Heal the World Book Club

This summer we did a Countries Around the Globe study, using the book Give Your Child the World: Raising Globally-Minded Kids One Book at a Time, reading a number of books from this book list, making food from those countries, and watching videos about the countries we selected. Simple Homeschool had a summer book club with a continent every week with extra resources in addition to reading the books.

Simple Homeschool is starting a new series of posts for their  new Heal the World Book Club, which highlights books where kids make a difference in the world. With all the divisiveness and problems plaguing our country and our world right now, this book club focuses on how we each can make a difference in healing the hurts of those around us. We'll be following along for the next few months and I'm excited to add these books to round out the kids' reading (which usually tends toward fantasy-those often have themes of right vs. wrong, courage, and love, too, but I think focusing on more human/earthly examples could broaden their reading repertoire).

Weekly Wrap-up: Weather Unit

It's been a lighter load this summer, just due to family visits, outside camps, and playdates, but we are still doing a little bit so schooling. We spent about 3 weeks on Weather, learning about temperature, cold fronts/warm fronts, air pressure, precipitation/water cycle/dew point, relative humidity, extreme weather (tornados, hurricanes, blizzards, etc.), and forecasting.  What took me by surprise was that my kids had never watched a weather report on TV! Admittedly, we don't watch much TV, so that's probably why, but also, with iPads and smartphones, we've always used weather apps to get our forecasts!

We used a variety of books to do some hands-on demos and read about various weather-related topics:

  

The National Weather Service also has Learning Lessons with printouts to use for making weather maps, so we practiced making isobars and isotherms using their maps.

Here's a couple of our projects:

Homemade Thermometer

Assembled Weather Station Kit

We incorporated other subjects into this unit with the following:

• Writing: Use weather in a story
• Math: convert Fahrenheit to Celsius and vice versa
• Computer Skills: Excel graph of temperature change
• Greek root words: meteor, bar, meter, therm, hydro. 
• Chinese words: rain, snow, hot, cold, temperature, degrees, clear, cloudy, clouds

It was a fun and practical unit!

This post is linked up with Weird, Unsocialized Homeschooler's Weekly Wrapup.

Weekly Wrap-up: Trip to Utah, Native Americans, Colonial Period, and Deserts

Well, this will be more of a monthly wrap-up, rather than a weekly wrap-up, as it's been some time since I've posted. In that time, we covered Native Americans, desert animals, the Jamestown settlement, the arrival of the Pilgrims, and the starts of the Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Maryland colonies, as well as taking a trip to Utah to explore some of the National Parks in the area.

We had planned the trip months ago as purely a vacation to hike and see the beautiful landscapes there, before we had even planned to homeschool Bunny and did not have a plan for science or history for the upcoming months. But turns out, our new history and science curricula had us studying Native Americans and desert animals RIGHT before our trip!

So while we were at Arches National Park, we saw a dessert cottontail rabbit, plenty of lizards, and flowering cacti.

Dessert cottontail rabbit

We also saw some Native American petryglyphs carved into the cliffs at Capitol Reef National Park. The tribes mentioned were familiar to the kids, because we had studied some of the different Southwest Native American cultures.

And of course, we learned about the formation of arches, spires and fins through erosion, and we learned about geological rock layers and forces that produced suck amazing views.

Before our trip, we did some fun Native American projects(we focused on the pre-colonial period): 

Pictographs

Various art projects

Pizza map of Native American cultural regions

Sampling of Native American food (various regions)

Attempting to build a home out of sticks

After we got back, we started learning about the colonial period and the first European settlers. No great activities or projects though, just some standard mapwork and timelines and lots of reading from our America the Beautiful textbook, Story of the World, the Light and the Glory for Children (tells the early history of America from a Christian perspective), and a few books from the library. We watched Disney's Pocahontas and picked apart the historical inaccuracies and read a few chapter books to get to know the era better:

• A Lion to Guard Us 
• Blood on the River: Jamestown 1607
• The Witch of Blackbird Pond
• Squanto, Friend of the Pilgrims

However, we hope to visit Colonial Williamsburg and Jamestown, VA this summer! 

This post is linked up with Weird, Unsocialized Homeschooler's Weekly Wrapup.

Weekly Wrap-up: African Grasslands Minecraft Project

We did our second week of African Grasslands this week, and I asked the kids to make a project that incorporates all the animals we've talked about and their habitat.  I gave them ideas to choose from: build a Minecraft project, a Powerpoint presentation, a short story, a diorama, a painting/drawing, a report...their choice. So, no big surprise, they both picked a Minecraft project.

Bunny built a 'zoo', with signs or a book of facts, alongside each animal section. They have a Minecraft mod called "Mo' Creatures", which gives them alot more animals in the game than the regular game (but they don't have giraffes), so she penned them into sections like a zoo.

Monkey built statues of the animals, that you could climb through, and inside, there were facts posted on signs.

They both really enjoyed the project and were proud of their work. I think I will try to incorporate a project for future units, they seem to like to do that, but I'll have to have some guidelines or every one of them will be a Minecraft project. Not that Minecraft is a bad choice, just that I'd like to give them the chance to learn how to use Powerpoint or do some artwork or do more creative writing.

This post is linked up with Weird, Socialized Homeschoolers Weekly Wrap-up.

Thanksgiving Art, Science, and Thankfulness project

We're just started a unit that will center on Thankfulness for these next 2 weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. We did this project Saturday which incorporated art, science, and character building.

We collected an assortment of leaves outdoors, and brought them inside to examine and identify them. We mainly used this leaf identification website, Tree Leaf Key, to identify leaves and talk about things like pinnately lobed vs palmately lobed leaves, alternative vs opposite veins, and different varieties of trees. The website didn't have every possible tree type, but it has the major common ones. (I didn't find gingko leaves in there, but we can identify those easily).

Then we copied, cut out, and added detailing to enough leaves for 4 of us to each have a leaf until Thanksgiving.

Each evening, we will each write down something we're thankful for and tape it to our door frame as we reflect on the many blessings we have in life.

"Give thanks in all circumstances for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus" - 1 Thessalonians 5:18