Weekly Wrap-up: Week 26 - 28 - The End is in Sight

It's been difficult  for me to keep up with blogging. With the warmer weather and the school year wrapping up, our focus hasn't been on school. We have lots of plans this summer, so I'm not sure how much blogging I'll be able to accomplish. Sometimes it's important to experience life rather than record it. But I'll certainly be around here and there, and definitely in the fall when another new year begins.

CORE CURRICULUM
Cate
My Life in a Post (blog)
Needful Things (King), Everblade (Messenger)
Khan Academy: Pre-Algebra (94%)
CNN Student News

Sam
MobyMax: Language, Reading, Reading Comprehension, Math Fluency
Wattpad: Capitals, Punctuation, Showing Spoken Words
Cursive Copywork: 
Eragon (Paolini)
Saxon 65: Test 7 (87.5%), Lesson 40 (Fractions), Lesson 41 (Fractions Using Number Lines), Lesson 42 (Comparing Fractions), Lesson 43 (Mixed Numbers), Lesson 44 (Adding and Subtracting Fractions), Lesson 45 (Short Division), Test 8 (905), Lesson 46 (Fractions), Lesson 47 (Divison with Remainders/Mixed Numbers), Lesson 48 (Metric Scale), Lesson 49 (Inch), Lesson 50 (Fraction Pictures), Test 9 (87.5%), Lesson 51 (Compass), Lesson 52 (Mixed Measures), Lesson 53 (Expanded Notation), Lesson 54 (Informational Problems), Lesson 55 (Word Problems), Test 10 ( %)
CNN Student News

ASTRONOMY
Sam finished on Lesson 13: Stars and Galaxies in Apologia Astronomy. He recorded information summaries and biographies on lined paper rather than printed notebooking pages. (I'm out of printer ink...) He's learned about: constellations, asterisms, star systems, black holes, supernovas and nebulae, variable stars, categorizing stars through temperature, size and brightness, light years, 4 types of galaxies, and God's design for the heavens. He completed a project making an astrometer and a constellation viewer. 

Then he finished his final lesson in Apologia Astronomy, Lesson 14 Space Travel where he learned about the "Space Race" between the US and Russia, Sputnik, the International Space Station, and built is own model of a space station from recycled materials.

Science? Complete!

GENERAL SCIENCE
Cate finished up Module 14: The Human Circulatory System with a 100% on her exam, and Module 15: The Lymphatic System with a 93.3%. She only has 1 more module to complete as well as a few previous experiments.

US HISTORY and GEOGRAPHY
I read aloud chapters 10-30 to Sam from A History of US: Making Thirteen Colonies 1600-1740 (Hakim). Our reading covered the creation of government in America with the House of Burgesses, King James of England, the Pilgrims and Puritans and Church of England, Henry Hudson and New York, Peter Stuyvesant and the Dutch in New York, the Duke of York James and New Jersey, Oliver Cromwell and King Charles I, William Penn and Pennsylvania, Ben Franklin, 

DAYS COMPLETED: CATE - 169 | SAM - 157

As always, special thanks to these bloggers for their weekly wrap-up blog hops. 

Have a WONDERFUL week! Happy homeschooling!

A Peak At Our Week: Session 5 Week 1 - Beginning the Home Stretch

In My Life This Week

Spring HAS arrived at Our Side of the Mountain! Relaxing in the hammock under the budded maple trees, the Spring Peepers and wild birds sing loudly and the red squirrels scamper around the branches above. Green grass is growing and early flowers have sprouted in Sugar Maple's garden. The heat inside the house has been shut off and the windows are open days. And we're on our last session of Year #9!

Cluck and Quacks

The Saplings fashioned a make-shift pen for the lil' chicks out in the veggie garden for their first outside romp now that they have most of their big girl feathers. Although Nutmeg, Amber and Butterfly were on high alert, they scratched and pecked and fluffed while the older hens, outside the wired fence, ignored them.

On the Dinner Menu
☀ Ham, Cheese and Broccoli Strata with Pineapple Chunks ☀ Hot Dog Roast Outside with Baked Beans, Cole Slaw, Potato Salad, and S'mores ☀ Homemade Ham Fried Rice with Veggies ☀

Homeschool Happenings
SIMPLIFYING.

