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.

Weekly Wrap Up :: Weeks 19 & 20

We have had two full weeks of homeschooling and also have been busy with showing our house. We are hoping it won't take too long!

We have been very consistent with completing our school work, all the math and language arts lessons were completed every day. Andre switched in the new year his spelling, grammar, and writing curriculum and so far we are both very pleased with the change. He is now back to using Growing with Grammar, which we feel is a better and complete curriculum than the Gage Language Power. When I was ordering his grammar, he noticed that they also offered spelling "Soaring with Spelling and Vocabulary" and writing "Winning with Writing" at his level now and after checking it out further, we decided to try those as well. He has done well with the spelling so far and the writing is interesting for him and gives him more practice than the assignments from Lightning Literature (which he still doing too).

In other subjects, we have learned about animal classification, cnidarians, worms, and echinoderms. Celeste and Andre are working with the same curriculum and we are all enjoying this one. R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey has been a winner in our family this year! I add library books and internet links to our lessons and we complete the labs suggested. I have found that this curriculum has been helpful in helping Celeste discover the field of life science and for Andre, it has been a great review.

A couple of notable links we visited related to what we studied were (we were very interested in jelly fish and in starfish!):

Monterey Bay Aquarium Jelly Fish Animal Guide

National Geographic Kids - Jellyfish (check out the video)

Jellyfish colouring page

Source: mesa.edu.au via Alexandra on Pinterest

For starfish, we enjoyed watching a few videos on youtube, especially this one:

Starfish eating

We will be doing the lab part of our worm study in the spring, when we can find them. We did read a couple of library books about them, and enjoyed Yucky Worms by Vivian French especially. You can see inside the book here.

In ancient history, we studied Greece, Crete and the Minoans, and we are now listening to the Tales from the Odyssey by Mary Pope Osborne. We found this seven disc set at our local library and we have all enjoyed this.

In world geography and cultures, we were also in Greece last week! We tasted Moussaka, an entree made with eggplants and ground lamb or beef (I used turkey).

Moussaka straight out of the oven!

This week, in geography, we studied Italy. We used the Enchantment of the World book and I found a great book of old Italian tales retold by Domenico Vittorini called The Thread of Life. We also used google maps to "visit" Venice and another area of Italy where I had spent some time vacationing with a friend and her family many many years ago!

Last Monday (23) marked the start of the Chinese New Year. We found this page interesting Chinese New Year for Kids and a friend on facebook shared a page with gorgeous photos of the celebrations.  


Canadian Home Learning is now on Google+ ! You can find the link on the left side of the blog. I am keeping the facebook page as well. I have been on Google+ for a while now, but haven't used it a lot yet! I have been quite busy over at Pinterest (that's quite addicting!!), you can also find the link on the left. I have pinned many links related to homeschooling, I have tried to organize them efficiently. All of them start with "learn" then the subject. Let me know if you use either Google+ or Pinterest by leaving a comment!

Some of my Pinterest boards

You can follow other weekly wrap-up posts at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Weekly Wrap-Up :: Week 8

We had a busy week! We enjoyed the beautiful weather and went out with our homeschool friends a lot! The school work suffered a little bit because of that, but I know we will make it up when the weather turns cold and grey again. I truly believe that this is one of the great benefits of homeschooling: being able to take advantage of the weather and participating in fun homeschooling events, being flexible with our schedule.

We did manage to complete several lessons. Mondays are usually our most productive days and this week was no different. We had a full day of school last Monday. Tuesday was equally good, Wednesday and Thursday together made up another day.

Even when we are busy outside the house, I try to get our Math and some Language Arts completed with the kids. Adrienne and Andre work on these subjects independently and I check their work after they are done. Celeste and I completed 3 Math lessons this week and 3 days worth of her phonics, writing, handwriting, and reading practice.

In science, we started our unit on the human body by making our folder and reading the introduction to the unit. A very light day for science, but it was fun for Celeste to prepare her folder. Andre, Celeste, and I are looking forward to this unit!

Adrienne has been working on her high school science regularly every week and she is getting more confortable with the curriculum (Oak Meadow high school biology).

