Planning for 2014?

Reposting Murrayshire Academy's resourceful list of links ... really helpful if one is planning for 2014... and needs a brain rest from planning.

The 10 Plagues in Egypt ~ Notebooking Page

Sharing here the notebooking pages we've tossed together to use alongside our study of Moses and the Plagues in Egypt - to help solidify the portion on the 10 plagues in Egpyt and the Egpytian gods they challenged.

The coloured clip art of the 10 plagues is from H.o.W

(For anyone interested in H.o.W Exodus Lesson, including the coloured clip art, above, which is used in a lapfold,  see here.  )

The Egyptian Gods, black and white, clip art page is out of Remembering God's Awesome Acts

though we may use some of the  - free for personal and/or school use only -   Egyptian gods clip art   instead.

Betsy Stout has created some free notebooking pages others may like to use:

Egyptian gods and Symbols page 

Ancients History, various topics, notebooking pages

or Megan's Ancient Egypt Notebooking Pages

There are a plethora of Ancient Egypt freebies, and go alongs out there .. pinterest is a pretty good spot to browse through for possible options.

We're going to use the pages we have on hand below, out of Remembering God's Awesome Acts, and, Bibloplan's Companion Text.

Calendar Pages ~ For Youngers

Betsy from Notebooking Nook has created these really nifty calendar pages for the youngers ... and the bonus is Southern Hemi's can use them too .

A perfect way to customise a different variant to create- a- calendar.

Daisy thinks they look like fun, for little children ☺ ; but wonders where is the space to draw a picture?
(Sigh.  No pleasing some folks ☺ )

Story of the World Vol 4 - Notebooking Pages Logic Level

As the children are working through SOTW 4 they have both continued to craft longer, and longer,  pieces for their history writing assignments.
I have to interject here that we often refer to a primary source, or a secondary one, to create our longer pieces of writing from.

Time to toss together some pages more suited to those longer writing sessions.  One page allows for a timeline figure/picture to be pasted or draw in, the other page is just for straight writing.

We've stored our SOTW 4 Notebooking Pages for logic level over at hs launch.

Bobs and Daisy complete the SOTW 4 mapping work, trim it up and glue it to the back of the first notebooking page.
The timeline figures are from the SOTW 4 activity book.

Notebooking Pages: Florence Nightingale & the Crimean War

We've just completed our SOTW4 history week with the chapter on the Crimean War and since Daisy is mostly just participating as a tag-along with SOTW4 (going deeper with Bobs!) I'm making sure to include side trips for her, away from some of the topics we're reading about.

So while Bobs looked at the issues surrounding the Crimean War, it was time for Daisy to have another, more indepth, look at Florence Nightingale.

Bobs completed his SOTW4, outline notebooking page with ease. Using WWE has certainly helped him to sift through the details and get the main points down in a brief sentence - it'll be interesting to see how he goes when we get to writing from the outline portions of SOTW, activity book 4.
The narration piece, shown in the photo below - along with Bobs outline, is Daisy's.During Core K and our unit on nurses we enjoyed using water colours to paint this picture of Florence . Above is Daisy's artistic efforts during Pre-K & Core K. She'll be happy to have another 'go' at that picture.
And since we're carrying on a Victorian theme - Florence Nightingale's clothing is of interest to Daisy.

We've tossed together some Florence Nightingale Notebooking Pages (which includes some generic Crimean War notebooking pages also. Bobs is not fussed on using the style of pages
Daisy likes, photo below, ☺ so we've included some art work that Bobs preferred too.)

Florence Nightingale Notebooking Pages (includes lapfolds)                                                Links repaired 05/15. Now goes to dropbox - you don't have to sign up to download the file, just close that box and then hold down the Ctrl key and click Download.
Daisy completed her Florence Nightingale Cut-n-Craft notebooking page, above, using the Florence Nightingale paper doll.
Our notebooking page can be found here, over at dropbox.

