Homeschool Sloths

It's just that kind of day.


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New School Year, New Fashion Statements

(The iPad camera still stinks, but it is super handy for blogging.)

-Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

And So It Begins

Goodbye, Summer. I'll miss you.

Planning

Here is a great site with free printable homeschool planning forms, calendars, recording keeping forms, etc. It's a little overwhelming at first, but there is a lot of good information there and many great resources.

Donna Young Planners

An overdue post

I have been meaning to post a detailed "Year In Review" post but I just can't seem to get around to it. Here's the Reader's Digest version of what I learned this year.

1.  Oak Meadow is perfect for us. The upper elementary (we were in year 5) is much more involved than I had anticipated, and some weeks we had difficulty covering everything completely, mostly because I didn't use only Oak Meadow. I had too many other things in our schedule.
2. Sometimes less is more. (See #1)
3. Swinging helps Thing 4 concentrate. I started noticing that if she was having difficulty focusing on, say...Math, she would ask if she could go swing. When she came back in, her concentration was better. (Everything is relative.) I've talked to other moms who have kids with attention issues who are especially creative, and they have noticed this, too. Interesting. 
4. MCT Language Arts is fabulous, especially the Caesar's English portion.  (Thanks, Melanie).
5. Life of Fred...also a fabulous curriculum. We use this to supplement Singapore Math. It is great for developing higher level thinking skills. 
6. Singapore Math is perfect for Thing 3, not so much for Thing 4. We are switching to Oak Meadow Math for her next year. 
7. It's great to be able to tailor instruction and expectations to each child's learning style, personality and activity level. (See #3 and #6.)
8. As Latin goes, Lively Latin is a really good curriculum.  It's a nice mix of the basics of Latin combined with history, games, art history and puzzles. The online resource is very good, also. That said, we are dropping Latin next year. (See #2.)
9. Rosetta Stone is a great way to learn a foreign language.
10. It's worth paying for a good art class. 
11. We should have planned more field trips and done less "school". Thing 3 was verging on burn-out by the end of the year. (See #2.)
12. CiCi's pizza is over-priced and under-good. We go there anyway.  
13.  Otherwise Educating is great. Summer is greater. 

The Cult of Apple

In an effort to further indoctrinate our children in the Apple ideology, we took our FunSchoolers on a field trip to the Apple Store. Granted, given that my children live in a home with, ahem, an Apple product or ten, there wasn't much work to be done on my crew. However, there are some in our group who have not yet drunk the Apple-flavored Kool-Aid. What better way to convince a parent that she needs to buy an iMac than to let her kids play with one for an hour and a half and let the kids fall in love with it? Who can say no to a child begging for a $1,700 computer? Sneaky, sneaky, Mr. Jobs.


We could choose from one of four projects...video, text, music or photo. We had the kids make a stop action video with props they brought from home. Very cool!

 The big kid in this next photo is Adam, an Apple mind control expert  Store employee. He had as least as much fun working on this as the kids did. He was so great with them that my neighbor suggested we hire him to entertain the children this summer.

Indoctrination aside, this was a great field trip. In addition to giving each child a DVD of their project and a certificate, they got free t-shirts (sans location tracking...I checked).  

I have tried in vain to upload one of the projects but Blogger is having trouble with video tonight. Trust me when I tell you it very cool...as long as you don't play it backwards. 

Learning about Bernoulli's Principle And Flight

Have I mentioned that I really love Oak Meadow? The enrichment activities are so great. Take our lesson on Bernoulli's Principle and the Principles of Flight, for example. We had a textbook lesson that explained Bernoulli's Principle and its relation to flight, and then OM had Thing 3 experimenting with paper airplanes to gain a concrete understanding. He told me today that it was one of the best days he's had this year. But then, who doesn't love playing with paper airplanes?