We also continued with history, learning about Sargon and Sumer. We are also reading some bible stories. Celeste has never heard these, so this was interesting. This week we read the story of the flood and of Samson.  We read these stories in a beautifully illustrated book from the library called "Everlasting Stories" by Lois Rock. We also watched an episode of Veggie Tales on Youtube "Minnesota Cuke and the Search for Samson's Hairbrush"!  Celeste liked that! On the photo below, you can see the book I mentioned and Celeste's drawing of Noah's Ark.

In geography, we finished our study of Ireland. Adrienne and Andre finished their notebook page. We have been reading from the Enchantment of the World series. This series of geography books are wonderful for reading aloud, our local library has several titles. We also made some Irish food on Monday: Irish Soda Bread and Colcannon Potatoes. We also listened to U2 and watched some Irish dancing!

We went to the homeschool park day on Wednesday morning.

On Thursday, we met two other homeschool families for a nature hike in a Carolinian forest. We had a lot of fun together and saw so many different types of mushrooms and fungus. I requested a guide book at the library and will do a seperate post with more photos once we identify the mushrooms.

Earthstar Puffballs

 On Friday, we participated in a homeschool track and field day. The weather was again perfect and it was a good turnout. The kids competed in races, long jumps, discus, javelin, and more. It was all in fun and the kids had a blast! We finished the day at the beach, playing in the water and the sand.

We also watched two beautiful family-friendly movies this week, both portraying homeschoolers in a good way! Dolphin Tale which is still playing at the theatre, and the other we watched on dvd: Soul Surfer. Both were beautiful movies based on true stories. I highly recommend them!

There's our week! How was yours? If you would like to read more weekly wrap-up posts, you can visit Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and see all the links to other homeschool families blogs.

Weekly Wrap-Up :: Week 6

The routine has set in now and most days go pretty smoothly. Life is never perfect, but we do enjoy our days together!

After the Battle of Britain parade with the Air Cadets, on Sunday, we spent time at a local nature area. It was a beautiful day and even if we didn't stay very long, it was nice to spend time together looking for birds, flowers, fungus and enjoying the walk.

In our homeschool, this week, we continued on our Math and Language Arts subjects. Adrienne and Andre had a light week with their Lightning Literature again, it was only reading assignments.
Math is going very well for all 3 kids. Celeste is much quicker at understanding Math than with her reading! Adrienne started last week to tutor our neighbour in Math.

In Science, Celeste learned about cells. We used an egg in an experiment. She is really liking the hands-on experiments of this curriculum (R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey) . Andre joins us for Science, and also does his own.

Next week, we will jump to the mollusk section since we found a snail this week while we were walking to the library. We are keeping it for a little while so we can observe it, it's our new "school pet"!

In Geography, we studied United Kingdom. We made mini scones with jam and tea one afternoon. We also completed some map work and created flashcards with the names of countries and capitals of some European countries. We continued to learn about different religions, ancient ones this week: Celts and Norse. 

I used this site for the worksheet that Celeste is working on in the above photo: homeschool creations. It's a wonderful site with lots of great printables!
I also printed colouring pages from education.com, they have a lot of different landmarks to print and colour. We did the Big Ben with double decker bus and Stonehenge:

It was another good week, we took Wednesday off so not quite a full week. We had plans to go to our homeschool park day, but the weather had other plans, so instead we went shopping for boy clothes. It's not his favourite thing to do, but was needed, all last year's fall clothes are too short. I think that he will soon be as tall as Adrienne! Here is a photo from last Sunday, at the parade in their Air Cadets uniform.

How was your week?

If you would like to read other wrap-up posts, you can visit Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Weekly Wrap-Up ~ Gardening, Sad Nature Study, and Mind Maps

Another week with a day off! Monday was Victoria Day in Canada. We took the day off and planned our vegetable and flower garden. On Tuesday morning, we went to the garden centre. We were only able to find tomatoes and basil this time, but we will add more to our vegetable garden soon. In our flower garden, I chose mostly perennials this year.

We completed our regular school work during the rest of the week. We all can't wait to be finished! We will be taking one month off during the summer, but June will be a much lighter month.

In Science, we studied colour: the visible light spectrum, dispersion, prism and more. We followed many of the internet links from the Usborne Encyclopedia of Science. One of Adrienne's favourite this time was an activity where you were the light designer for a concert.

