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

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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?
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Weekly Wrap Up :: Week 17 and H.S. Unschool Week 5

This past week was filled with goodness! If you read our blog regularly, you might have read all about Andre's dinner and Adrienne's African dinner. They both cooked delicious meals for us. You can read more about them by clicking on the following links:
Dinner by Andre    
African Dinner by Adrienne.


The rest of the week was quite productive for Andre and Celeste. They  completed all their Math and Language Arts lessons. 


We completed our Mysteries of the Great Lakes study by visiting the teacher site , completed a couple of their worksheets, and reading several of the suggested books. 

I found a series of books at the library by Anne Ylviskaker. They are geared to elementary students, but we enjoyed them anyway as a brief introduction to all five Great Lakes. 

The girls visited the Island of Blue Dolphins site and completed the online activity and the quizz that followed. 

Adrienne's experiment is coming to a close. We talked about her unschooling experiment and both agreed that it was a good experience but that we couldn't go on in the same way. Adrienne decided to get back to her regular schedule right away, adding a few subjects at a time instead of all at once. I thought she might ask to take the rest of December off, but no, she started back this week by adding Literature Study again to her schedule. Next week, she will add more.

This week, she completed her Math every day besides Wednesday and Spanish on Monday only. She exercised every day, and worked on my Christmas present a few days too. She read a lot, watched a few movies, spent time painting and drawing. She wrote Christmas cards for Canadian soldiers overseas (Air Cadets were sending them). She also participated with us in the Great Lakes study and our history lessons. 

Celeste started doing some embroidery while she watched My Fair Lady, her new favourite musical! 

I will be taking some time off from the online world until the new year. At this time of the year, I enjoy spending even more time with my little family and feel the need to unplug. I wish you a Merry Christmas and will see you very soon! 

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

Merry Christmas! 

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?

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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!

Weekly Wrap Up :: Week 13 :: The High School "Unschool" Experiment Week 1

We started the week with a Remembrance Day Parade on Sunday (6th). Both Adrienne and Andre are part of the Royal Canadian Air Cadets. This is the entire parade coming up the main street.
Below is a photo of some of the Air Cadets marching back to the squadron building. There are about 170 cadets in their squadron, not all attended this event, but most!

Monday was back to our regular school routine for all of us, with a bit of a modified schedule for Adrienne. She has been asking me for the last few years to unschool, but I have been resistant. I have seen over the last couple of years that she is independent and recognizes what is important as well as what she is interested in. We talked about it over the weekend and decided to give this a try. She will continue working on certain subjects that I find are a must. The funny thing is that she told me she was planning on doing those anyway!

I also asked her to log in her agenda what she accomplished every day as well as think about some projects that she would like to work on. We decided we would meet at the end of the week and discuss what she had done.

She did well and completed every day her Math (one of my "must") and did two lessons of Spanish. She worked on her NaNoWriMo novel every day besides Friday. She worked on her homework for Air Cadets. She read a lot, for her own pleasure and also for research for her project. She is researching and writing about the history of makeup. We also started reading together What Colour is Your Parachute for Teens.

For this week, I asked her to continue what she is doing and log in a bit more of the "extra-curricular" activities that she is doing, like drawing, exercising, cooking, etc.

Andre, Celeste and I had a productive week too. Math and Language Arts were completed every day, even with a little bit of help from Clara, our cat!

We didn't do our regular science this week, instead we read about Marie Curie with Kathleen Krull. We love this Giants of Science series. I have talked about it here and here before!

Celeste and I also started our Dolphin Lapbook. We read several books and started with the mini books. She really loves working on lapbooks. I need to plan more of these in her studies! I am using this dolphin lapbook resource from homeschool share. I also found this Island of the Blue Dolphins lapbook resource, which we will use when we are done with reading the novel.

In World Geography, we finished studying Spain and watched a little bit of a bull fight as well as explored (virtually!) the Alhambra. We then moved on to France. We made a French Apple Tart. It was delicious bien sur!

Andre started learning about computer programming with Alice, actually Storytelling Alice. Both are free to download. I thought it might be better to start with the storytelling version since the full Alice is recommended for high school and college students. Here is a description: "Storytelling Alice is a programming environment designed to motivate a broad spectrum of middle school students (particularly girls) to learn to program computers through creating short 3D animated movies".

He really enjoyed this. Every time I looked his way, he was smiling!

We had a good week back. It was interesting to try something new with Adrienne. I am happy that she still joined us for World Geography and Science. Andre and Celeste didn't do their full schedule, but it was still good and we did manage to include Music Appreciation! We learned about the woodwinds instruments.

How was your week?

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