I've wanted to figure out a way to get some of this "delight directed" learning in despite my more "traditional" school views. But where to start? Gardening! Alaska! This week I decided to sit down WITH THE SAPLINGS and just learn about gardening and Alaska without any preplanned studies. We read. We wrote. We drew. We discussed. Whatever worked. And the sapling were confused. Not our usual approach to school.

We also read on in SOTW 2: Middle Ages, completing our mapwork and wall timeline along the way. And the younger saplings worked on their Saxon Math and Math-U-See. Sugar Maple is super excited that she should finish her ENTIRE math book this year.

In preparation for writing his first 10 page+ research paper, White Pine read How to Write a Term Paper (Elizabeth James and Carol Barkin) and then chose his topic: Comparing Union and Confederate Civil War Battles . He spent the rest of the week taking and citing notes from his research...and finished up his Computer Science 101 class from Coursera and continued on with Biology, World History, Geography and Cultures, US History Video Project, and Algebra. 

What We're Reading
☀ Darling Jim (Christian Moerk) (SP) ☀  Julie of the Wolves (Jean Craighead George) (SM) ☀ The Bear Scouts (Stan and Jan Berenstain) (BF) ☀ Prince Caspian (CS Lewis) (Read Aloud) ☀

Places We Went, People We Saw
☀ Scouts (All) ☀ Softball (SM) ☀ Library ☀ Co-op/Playground (All) ☀

Our Favorite Thing

Something to Share

As always, linking up to these WONDERFUL blog hops!

A Peak at Our Week: Session 3 Week 6 - The Calm Before the Storm

In My Life This Week / Things I Worked On
✔ Organize Session 3 Papers in Portfolios
✔ Declutter the Downstairs
✔ Walk Every Other Day With Rosie
✔ Clean Up and Organize the Garage  

My Favorite Thing This Week
Our garage has been SERIOUSLY buggin' me. ::sigh:: With a HUGE (embarrassing) pile of trash filling up one side, and outdoor toys thrown every-which-way, and Balsam Fir getting into and not putting back our tools, and old hay scattered across the concrete, I couldn't even get the van into it! On Saturday we ALL worked together and got it cleaned up...and Mama is happier!

Homeschool High School
SOMEONE has worked diligently this session! With only 1 week to go before our vacation break, White Pine doesn't have much work to do before meeting this session's goals. His big focus this week was finishing up Biology textbook and lab work, his Cather approach paper, and doubling up some Algebra and Biology Coloring pages. Next week? A few more math lessons and coloring! I suspect he'll enjoy a few extra days of sleeping in! ::wink::

He also started playing Ultimate Frisbee. Something totally new for him and us! 

Accomplishments
Vorpal Blade, Cather Approach Paper, Square Roots, Decimals, Additive Property of Inequality, Domain, Radical Expressions, Weighted Average, Complex Fractions, Trinomials, Probability, Pyramids/Cones, Bio Ch 20-21: Fungi/Protista, Mold Lab, Frisbee

Homeschool Elementary
Balsam Fir (finally) located a Nerf gun with foam darts from the garage, and I could (finally) make a Shooting Range Word Wall for him. I saw this idea at Life With my Giggly Girls a while back, although I can't find the exact post right now...Anyway, I wrote words that he struggles with (from his reading) onto index cards and then taped them onto closet doors. If he remembers them or can sound them out correctly, he gets to try shooting a dart at it. He thought it was my coolest idea in a while! ::wink::

I was going to wait until NEXT WEEK to start Story of the World Volume 2: Middle Ages, but the saplings didn't want to wait. How could I not start it, right?

And I took them ice skating for the first time this season. I don't enjoy ice skating so I read in the warming room around a wood stove, watching THEM through a viewing window. They had a wonderful time despite the slips-and-trips and want to go back. Fortunately it's a FREE rink (in a BARN) and has skates available. Nice!

SM Accomplishments
Creative Story (3000 words), Spelling Days ,Vitamins/Minerals, Digestive System, Fractions/Decimals, Fall of the Roman Empire

BF Accomplishments
Lionel in the Spring, Flat Stanley, Sight Word Flashcards, Writer's Notebook, Word Builder, Dollar/Coin (Count/Exchange/Change), Skeleton, Fall of the Roman Empire

Books, Books, Books!

We're reading about the "far land of Spare Oom...around the bright city of War Drobe" in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Have you read The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis to your kids? I'd most definitely recommend it! Both Sugar Maple and Balsam Fir give it two thumbs up! 

People We Saw, Places We Went
☃ Cub Scout Pinewood Derby (WP/BF) ☃ Hanging Out with Buddies (WP) ☃ Scouts (WP/BF) ☃ Ultimate Frisbee (WP) ☃ Basketball (SM) ☃ Clarinet/Band (SM) ☃ Library (SM/BF) ☃

Something Silly to Share

As always, thanks for stopping by Our Side of the Mountain. We're glad you came! We're linking up to these awesome blog hops this week. Why not head over, link up, or just read some more homeschooling happenings.

I also shared our Featured Feathered Friend here.

And don't forget this Sunday is our 2nd ever Explorers Blog Hop! We'd love for you to link up your outdoor adventures. Check out last week's hop here. Thank you to all those linked up last week!

It's a Wrap! Session 2 Week 4 - A Regular Ol' Week

In My Life This Week
The usual. You know - laundry and sweeping and vacuuming and mopping and taxiing and cooking and school. I did finish up one book, Valley of  Ashes, and started another, Born Blue. That's it. But isn't the usual the best kind of week?

L. to R. Speckles, Onyx, Roadrunner, Mustard, Rhodie, and Sassy

What We're Cooking
I've been slowly phasing myself out of the kitchen. I seem to do a lot of cooking since most of our food is prepared from scratch, but it isn't something I enjoy. It's nice to have 3 kitchen-savvy Saplings to help out! This week they prepared for dinner Homeschoolin' Mama's Burrito Bake, Our Best Bites' Catalina Chicken (which was cooked in the crock instead), I Heart Naptimes' Sugar Cookie Bars, and Allrecipes' Eclair Ice Box Cake. Now, to work on getting them to clean up afterward! ::wink::

Top L. to R.: Ice Box Cake and Burrito Bake. Bottom L. to R.: Catalina Chicken and Sugar Cookie
Bars

Homeschool High School
White Pine (finally) wrapped up his Animal and Plant Cell lab this week. It was from 2-3 chapters ago, but his 2 other labs went for 2-4 weeks, slowing this one up. He still has 3 more labs to catch up on. (Sweet Pepperbush needs to gather lab supplies from the store. Soon. No, no, that's not me! Ahem.) But he's moved onto Genetics. (And fortunately those labs are paper demonstrations of DNA strands. Phew!)

He finished reading The Count of Monte Cristo and wrote his Author's Profile and an Approach Paper for Excellence in Literature II.  If you're looking for something heavy on reading and writing for high school, but easy to implement and inexpensive here you go.

He set aside World History, Geography and Cultures for Saxon Algebra this week. He'd much rather do the history of course, but those equations with LETTERS don't solve themselves. ::wink:: 

And White Pine joined his buddy as "Assistant Coaches" for Sugar Maple's basketball team. His buddy's Dad's the coach and his buddy's sister is also on the team. But I think they spent more time "hanging out" then coaching.

L.: Biology Lab Book sample on cells. R. Top: Typing up an English paper. R. Bottom: Stripe helping
White Pine with school.

Accomplishments
The Count of Monte Cristo, Author Profile, Creative Essay, Persuasive Essay, Equations with Parenthesis, Word Problems, Products of Prime Factors, Population and Cell Labs, Genetics, Parts of a Microscope

Homeschool Elementary
Well, let's see...We read lots of Ancient Egypt books (from the library) but I returned them before writing them down. Oops! Then we moved onto the Phoenicians. Now, the Phoenicians are pretty interesting. I can't say as I really knew much about them before SOTW, but they were some of the first glass blowers. The Saplings did some mapwork, writing down notes and highlighting Phoenician areas around the Mediterranean, and then we studied about the first librarian ever, Ashurbanipal, who was also a cruel Assyrian king that conquered Egypt and Canaan back when.

