Posts Tagged ‘unit studies’

A Typical Homeschool Day

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

What does a typical homeschool day look like? This video shows you exactly what we did during one school day while doing a unit study on Ancient Egypt.

First thing in the morning, the kids wake up and start doing their math. My oldest two kids switched from Saxon to Teaching Textbooks. That has cut their time in half because they do a workbook, so they don’t have to write out all of their math problems. Plus, it’s self-correcting. It’s expensive, though.

They’re in separate rooms to work on their math. My younger two children are working on Horizon math. They usually get their math done before breakfast, which is really nice.

As you can see, we use headphones so that if one of our kids wakes up earlier than the others, it doesn’t affect the other kids waking up.

Here we are eating breakfast. We listen to Scripture while we’re eating breakfast. (Audio of the book of Exodus playing in the background, which relates to our unit study on Ancient Egypt.)

Here’s my 5-year-old. She’s reading from a McGuffey book. My 7-year-old and my 5-year-old read to me after they finish their math and after they eat breakfast (with Bible).

My 8-year-old son is practicing guitar.

So we’ve done math first thing in the morning. Then we did Bible as we were eating breakfast. Then we did reading. Now we have our writing. This is my 5-year-old’s writing about mummies after studying mummies for about a week and doing a lot of hands-on activities about mummies. And this is my 7-year-old’s writing about mummies. My 8-year-old hasn’t decorated his page yet. This is from our notebooks on Ancient Egypt, which the kids were able to decorate. We also have my 10-year-old, who has just finished putting on some stickers to write the title of his writing assignment about mummies. He has decorated his page. So he’s just finished with his writing assignment.

a-typical-homeschool-dayWe just read from Story of the World and Pyramid by David Macauley. We’ve also been talking about tombs, and now we’re making some treasure. We have a treasure chest, and in that treasure chest, we are going to put some treasure. We made some treasure out of clay, and we are painting it with metallic colors now. Those treasures we’ll end up putting in the treasure chest. We looked at the treasure of King Tut and his tomb. The pharaohs had tombs that were made for them as well as pyramids. So we’re changing our treasure chest into an Egyptian treasure chest because it looked just like the treasures we saw in the book about King Tut. Look at all the lovely treasures in King Tut’s tomb. We are thinking about what we want to put into our treasure chest. That is our history class today. I read the lesson while the kids are eating lunch so that it’s nice and quiet.

During their free time, my kids often work on their electronics kits. It’s just something they enjoy doing. They look at the instructions and do it on their own. Right now we’re doing Ancient Egypt only. We are not doing any science. Over the summer we did a nature journal, and we studied insects. So you don’t have to do both science and history at the same time.

Right now it’s after lunch. This is reading time. This is my oldest son, and he’s reading a book. He also reads the Bible, and he colors in one square for each chapter that he reads. He just finished Exodus. So he reads during this hour and a half. That’s when he does his assigned reading. We’re finished with our homeschool day by noon.

 

Organizing Your Homeschool

Monday, August 30th, 2010

Organizing your homeschool does not have to be difficult. In this video clip, I show you how to organize educational bins for unit studies in homeschooling:

As you can see if you look upwards, a lot of storage space can be found above your head. Look at the enormous amount of stuff that I’m storing above my head. It doesn’t affect any floor space. As you can see, it’s by years–it’s what we did for each homeschool year–and we went through the history of the whole world in six years. (We also covered all the sciences within those years.)

organizing-your-homeschoolFor example, in year 2 we studied human anatomy for a full year, so let me take that down real quick… When we did human anatomy, I just threw the things into this bin. I collected things from yard sales and used curriculum sales. You can get all kids of fun stuff. Here is a model of the lungs that we did, and the model of the human arm. We have X-rays of different parts of the human body; you can put the whole body together like a puzzle. Here are the skeletons of animals, and the bones like the femur are called the same thing in animals and humans. (So once you learn the bones of the human body, you can find and label animal skeletons, too!)

I have games about the human body, and books like Blood and Guts, which have lots of fun experiments about the human body. (It does contain evolution.) I also have coloring books of the human body, and diagrams to color for younger children. You also see I have different models, like the human heart.

So all of this is stored in this bin. That’s how I store things for different unit studies, so that the second time I teach something, it is so easy compared to the first time. As you make the different hands-on items for science or history, you can throw them into the bin. By the time you get to that time period in history, surprise, surprise! You open it up and go, “Wow! Look at all the stuff I have for the Revolutionary War!”

This is a small sample of my 2-hour video workshop, Organizing for a Fun Homeschool, where I show you every room in my house, and how I organize it for fun homeschooling.

How to Make an Educational Display

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

educational-display

When studying a particular theme for a unit study, an educational display can spark interest in that study. It is a learning center and can be located anywhere in your house. My favorite place to put the display is on a low bookshelf. I like to include books about the topic, including picture books.

I also include other items such as games, puppets, magnifying glasses, models, puzzles, small plastic insects, or any other item that would make children want to study that subject on their own. This way your child is studying and learning whenever you are not there. This can enhance and deepen their learning.

For example, they might want to read a book that you don’t have time to read aloud to them. Or they can study star charts more closely, or reread a book already read. Or they can browse the insect identification book and find out what that weird insect was that you found on your doorstep last week. Of all the items in the display, the extra books are especially helpful. You can even make a display with only books, propping some up to generate interest.

If you want to learn more about setting up your house for learning, you will love my 2-hour video workshop Organizing for a Fun Homeschool, where I show you how I organize my  house for fun learning.