While we read aloud The Drummer Boy's Battle ~ Florence Nightingale, by Dave & Neta Jackson (*note: pre-read before giving to sensitive children!!), Daisys enjoying colouring in, picture below, a hidden picture that I stashed away in our archives folder a few year back. Sorry, the original link I had for this picture no longer works..... you can send me a note at sldownunder dot g at gmail dot com if you'd like the page.
I did find the picture without the picture clues linked on one of Jimmie's lens ... (I'll try to find her lens again & place that link here... I may not be able to, look at all her lens ☺.)
Found it! Jimmie helped by placing the squidoo link it's on, in her March Notebooking Round up: Go to this squidoo post and scroll down to The Biography of Florence Nightingale portion and it's #4
For those looking for a Florence Nightingale notebooking page, for youngers, The Notebook Fairy has two.
Popping this here for others: We found this pdf in our travels that may suit your children.

Homeschool Blog List

I enjoy reading homeschooling blogs and Honey of Sunflower Schoolhouse has compiled an amazing list of homeschool blogs to browse through - these next links will take you straight to Honey's homeschool blog list and her workbox blog roll .

Abraham Lincoln's WORLD ~ Notebooking Pages

We've put up our notebooking pages, to use with Genevieve Foster's book Abraham Lincoln's WORLD, over at HSlaunch.

We're hoping to create outlines of various portions of some of the chapters in A.L.W using set 1 of the pages beneath, and then write from our outlines using set 2.
Abraham Lincoln's WORLD ~ Notebooking pages: Set 1 (incs timeline option)
Abraham Lincoln's WORLD ~ Notebooking pages: Set 2 (incs paper dolls)
(For those wanting paper dolls of Abraham & Mary Lincoln to colour in - you'll find a few links, with some lovely black line paper dolls, listed in this post. )

Story of the World Vol.4 Schedule ~ 2012

We're up and running with our updated, 2012, SOTW 4 schedule and are at the end of week 1A
(the initial, 2010, type up can be found here ).

I've removed some titles and made this years emphasis New Zealand history, while we read through Story of The World ~ Modern Times, by adding in the following NZ history books:

Builders of New Zealand By A.W. Reed (mentioned in previous posts & sadly, O.O.P) (Reader)

Illustrated History of New Zealand by Marcia Stenson (Read Aloud)

The Kauri & The Willow by Elsie Locke (Read Aloud)

The New Zealand Wars by Ross Calman (Read Aloud)

How Parliament Works by John Lockyer (Read Aloud)

We're not sticking, strictly, to Sonlight's cores 4/E and 7 /H this year, choosing instead to mix and match up the read alouds and reader titles from various cores to suit us. Namely a few titles from the old Core K, Core 5/F, and Core 100.

Geography will remain an ongoing study through this year.

We've added in a few good splashes of Australian literature too and will also be continuing our studies of hymns, composers, and artists.

While all the other subjects are sorted, with pdfs downloaded and printed, or books labelled and placed in work baskets, I'm still mentally juggling our grammar instruction choices.
*I* like Maxwells book, but ...

Huckleberry Finn - Audio

Bobs favourite summer time audio (so far) has been Huckleberry Finn read by Elijah Wood.
Sterling job!
Huck Finn is an Ambleside on line (AOL) free reading title for Year 6 that we'd scheduled in for him to enjoy during the first few weeks of us easing back into scheduled learning.
He's now enjoying his second listen through it.

Retro Post ~ Wedgits

This is not an advertising plug to sell this item, our sale is all done and dusted ... I'm just in the frame of mind to showcase another early homeschooling gadget.

WEDGiTS!

Our children used to love tinkering with this set of Wedgits (as did any other people who happened to be in our space at the time the Wedgits box was out).

When they were really little we'd do the whole (excellent) Montessori idea, I'd build a shape and they'd copy the building of it ... here's a small funny though >

During some more involved building sessions with 3 yr old Daisy, I was trying to nut out how the pieces went together so that she could "monkey see" "monkey do".

Bobs, 5yrs old, could see marmee was just not getting it, so quietly sat RIGHT in front of me with the pieces needed to make the shape and s.l.o.w.l.y built it while I watched - even then it took me at least 4 goes to get the shapes to lock in place (laugh!). I was not doing well with following 3D instructions - which Wedgits are.

(Great early (? snort) years discovery toy. Our family built with these from ages 2-8.)

Needless to say Daisy mastered Wedgit building from watching Bobs, then they both ending up teaching marmee how to build 'involved' Wedgits.