How about our volcano study? It's been a blast! Ha! Ha! Anyway...we studied the different types of volcanoes and how they erupt, filling out a couple of Homeschool Share mini books,  built and watched volcanoes erupt on Volcano Explorer, and learned what type they were, watched videos and played games at neoK12 to reinforce our learning, and watched "Krakotoa: Volcano of Destruction".

Sugar Maple read D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths. Again. I'm guessing she may have parts of it memorized by now. There's just something about myths that she really enjoys. 

L. Using a Magnifying Glass to find spelling words in the dictionary. R. Top: Reading under a
snuggly fleece blanket that she made. R. Bottom: A crystal garden made from ice pulled from
the brook

And Balsam Fir built a rocket out of a styrofoam bowl and TP rolls. It even dropped "engines" as it "shot into space", leaving the nose with the astronauts. Unfortunately, there are no photos as his rocket had a disastrous landing. ::wink::

L. to R.: Wearing MY hat, sample of  handwriting, working on a puzzle.

Sugar Maple's Accomplishments
Writing - Letter to Pen Pal, Vocabulary Building, Sequential Spelling - Day 18-23, Cursive, Decimal Place Value Through 100ths, Naming Points on a Number Line, Volcanoes, Phoenicians, Assyrians

Balsam Fir's Accomplishments
Henry and Mudge in the Sparkly Days, Sight Words and Spelling with Samson, Handwriting, Addition with Carrying, Calendar, Volcanoes, Phoenicians, Assyrians, 100 Piece Puzzle

Places We Went and People We Saw
★ Scouts (BF/WP) ★ Basketball (SM/WP) ★ Clarinet/Band (SM) ★ 

Helpful Homeschool Hint and Resource

I spent some time this week updating my Helpful Edu-sites page. Would you check it out? There's lots and lots of stuff there! And everything is free (if you don't count printing costs). Do you have any great sites I should add? Comment below please!

Something Silly to Share
It's not our cat Stripe, but it could be. I'm sure she'll gets lots of enjoyment out of the Christmas tree in the days ahead. 

Well, that's a wrap! I don't know about you, but it's hard to believe that tomorrow is DECEMBER and in a few weeks it'll be 2013. Wowzers! We're linking up to these great blogs. Have a wonderful week!

 
 

New Leaf Publishing: World History

I recently received World History: Observations and Assessments from Creation to Today ($24.99) from New Leaf Publishing for review.

Written by James P. Stobaugh, this 12th grade World History curriculum comes with a 288 page black-and-white student book. This book has 34 short chapters that each have several lessons with assignments. And a 143 page teacher's edition that breaks down the chapters by lessons and includes lesson objectives, assignment answers and exam keys.

You will find these components in the book (taken from the student edition):

- narrative background

-critical thinking questions

- concepts/generalizations (theories)

- history makers (people)

- historiographies or historical debate

- world view formation

Lesson 2: Growth of Greek Civilization Teacher's Edition Preview

Lesson 2 Growth of Greek Civilization Student Edition Preview

Our thoughts? 

Stobaugh only skims the surface of World History and, for White Pine, there wasn't enough details in each chapter to keep him intrigued and interested. He's a history buff! Although there were numerous black-and-white photos, there were no maps of any region or time period discussed. Maps are very important to us! Obviously World History is a HUGE subject to cover in ANY NUMBER of pages, but 288 were not nearly enough for my 13-year-old.

However, the curriculum was very user friendly. Each chapter is broken down into 5 20-30 minutes lessons so it's easy to implement into your school day. There are also weekly exams (or assessments) provided and the lesson assessment questions are thought-provoking. Students only need a notebook and pencil to use this curriculum. 

So, if you're looking for an OVERVIEW of World History then click here for more information.

Disclaimer: As a member of the New Leaf Publishing Group, Our Side of the Mountain was provided this product free in exchange for our honest review. All thoughts and opinions are our own.