours and she tutored math too. She spent some time on Friday afternoon watching cooking shows on the Food Network website.

Andre and Celeste completed all their math and language arts for the week. Andre is back to using Growing with Grammar and is very happy about it! We are also trying the Winning with Writing and the Soaring with Spelling and Vocabulary. You can read more about these at the main Growing with Grammar website.

We continued with our dolphin lapbook and unit study, working on the mini books this week. We watched the video at National Geographic Kids about Bottlenose Dolphin youngs and how they copy and learn from their mothers.






We spent a lot of time reading again this week. I love our reading time together! We finished reading all the Gilgamesh stories for Ancient History.

I also read Wonderstruck. Andre and I loved The Invention of Hugo Cabret a few years ago. I think we still prefer that one, but we did enjoy Wonderstruck very much. Scholastic has a nice website for this book, which could lead to more exploring into sign language and the stars. Just like the Invention of Hugo Cabret, I think Wonderstruck could lead to an interesting unit study on sign language, museums, "cabinets of wonders", New York City, wolves, and more (I don't want to give too much away from the story!).

Celeste and I have been checking out many Christmas picture books from the public libary and we got our Christmas movies, music cds, and books from storage as well! We have been collecting these over the years. What are your favourite Christmas movies? Leave me a comment and let me know!

Weekly Wrap Up :: Week 14 :: and High School "Unschool" Experiment Week 2

Last week was another nice week for us. It wasn't a "full" week again. Usually we tend to slow down in the winter, around February or March, but we are finding ourselves not as motivated right now. I think this is odd! Some of our curriculum is definitely not working as well as we hoped so I think that has a big part. More of that later on.

This week was week two of Adrienne's unschool experiment. I had asked her to keep better track of her activities in her agenda and she did just that. She wrote down pretty much every thing she did during the course of the day. This gave her a really good picture of where her time goes and for me too.

She spent many hours writing her NaNoWriMo novel last week. She also completed three math lessons and spanish lessons. She did a lot more reseach for her History of Makeup project. She researched main makeup companies and continued filling her notebook with her findings.
She spent an hour on Monday looking at makeup through our microscope! We hadn't used our microscope yet since we got last spring. She figured out how to control the settings and dials and then taught me how to use it. I love when my children teach me things!

She also spent time playing video games. I am not a big fan of video games, but the ones she plays I am ok with. She exercices with the Just Dance game for Wii. She loves Little Big Planet and planned out a whole level, designed it on paper, then created it on the game. She also likes to play Professor Layton and Ace Attorney. Both games include a lot of critical thinking. I wrote about these games before here.

From her notes, we also saw that she spent time playing outside with friends in the afternoon, read, took care of her cat, ironed her uniform for Cadets, joined in when I read aloud for geography, etc... It was interesting to see everything on paper! She also went out Wednesday morning with her dad!

Andre and Celeste completed all their Maths and Language Arts from Monday to Thursday. On Friday morning, Andre went out with his dad to do his Christmas shopping.

We continued our regular science this week with the digestive system and our senses.

I found at our local library Jamie Oliver's Food Escapes dvds. This came in a set of 6 dvds and we watched the Adalucia episode and the French Pyrenees one. We really enjoy watching Jamie Oliver's recipes and seeing the culture and the beautiful sights of Spain and France this way was wonderful, "brilliant" as he would say!

I found them on youtube for you, these have greek subtitles but better video quality than others without the subtitles. Both of these are part 1, the rest are available too:




Celeste and I had a playdate at one of our homeschool friends on Wednesday afternoon which was lovely! We both also have been working on some Christmas sewing, in particular adding sparkles and beads to an old Christmas tree skirt.

Celeste wrote her letter to Santa! Dad helped her with the spelling and I helped with the address, but she wrote it all herself and decorated the envelope too.

The rest of the week was filled with a lot of reading, especially reading aloud. We have several books on the go and also finished a few. We finished Free the Children by Craig Kielburger for world geography, Marie Curie by Kathleen Krull (another great book in the Giants of Science series) for science, and Gilgamesh the King for history. Ongoing is Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell, Dolphins at Daybreak, and Pippi Longstocking with Celeste. Andre and I also started Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick. We both loved the Invention of Hugo Cabret!

How was your week? Come and read other weekly wrap up posts at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers!