Tag Archives: what do homeschoolers do all day

Homeschool, On the Road

Three fun places near Savannah to visit with your kids

7 Comments

homeschooling060614
Rockford had a work trip to Savannah GA this week, and we decided at the last minute that we should all go along. We’d never been to Savannah before, and the kids and I loved it. We saw a baby dolphin, I ate every praline sample the candy store offered me, we went to the beach, and the kids became Junior Park Rangers.

It was a great trip.

Savannah 2014

Dolphin tour on the Savannah River

At $30 for adults and $15 for kids, the Dolphin Magic tour was a big splurge for us. Poppy and I really enjoyed the boat ride; Pete was pretty crabby the whole time. We saw a good number of dolphins, including a baby who was zipping along with two big guys, but I do wish we’d nabbed better seats. Ours were right behind a column. That didn’t impede our view of the dolphins, since the captain stopped the boat and everyone moved around to find the best vantage point, but it did shield us from the breeze while we were moving. If we did the tour again, I’d try to get a seat in the front of the boat.

Beach walk at Tybee Island

We did a beach walk with a guide from the Tybee Island Marine Science Center. I learned a few things about all the critters that live and/or wash up on the beach, and I think the kids did, too. Pete’s favorite part was learning how to squirt water at someone with a tunicate. It was sort of hard for Pete and Poppy to concentrate with all of the beach-goers building sandcastles and skim boarding and having fun beach time. They definitely had more fun when we went back to the beach later without an educational agenda.

Exploring Fort Pulaski

Fort Pulaski is a Civil War-era fort located between Tybee Island and Savannah, and it was well worth the $5 it cost us to get in. Following the advice of the guy at the front gate, we picked up a couple of Junior Ranger activity books at the visitors center before we crossed the moat via a drawbridge to check out the fort. They were really informative and well-written, and they gave the kids something to focus on at each part of the fort. Pete was especially taken with Fort Pulaski. He wanted to check out every nook and cranny, including the tunnels under the man-made hills in front of the fort.

The kids learned a little about the Civil War, which we haven’t covered yet, and I learned that Fort Pulaski would be a great place to be in the event of a zombie apocalypse. (Did I mention the drawbridge? And moat? It’s perfect.)

We took the kids’ schoolwork along with us to Savannah, and they worked every day we were there. Saturday and Sunday included! Which meant that today was our last day of school! They celebrated by having sweet rolls for breakfast and bursting through a paper banner Kool Aid man style. As one does.

Uncategorized

This week in homeschooling: Getting back to work

Homeschooling at ButterscotchSundae.comWe are steadily creeping up on the end of this school year.

In past years we’ve been finished by now, but we had a lot of sick days this yea, and we took last week off entirely to go to Disney World, and we took Monday off because it was Memorial Day. And so we still have a couple of weeks to go. I’m aiming to be finished with our 180 days by June 13th.

Here’s a bit of what we did this week:

Language Arts
  • Pete finished Step 11 of “All About Spelling,” which is working very well for him.
  • Poppy is working independently on “Growing with Grammar: Level Three” and the “Wordly Wise 3000” vocabulary program. She isn’t going to finish either by June 13, but we’re going to do a little bit of schoolwork throughout the summer. She might finish “GWG” by August.
    • Math

    The kids are both still plugging away at their McRuffy Math, and Poppy is still working through “Teaching Textbooks: Math 4.” I’m still on the fence about switching Poppy to Right Start math next year. It’s so expensive! Any insight you have on it would be appreciated.

    Reading
  • Still. Reading. “The Mysterious Benedict Society.” A.K.A. The book that wouldn’t end.
  • Poppy has been working on a reading comprehension workbook, and she’s doing mostly well on it. There is a writing exercise at the end of each assignment, and she’s very reluctant to do that part.

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

    Homeschool

    In which we make Thiebaud-inspired art at co-op

    "Great American Artists" Wayne Thiebaud projectI first became aware of artist Wayne Thiebaud a little more than a decade ago, when Rockford’s sister worked at The Phillips Collection. They only have one of his paintings in their regular collection, so they must have had a special exhibit or something. Or I could be entirely misremembering where I first saw his work.

    Thiebaud is my favorite artist either way, so I knew when I saw that MaryAnn Kohl’s “Great American Artists for Kids” included a project based on his work that we’d be doing it in our art class at co-op.

    Although he’s made paintings with lots of other subjects, Thiebaud is best known for his paintings of cakes, pies and other desserts. “CBS Sunday Morning” aired a nice piece on him back in 2002; he seems like a nice, self-effacing kind of guy:

    The “Great American Artists” Thiebaud project focuses on his dessert paintings, so I took a couple of baking cookbooks with me to co-op yesterday for the girls to flip through before they got started on their watercolors. The book suggests adding flavor extracts to the painting water to provide a little extra sensory inspiration, so I took in what I had on hand: almond, lemon, peppermint and butter.[ref]“Didn’t you have vanilla?” my co-teacher asked. Yes, but I forgot about it because it isn’t stored with the other extracts. It’s in the giant vanilla jug.[/ref] Not only was our classroom the most pleasant-smelling in the building, but the girls really enjoyed painting with the scented water.

    After they finished sketching and then painting their cupcakes, the girls spread white glue over the frosting areas of their paintings and poured real baking sprinkles over it. That was definitely their favorite part of the project, and it really made their paintings pop with color and texture.

    This would’ve been an awesome project even if I weren’t so fond of Wayne Thiebaud!