*WEDGiTS currently can not be purchased in NZ - Australia is our closest distributor.

Alphabet Bingo - Memory Lane with Sonlight

I'm currently having a rather large homeschooling items purge - ouch, who knew selling memories pinches just a little - and as I was typing the pictured item up for sale tonight .. all the fun times the children and I had playing with those very simple looking Sonlight language arts games just brought back a flood of good 'early' home educating memories .... I haven't checked to see if Sonlight still sells these, if they do snaffle a set for the elementary age learners in your home.
They are really fun!
Here are some of the ways we used these sets, all while playing bingo, mind.

Sometimes the games had to go really slowly and be played with just a few letters/blends/words at a time.
As the confidence and 'reading' ability grew the games became a counter-placing-race:
Use the alphabet bingo set to assist little ones to recognise each letter by it’s name.

Then using the same cards, the students recognise the (short) phonetic sound of each letter. (Add long phonetic, or alternate phonetic sounds at a later stage .. you know these cards go so well with All About Spelling and any reading program.)

The letter blends (groups) cards are perfect to use with an emergent readers or to re-enforce letter blends for spelling.

The word cards are excellent for practising common sight reading words.

Can also be used for spelling - the parent or teacher spells the words and the students are to find them ...

Bingo!

(sorry, ☺ just couldn't resist it )

Marie Antoinette & Redoubt

I've finally got around to photographing Daisy's completed SOTW3 cut-n-craft. We used the notebooking page and Redoubt book detailed in this post.

Children Around the World Colour in Pages

Even if your children don't like to colour in, the art work off the geography colour sheets from Hugo L'escargot's site would make for great cut-n-craft embellishments for lapnote, lapbook, or notebooking pages.
We don't mind that the wording is predominantly in French and we're using some of the pages that are available as 'title' page dividers in the geography portion of Bobs and Daisy's history folders.I know I've mentioned these pages before on a previous colour-in-pages-and-clip- art post, but they seemed to deserve a post of their own :)

Classical Composer Study for Haydn, Mozart, & Beethoven

Dawn of Our Nest of 3 blog has crafted, and then generously shared, a really nice study on Haydn, Mozart, & Beethoven. She has spent hours of work inserting lots of helpful links - I'm seriously impressed!

You can find her post with the links to her pdf, here.

Dawn's study is a perfect composer tie-in to go with where we are in our SOTW3 readings.

Haydn is slight review and Mozart is up for study next.

The Witch of Blackbird Pond - Notebooking Pages

We all enjoyed this Sonlight scheduled read aloud, though I have to say Dn and I saved our voices and enjoyed it via the audio book with the children.
On our customised, Story of the World 3 & Sonlight Core 3, schedule you'll find The Witch of Blackbird Pond slotted in on page 1c, SOTW3 chapter: 15.
(We've edited our schedule a few times since we placed that one up on hslaunch, I may have to upload the schedule we are using now).
We appreciated the character lessons and history detailed in The Witch of Blackbird Pond and so I went ahead and created a few (very plain) pages for Daisy to use to go with this book, namely: a copywork page and a colour in page.
HSlaunch: Witch of Blackbird Pond Notebooking Pages

Poetry Copywork

Since me and mine are keen poetry 'appreciators' I thought I'd create this random post.

We like to have poetry copywork sheets, which include optional colour in themes for Daisy, to go with some of the recitation pieces we are working on.
Seems a waste to create these pages just for us and then leave them languishing in our files so I thought I'd share some of our past efforts that others may like to use too.

Poems include pages for:

The Caterpillar by Christina G. Rossetti

A Wise Old Owl by Edwards H. Richards

The Little Plant by Kate L. Brown

God is Like This by Rowena Bennet

I've detailed how we use them, should that interest anyone too, on the first page of the following pdf .

HSlaunch Poetry copywork pages.

Life of Fred and Making Math Meaningful

Jay is enjoying the Life of Fred books (he's encountered so far very much) and the first 2 books tie in so well with M.M.M level 6.

L.O.F is a wonderful incentive to make sure other, less palatable, learning tasks are done.
See these samples if you'd like to see inside L.O.F books.