We started working with the Mind Maps for Kids book this week. I chose this book to do together, including Celeste. We really enjoyed this introduction and first activity. Mind mapping will be hopefully be a helpful option for the writing process. I read aloud from the book and we each completed a mind map about our likes. You can see Adrienne's at the bottom of the photo.

A little nature study happened right in our driveway. On Wednesday morning, Celeste was looking outside and told me that one black bird (maybe a Common Grackle, not as big as a crow)attacked a smaller bird on its head (you can see on the first photo where it was hurt). The smaller bird, a House Sparrow we think, was hurt and not moving. I went to check it out and it was still breathing. We decided to move it to a safer spot and monitor it. Adrienne gave it some bird seeds and water. There was a big rain storm that day and we gave the bird a little shelter. Sadly, the bird didn't make it.

Another bit of nature study that happens right around our house is the rabbit that lives nearby. We always need to protect our vegetable garden and our strawberry plant from it! Our dog loves to watch it from our windows and when he goes outside, he is always looking for it. We think it lives in our neigbour's yard. Here are some recent photos:

If you would like to read more wrap-up posts, you can visit Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers!

Weekly Wrap-Up ~ Three Weeks Worth!

We have been busy! I will try to condense three weeks worth of wrap-ups in one post, without putting hundreds of photos!

Starting with our regular subjects, we are finished with some and took an inventory of what still needed to be done with a count of lessons for each subject. Here are some highlights:

Andre is now finished his Math Teaching Textbooks 6 and after a two week break, he started Teaching Textbooks 7. Celeste also started Saxon Math 2! I thought I would never go back to Saxon but I decided to give it a try with her. Miquon Math and its discovery-based style worked out nicely, but I felt that she now needs a bit more in this subject. We'll see how it goes, we are giving it a try since we already had it (from Andre). Adrienne has about 50 lessons left in her Teaching Textbooks Pre-Algebra.

Andre is also finished with his Growing with Grammar 6 and is now taking a break, since I don't have the next one yet. He has been working on his writing for the last couple of months with the help of Write Source 2000. Adrienne is also well on her way with Growing with Grammar 8 and with her writing. She has been using Format Writing and I can see a big improvement since last year in her essays.

One subject that we are definitely behind in is spelling! We are using Sequential Spelling but have missed many days. We will work through the summer on it. It only takes a few minutes a day.

Now, for what happened in the last three weeks...

We finished our study of Canadian History too! This took us all the way to our current time and we wrapped it up with a brief study of our government and politics, since Voting Day was on May 2. We also learned about the Census which is happening this month in Canada. I had requested teachers materials from the government (free), which are also available for download here.  These materials are for various ages and we were able to all work together. My kids enjoyed the activity where they were acting as town planner and had to study the census data given to decide the best locations for a playground, a seniors centre, and a health care centre. They also liked the colouring pages!

In World Geography, we finished our study of Asia and are now learning about Australia. Adrienne has always been interested in Australia, so we'll make sure to spend a little extra time studying it! We are adding some library books, more are coming, especially on Dreamtime! The next unit in our geography study is the last one, Antarctica.

We also did some Art and Music Appreciation over the last three weeks. We listened to Richard Wagner and admired John James Audubon's work.

In Science, we are wrapping up our study of Physics. We now have 3 topics left to cover (lights, optics, and electronics). We covered sound and electricity over these last two weeks. I had picked up a documentary at the library to add to our study. We really enjoyed it, it was a nice change from reading. I will be looking for more from this series at our library. The series is from Disney, called the Science of Disney Imagineering. It is geared to grades 5 to 8, but Celeste enjoyed watching it too. We watched the Electricity one. You can see a little video about the series below:






We also had a lot of fun these last couple of weeks, the weather has been better..even hot! We enjoyed our time outside, going for walks, playing in the driveway, having popsicles and much more!

We attended the Science Rendezvous at the local University (see previous post). We celebrated my birthday by visiting Point Pelee National Park and so, I will leave you with a few of my favourite photos from that day:

This post is part of the Weekly Wrap-Up hosted by Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers. Visit her blog to read more posts by other homeschool families!