The past few days has seen us reintroducing Story of the World Volume One for Kangaroo's Prep/ Grade One history program. Kookaburra is loving doing it again too, fortunately!
Here we are right at chapter one, wondering what makes history. It's pretty simple stuff really. We read the section designated in the Story of the World Activity Guide and then Kangaroo narrates to me while I record his thoughts into the free two day a week lapbook we're using. Combined this with some great ideas from the self proclaimed OCD Story of the World using Mumma at The Chronicle of the Earth Blog and I might stand a chance of finishing this program with my boys and they getting so much more out of it this time.
This has been a hectic year. We've had so many opportunities to be involved in the community in various ways that I'm so glad and immensely appreciative of, but I find myself feeling very relieved to be saying goodbye this week to our latest 'job', a nearly three term stint as volunteers and visitors to one of the local private schools Art class on Fridays. I'm glad because this will aid my attempt to stem the flow of lost time in our home. I've also clamped down pretty tight on visitors and outings in the mornings and do not answer the phone, the calls go straight to messages so if it really is important I'll catch it. Every week we have several great reasons to be out and about and although I really miss catching up with friends and having my boys play with their children I've found that as Kookaburra is getting older I need to be very committed to my priorities. For us, for various reasons, homeschooling does take up a lot of our time and if I let a few hours slip through my fingers in the morning (read that as, this week my washing machine is in pieces so we'll have to make time to get the washing done at our local laundromat. But hey! We can at least enjoy some reading together!) inevitably our afternoons are sacrificed.
Today I managed fine. We had swimming lessons first thing this morning and got our language arts and math done before lunch so in the arvo we enjoyed A Dirty Dig. I buried some household items like tools, pencils, pot, toy car etc things that symbolise our present society into our sandpit and armed with trowels and paintbrushes my little archaeologists carefully excavated the site.
We also got some inspiration on how to exactly carry this out from here.
Kookaburra sifted the sand to find any stray artifacts.
Meet Elvis. We're babysitting him for two weeks whilst my cousin is on holidays with her family in France. Lucky girl :) he's a Dutch barge dog whom apparently has no idea how to play... Well, Minna and Thor have sorted that out and after two days, Elvis is running around chasing the kong right along with them. I think he'll be fine!
Kangaroo gently brushes away the sand from his treasure. A silver serving dish therefor, he concludes, that these people were rich!
Kookaburra and Kangaroo happily pose for a picture after their successful dig before taking their final bagged items upstairs where they reflected on the culture that left behind these buried remains, another narration for Kangaroo and some writing for Kookaburra. We also used this table to record our findings.
Thank goodness for the internet and clever blogging homeschool Mummas! A quick check on my some of my favourite bloggers for inspiration on how to approach each chapter of SOTW and I know that this program will keep on being interesting again for my boys a second time round and it leaves me with less head scratching for ideas and more time for being with them.
Here we are right at chapter one, wondering what makes history. It's pretty simple stuff really. We read the section designated in the Story of the World Activity Guide and then Kangaroo narrates to me while I record his thoughts into the free two day a week lapbook we're using. Combined this with some great ideas from the self proclaimed OCD Story of the World using Mumma at The Chronicle of the Earth Blog and I might stand a chance of finishing this program with my boys and they getting so much more out of it this time.
This has been a hectic year. We've had so many opportunities to be involved in the community in various ways that I'm so glad and immensely appreciative of, but I find myself feeling very relieved to be saying goodbye this week to our latest 'job', a nearly three term stint as volunteers and visitors to one of the local private schools Art class on Fridays. I'm glad because this will aid my attempt to stem the flow of lost time in our home. I've also clamped down pretty tight on visitors and outings in the mornings and do not answer the phone, the calls go straight to messages so if it really is important I'll catch it. Every week we have several great reasons to be out and about and although I really miss catching up with friends and having my boys play with their children I've found that as Kookaburra is getting older I need to be very committed to my priorities. For us, for various reasons, homeschooling does take up a lot of our time and if I let a few hours slip through my fingers in the morning (read that as, this week my washing machine is in pieces so we'll have to make time to get the washing done at our local laundromat. But hey! We can at least enjoy some reading together!) inevitably our afternoons are sacrificed.
Today I managed fine. We had swimming lessons first thing this morning and got our language arts and math done before lunch so in the arvo we enjoyed A Dirty Dig. I buried some household items like tools, pencils, pot, toy car etc things that symbolise our present society into our sandpit and armed with trowels and paintbrushes my little archaeologists carefully excavated the site.
We also got some inspiration on how to exactly carry this out from here.
Kookaburra sifted the sand to find any stray artifacts.
Meet Elvis. We're babysitting him for two weeks whilst my cousin is on holidays with her family in France. Lucky girl :) he's a Dutch barge dog whom apparently has no idea how to play... Well, Minna and Thor have sorted that out and after two days, Elvis is running around chasing the kong right along with them. I think he'll be fine!
Kangaroo gently brushes away the sand from his treasure. A silver serving dish therefor, he concludes, that these people were rich!
Kookaburra and Kangaroo happily pose for a picture after their successful dig before taking their final bagged items upstairs where they reflected on the culture that left behind these buried remains, another narration for Kangaroo and some writing for Kookaburra. We also used this table to record our findings.
Thank goodness for the internet and clever blogging homeschool Mummas! A quick check on my some of my favourite bloggers for inspiration on how to approach each chapter of SOTW and I know that this program will keep on being interesting again for my boys a second time round and it leaves me with less head scratching for ideas and more time for being with them.
1 comment:
Sounds great J. We just received our SOTW books in the mail, so I am a little excited to start that next year. May well be borrowing some of your creative ideas down the track!!! Hope you are well and life settles into a smooth flow for you. Miss you.
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