Thursday, June 16, 2011

Homeschool Thursday: Finishing Up

We're wrapping things up for the summer around here, at least as far as our "regular" school work goes.  We stopped working on copy work about 2 months ago, but have been doing math, nature study, and history a few times a week.  With these last few days of cold and rain we were able to make it through the final chapters of The Story of the World:  Ancient Times by Susan Wise Bauer, which we've been using for history.  We borrowed the audio book from the library and have really enjoyed listening in the car--we all have much better attention spans while belted in, and we've liked everything we've ever heard read by Jim Weiss.
The Lego guy is unintentional, but so telling of our days around here!

To close our history for the year we collected all of the narrations, coloring pages, photos from plays and action figure play, along with the review cards available in the study guide, and assembled them into "books" in metal tab folders.  I had some mixed feelings toward the end of this assembly,  Is all this paper necessary?  Is all the time spent gluing and assembling really worth it?  Aren't  the listening, discussing, and productive play the real goods? Of course the answer is yes--it is the learning that is the real product, not the paper work.  However, I do think the kids will have a sense of pride in looking back through these books, as well as perhaps the opportunity to recall stories they may have forgotten.
Wylie has always loved official paper work, so at the very least he'll enjoy having some of his own.



We did the same thing with their math work, though we had considerably less of it since most of the math we do is oral/visual and very game based.  But I do think these math books may actually come in handy in reviewing where to start up again next fall.



For the summer I like to change things up a bit.  But for the sake of routine (and because we spend comparatively very little time on school through the school year) I like to do some focused learning project with the kids during the summer months.  This is of course aside from all the learning that just happens in the course of water play, low tide exploration, hiking, biking, and just being bored outside.


This summer the kids are each thinking of a topic they want to explore in depth, and I'll work with each of them to read about the topic and prepare some kind of written and creative art work about their learning.  This may be overly ambitious.  I haven't yet figured out how to read to the kids for more than 5 minutes at a time unless Kale is asleep (he pushes them off my lap, brings his own book over to read, or otherwise demands attention).  So, I've got low expectations.
But Wylie has some big plans, so we'll see.
Mostly we're all looking forward to a lot of time outside in the sun.


 

1 comment:

  1. I love reading about your homeschool adventures. I think the books are a good idea, though I have the same thoughts about paperwork in general. Is that Wylie on the red bike? It really doesn't look like him.

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