Today we started studying India in both Galloping the Globe and Story of the World – Vol. 1. We are using Story of the World to guide us though Galloping the Globe. As we study, we move quickly over some countries and stay about a week. Other countries we stay for 2 weeks or more. Looks like we will stick with India at least a couple of weeks. Below are some of the books/videos we are using. We own the core curriculum books, and the rest we picked up at the library.
India is where we are in Story of the World so we are going to skip around in Galloping the Globe so we can be in the same place for history and geography next week. Should be fun! I’ll head to the library by myself on Sunday afternoon (my time for planning) and pick up our books! Today we read Chapter 9 in STW and we’ll catch up in GTG on Monday. We still have a little more to cover of South Korea today and tomorrow…..
Indie's Indus King
And Beluga's
Time to get back to lessons tomorrow. My husband has today (Monday) off so I’m using it as my planning day. It might be a slow start getting back into the groove. We have had 14 days away from a steady schedule….
Christmas 2009 – we finally contributed to the neighborhood with arches. Out arches had a bonus feature, disco lights! The lights all have a little flashlight effect. The kids think it’s very neat!
IMG_3863, originally uploaded by pbjhomeschool.
These cookies are super yummy. I’m taking them tomorrow night to a homeschool Christmas tea/cookie and ornament exchange. Here is the recipe! They are easy! I melted chocolate and dipped the bottom for a little extra yum!
Tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, strawberries, peppers, and lettuce in this box, more herbs and lettuces in others. This year we have 2 square foot gardens and many containers going. I’m looking forward to more of a harvest this year.
Our first stop this morning was our local zoo. This is how she wanted to spend the morning. We have an annual pass and love to do this.
One of our favorite places to pose for photos at the zoo. Guess I should have pulled her hair back for her. 🙂
This is probably the real reason she wanted to go to the zoo. With all of the public school kids in school, we had the place to ourselves!
After the zoo, we made it home. We had friends over to swim and have pizza and cake. It was a very nice day!
I love seeing J’s personality coming though…
B starting 1st grade. He looks so big with missing top teeth! 🙂
J's first day of Kindergarten. I can't believe it!
Darcy at Life with My 3 Boybarians is doing a Not Back-to-School Blog Hop: for School Rooms this week. Here is our school room.
Our cluttered school room.
There is B doing his math. To his right are our workboxes. We love these Ikea shelves. That whole 8 foot section on the left was $200.
I bring my laptop in and keep it there on the shelf. I like being portable.
The kids use our older iMac there. Again, more Ikea shelves. they have “desk shelves” that i LOVE. That is what the iMac is on. You can move them up and down to fit your needs.
Close up of the workboxes. B and J both have 10 boxes each. Plenty for Kindergarten and 1st grade. We do our First Language Lessons and Ordinary Parents Guild to Teaching Reading at the kitchen table after breakfast or lunch.
My 3 Boybarians is having a not back-to-school blog hop. This week she’s covering Curriculum.
I’m midway though my planning week. We will start school this coming Monday. I recently discovered Sue Patrick’s Workbox System. I plan to use the workbox with our curriculum, Galloping the Globe. We’ll stick with what GTG suggests for Science – Considering God’s Creation, and Social Studies – Our Father’s World.
For Language Arts we’ll continue with Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading (my 6.5 y/o can read but it’s good review). We are also going though First Language Lessons. We have been enjoying working though the poetry, and memorization especially. We do everything FLL suggest. We mainly do FLL and OPRGTR after our breakfast and lunch while we are still sitting around the table….
For phonics we are using Explode the Code. Indie, starting 1st grade – 6.5 y/o will be starting book 3. My daughter will be doing Getting Ready for the Code – Book B. She is K-5 this year. She will be turning 5 at the end of this month.
Indie and Beluga will both continue with Math-U-See. Beluga will finish up Primer, and Indie will start Beta (book 3). We’ll work on Handwriting Without Tears once a week and at some point we’ll work on Story of the World Vol 1. Not sure how much we’ll get to. I think GTG covers some history and we’ll be using lots of literature, real books to supplement.
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This is the first year we’ll be declaring to the state as a homeschooler. Here in Florida, you only need to start this for 1st grade. I want to make sure I’m really organized this year. I’m a pretty organized person naturally but there is always something I can work on.
This is the second year I’ve used a binder for keeping track of my planning and activities. It worked pretty well for me last year. At times the binder got a bit bulky and heavy but, for the most part I kept it home, on my desk.
My planner is a “pleather” 2 inch, 3 ring binder.
This year I added tabs for any ideas/print outs I get for the following weeks so I can keep track of them. Last year, I found myself misplacing my ideas or sheets I printed out for the following week.
I also keep my household papers here. (I got my ideas for this binder mainly from Flylady). My chore lists, emergency information for the kids, medical info., hurricane preparedness list, etc are all in my binder.
My notebook/binder has enough room for my calendar as well. I use a Mead spiral bound calendar from Wal-mart school section that also has 3 ring binder holes. It works great! I’d love to only use Google Calendar, and my iPhone for my calendar but I’m not there yet. I still love having a hard copy to fall back on.
The calendar is where I log future activities so I don’t miss play dates, sports activities, classes, homeschool meetings, or other doings.
In my binder I also keep a list of what my kids need to know per grade. Printed from here.
I have a section with pockets where I keep schedule sheets, soccer and dance schedules, library events, etc.
The most important section of my notebook is my planner. This is where I log all of the homeschool activities we do each day. I didn’t find planner pages that really worked for me so I made my own two paged planner. I got my inspiration from Donna Young.org. She has so many great forms on her site. I like the spaces down the left side for each subject, and the days of the week are written across the top of both pages.
It’s nice to have one place to keep activities that I want to do the following week. We are going to do this Enchanted Learning craft so I printed it out and stuck it into m binder so I actually get to it!
I also find that it’s nice to have a few clear, 3 ring sheet protectors in my binder. This way I can slip a class schedule, or sports roster into my binder quickly without having to hole punch them.
That’s about it for my planning. Time for me to get back to work! 😀