Daisy gets enthralled by what Fred is up to next and wants Jay to 'work' the math part out so they can move on with the story.

They valiantly plowed through the first book far quicker than I wanted Jay (them) to so I quietly put the second book "out of reach" for a while since I wanted us to use it for study now - using portions of our M.M.M text for further practice where, or as, needed.

L.O.F books are a hit in our home .... I like reading them too - wish math had been this much fun when I went to school :-)

Science

Seems like many of our posts lately are about this topic ..... odd really, with me so science orientated (laugh.  I'm not).

Daisy has completed her Exploration Education box and is strongly encouraging Jay to 'get done' so that they can enjoy their next choice for science (Yes, it will still be part of our science boxes approach).

After comparing the various options available and since the children have enjoyed building "Billy Bones" (only seven weeks to go and Billy, picture above, is all built!!) we decided they might like to have a go with:

Apologia's Exploring Creation With Human Anatomy,

Complete with a notebook each, regular level and junior level,

And the wonderful experiments supply box.

The items are not all loose like this they have been efficiently packaged together into plastic lock bags which relate to each lesson's experiment and labelled accordingly.

Daisy wanted to get started as soon as the box arrived - since it comes complete with quite a few American sweets, (smile) such a novelty and a book you can colour in, cut, paste and create lapnotes for! I think the junior level notebook is lovely and bar the line spacing for writing (too large), this notebook is a perfect fit for Daisy to complete on her own.

We've also selected a few books to go in the children's book basket; a notable reading mention for Jay is Tiners, Exploring the History of Medicine.

I noticed that Lilliput Station have some really nice free notebooking pages to go with Exploring the History of Medicine.

I'll keep you 'posted' as we go along, how well we're all doing with this :-)

Science Boxes

I actually typed most of this in reply to a query from a SL friend, Annie, and thought I'd reshare it here since we get quite a few homeschooling mums/moms asking about our science boxes.

I'd rather not do science, while my children seem to love it - perhaps because it's always been delight led (?). So with those 2 factors in mind I'm continually looking for ways to create a compromise to suit us all.

I'll detail next what we've been doing since Sep 2010: Bobs and Daisy enjoy the freedom of choosing their own box and I'm happy since I don't have to 'take' science.

Funny thing is I get so interested in what they are doing that I usually end up asking 'can I have a turn" - so we're all happy.

With our "science boxes" - I am using a mix of Exploration Education's boxes and some of our previously purchased, and unused, Sonlight's science supply kit boxes all set up 'to go'. The children choose which ever box they feel like using, on the day. Pictured beneath are the the SL science supply kit boxes boxes, filled with all the bits n pieces, along with the appropriate DvDs (no IG's). Since we do science Monday afternoon's (think relaxed start to the week!!!!!!)& Friday afternoons, Bobs and Daisy watch a DvD , if they wish, then try an experiment and for their reader that day they *must* pick a science based book out of their basket (I place various SL & other science books in there). For those not familiar with the Exploration Education boxes we are using see this blog post: science for 2010-2011.

Again, the children just do whatever they feel like completing (such a bad science mummy). Daisy, in Elemenatary Level, has just completed her science buddy and the scales and Bobs started working on his "electric car".

(Our cheeky little Bichon found Daisy's science buddy when no-one was around. He had a wonderful chew on it and swallowed one of the eyes - science buddy now looks like a cyclops!)

With the Intermediate Level, Bobs uses the teachers book - makes the computer side of the lessons so much more enjoyable and less "hunt for the answer". Not very high tech I know, but there you have it.

Bible Colour in Pages.

Really nice (extra) colour in pages can sometimes be a stretch to find.

Pages that have more realistic pictures but are not so heavily detailed that Daisy gets dispondent with ALL the tiny lines - and pages that are different than the ones she's coloured in before.

I've been eyeing these for a little while: The student pages for Telling God's Story , they sure do have some wonderful art work for colouring in.

We are not using the course that goes with these page, we have our own preferred approach to teaching bible .

We just want to use the colour in sheets in the pdf (and perhaps a few of the craft/game ideas), those will suit us just fine.

Samples of the art work can be viewed here.

And, a great bonus for internationals wanting to purchase their downloads: Peace Hill Press now have payment available via paypal. So convenient.