New Year

Well, our new school year has started.  Several things are changing this year and several are staying the same.  First of all, we are continuing our volunteer work at our local park.  We've been twice already and are very glad to be getting back to filling the bird feeders and clearing the trails every Wednesday morning.  We are really looking forward to being in the park as Fall comes and seeing the change in the colors.  We are also continuing with our co-op, which is now growing.  We look forward to a year of great projects with our friends.

What's changing this year?  Well, after spending a lot of time this summer looking at different curricula and trying to decide how to more forward, I have decided to give Time4Learning a try.  It's a complete online curriculum for K-8.  We've been using it for about a month now and, so far, I'm very pleased with it.  I want to give it another few weeks and then I'll do a more in-depth review.  We are using it mostly for Math and Language Arts - I still really love our Unit Studies for History and Science.  That's where we get to do all the fun stuff!  But I can pull certain lessons from T4L to supplement our Unit Studies.  With a Grandparents Grant, the boys now each have their own laptop and work/read independently for much of the morning.

Ah, the beauty of the Periodic Table!

I'm also using BrainPop, another online resource to supplement all of our subjects (again, I plan to do a more in-depth review after a few more weeks of using it).  It's a great way to introduce a new topic and the boys really enjoy the animated videos with Tim and Moby.  I'm still cobbling together a lot of different resources, because I don't want the boys on the computer all day, but using the T4L curriculum gives me a strong spine to work with.  It also gives me reassurance that we are covering everything they need to cover.

So, to get us started this year, we are doing units on Chemistry and the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages is another one of those units like Ancient Egypt - there is so much to do, I can hardly squeeze it all in.  We have studied knights, the Feudal System, Heraldry, the Goths, Visigoths and Ostrogoths, the Crusades, and the Plague.  We have read two great historic fiction tie-ins (Crispin by Avi and Found by Margaret Peterson Haddix) and watched several movies/documentaries about knights, vikings and Robin Hood.  For projects, we made mosaic tiles and some really cool stained glass window stick-ons that now adorn our back door.

The Boys' mosaic tiles displayed with the painted ones they did in  co-op.

I loved how these turned out so much, I had to do one too!

We are going to finish up with Charlemagne, the Vikings (including some more cool mythology) and the Magna Carta.  The Boys have already started on their final projects - one on the Black Death and the other on the Crusades.

We are doing a Chemistry unit because the boys really liked that last year and because it has a lot of connection to the Middle Ages.  After learning about atomic structure and phases of matter last year, we are focusing on elements, compounds, bonds, and the periodic table.  So of course, we started with alchemy and then learned about Mendeleev and his periodic table.  Our first experiment was the electrolysis of water.  At first, the boys were a little disappointed that there was not some big explosion when I hooked the battery up to the pencils sticking in the water.  But when they saw the bubbles of gas forming on the ends of the pencils, they were fascinated.  We let it run all day.

For our chemistry unit, I am using a combination of the second Chemistry unit from Intellego and a wonderful resource I found from Ellen McHenry (http://www.ellenjmchenry.com/).  She has some great unit studies and a lot of free resources on her site.   All of her units have lots of experiments, board games and activities.  I love her hands-on approach to science.  Check out the Brain Hat - I can't wait to try that one!