Our FIAR book for this week was The Story of Ferdinand
by Munro Leaf. We didn't do as much with it as I had planned, we had another busy, busy week. Yesterday we read about vultures and noticed how often they were in the story. Today we will wrap up the story by talking about cork and Spain. Saturday will be our "grand finale". We will make two recipes from the FIAR Cookbook to celebrate reading Ferdinand.
Next week we will read They Were Strong and Good
by Robert Lawson. Some of the things I hope to cover are:
Geography - Islands of the Caribbean (we have some personal experience with this one!)
Science - Bees and Bee Keeping, this is a favorite family topic
Our Saturday dinner will include two caribbean recipes from the FIAR Cookbook.
At the Midwest Conference, I attended a seminar by a woman named Rebecca Kochenderfer. She was giving out a free book to all of her seminar attendees. It was a book she wrote called Homeschooling and Loving It
. I really enjoyed the read and it gave me lots of great ideas as well as encouragement and confidence to try some different things in our day. As we go along in our homeschool journey I find we are less and less into the school at home mode. Nothing wrong with that route, I just think there are other choices that are a better fit for our family. In the book she walks you through developing a learning plan for each child, taking into account they way they learn best and most importantly going with what your child is interested in learning about.
She also stresses the importance of helping your child to set goals. She walks you through breaking those goals down into manageable tasks so it is not so overwhelming. Jacob and I sat down and worked our way through the learning plan, even taking a quiz on how we each learn best - Dad joined us in that one too! Without hesitation his goal for this year is to earn his junior black belt. So we wrote it down and talked about the things that he needs to do over the next several months to achieve that goal. For instance, this summer we will work on TaeKwonDo knowledge, he will continue with his private lesson, and he will attend sparring class 2x per week.
As for the item he wants to learn more about, not really a surprise, it's trash. The more we thought about it the more we realized that there really is a lot we can cover. A field trip to a recycling center, a science experiment on trash decomposition, a mock business plan for a trash business and so on. I also plan to revisit Math on the Level this summer so we can incorporate more everyday math into the trash unit. I definitely won't be getting rid of all of our workbooks, we are not unschoolers by any stretch, but we are excited about adding some new and different things to our life of learning.❀
we made Coconut Chicken, Coconut Salad, and Coconut Cream Pie.
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that has been working well. These are the items I would like recommendations on:
