Category Archives: Homeschool

Learning at home with a second-grader and a fifth-grader.

Homeschool

This week in homeschooling: Spelling lists, futuristic ’50s novels and a hint of Nixon

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Poppy has brought to my attention the fact that I have been inconsistent in my This Week in Homeschooling updates. So today I’m going to post one, just for her. No promises about improved consistency on my part in the future, though, Poppy.

Language Arts

Reading

We’re nearing the end of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” I still can’t remember who the half-blood prince is, and I’m trying to make myself refrain from googling it.

Poppy and I read “May B” for our mother-daughter book club this week — we all agreed that it was a dark & difficult story — and also finished “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” and Raina Telgemeier’s “Smile.”

tomswiftPete has been without an assigned reading book until today, when I went downstairs and grabbed a copy of “Tom Swift and His Giant Robot” that my father-in-law picked up for him at a flea market a few years ago. Pete’s career plans currently involve building robots and inventing things, so I’m guessing he’s going to enjoy Tom Swift.

Spelling

Both kids are still doing well with Spelling City. I’m using a list of fifth-grade spelling words from K12reader.com for Poppy, and Pete is working off the Dolch sight words list.

Writing

Poppy is still working independently through her writing curriculum. I check in on her progress periodically, but she’s doing a pretty good job following the book’s instructions.

Pete and I got back to work on his writing this week. He wrote a paragraph about his plans for the weekend (it involves a good deal of candy) as well as an acrostic poem about Easter.

Memorization

The kids are working on memorizing all of the US presidents. We’re up to Nixon so far.

Math

Pete is working on memorizing multiplication facts. We’ve had some very lovely days this week, weather-wise, so I wanted to find some ways to take our school outside. One of my favorites was Multiplication.com’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Outdoor Math game. I made a grid of numbers with chalk in the driveway, and the kids took turns tossing a pair of pebbles onto it and telling me what the product of the two numbers would be.

featured_multiplication

We opted not to make it a competition, but competitively minded kids might enjoy playing in teams and keeping score.

Geography

We focused on Virginia this week. We did zero fun projects to go along with our study.

Co-op classes

Pete and Poppy are taking a “Mad Scientist” class together at co-op this semester, and from the sound of it they’ve mostly been working with chemical reactions. Pete is also taking a Ninja class, in which he’s learning some Japanese history and making marshmallow blow guns. Poppy’s other class is Desserts Around the World. They made luqaimat with rosewater syrup this week. It’s an Arabic doughnut typically made for Ramadan, and they were crazy delicious.

Wanna read more about homeschooling? Check out the Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers weekly linky thing!

Homeschool

The mediocrity of magma and other homeschooling news

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Science

We spent a fair amount of time this week making a volcano. We papier-mached, we researched the optimal ingredient ratios, we painted, and we waited and waited and waited for everything to dry so we could make our hand-crafted volcanic eruption.

And today, when we finally put everything together? It was a pretty pathetic eruption. Things went much better when we were just doing our research.

I’m sure that’s an appropriate metaphor for something along these lines:

joy

And you know what? We did find the journey to our disappointing volcano quite enjoyable.

US Geography

We took a break from our Geography study this week, because I neglected to put the necessary library books on hold. We’ll be back at it next week with a study of Florida. Which means, of course, that we’ll be making key lime pie.

Reading

We’re making good and steady progress on “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” It’s much easier to do that when your primary reader (by which I mean: me) doesn’t have a cold. Pete has also been reading the first “Encyclopedia Brown” book and a biography of Rosa Parks, and Poppy just finished “A Snicker of Magic” for our book club. Her current literature study book is “The Westing Game.” She’s not crazy about it so far, but I suspect that’s because she knows it was one of my favorites when I was her age. I find it very frustrating that she’s so reluctant to consider the titles that I suggest she’d like, and I’m not sure what to do about it.

Math

Poppy finished her current math curriculum yesterday, and she’ll be starting the new one on Monday. Pete finished his old curriculum a few weeks ago and had been working on Teaching Textbooks 3 while he waited for the new level of McRuffy Math to arrive. It finally got here late last week, and he started it on Monday morning.

Wanna read more about homeschooling? Check out the Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers weekly linky thing!

Homeschool

This week in homeschooling: A lot of tea and Vitamin C

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Today we are celebrating our 100th day of school. I thought about doing an adorable 100th Day of School activity, but I’ve been sick all week and never quite summoned the motivation to find and prepare anything. So by “celebrating,” I mean we are saying “Happy 100th Day of School” and patting one another on the back.

US Geography

We started studying Mississippi this week, and we’ll continue it next week because we didn’t finish everything I’d planned to do. We did start making Matt Lewis’ Mississippi Mud Pie last night, but I need to get some cornstarch today so we can finish it.

Language Arts

Reading

We weren’t able to do much reading aloud this week, thanks to my cold, by Pete did read some of “The Jungle Book” to me and Poppy read a Steve Jobs biography. Two and a half times. She’s spent a good part of the week quizzing me on what Apple products we’ve owned.

Grammar

We’re continuing to work thought “The Giggly Guide to Grammar.” The kids get a kick out of the goofy sentences in the exercises, and it’s a good review of the material they learned in the Michael Clay Thompson books.

Math

Pete finished his second-grade math book yesterday, and that’s when I discovered that I’d only written down that I needed to buy a third-grade workbook. So he’ll be working on Teaching Textbooks until that arrives.

Wanna read more about homeschooling? Check out the Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers weekly linky thing!