You can still see exactly what we do for school to get links or ideas. You can go to the Easy Peasy All in One Homeschool and click on Math or Biology, for example. I list in bold the minor topics like Place Value or Digestive System. You can see exactly what materials we used and what activities we do. I will also post there from time to time about the things we do for school.

My focus is now on working on my curriculum, which I do daily. This blog was the first step towards the creation of the curriculum. I actually never even intended to be a blogger. I just started this blog originally to show the grandparents (on a different continent) what the kids were doing for school, but I unintentionally gained a following, getting more than a hundred visitors a day.

If you are using my curriculum or considering it, you can still scroll down and look at past posts and see what types of materials and activities the curriculum uses. The freebies will all still be here. There are some more, basically notebooking pages, listed on the Simply Lapbooks group.

Thanks everyone for your support over the last few years. I’m glad I could help and encourage some of you. I’m still trying to do that. I now get emails from families saying that they wouldn’t be able to continue homeschooling if they didn’t have my curriculum. Others write about their circumstances and how they found themselves suddenly needing to homeschool when they had planned on their children going to school. For those overseas it offers them accessible resources. For those who’ve lost jobs it offers free resources. For those who have never homeschooled, it offers knowing exactly what to do each day. Everyone has different needs and circumstances, but they all found that the curriculum is meeting the need they were faced with. I love being the Lord’s tool to bless others.

Blessings,

lee

These are the two sites we used for information: younger  older.

Each day as the children read they wrote down what they found to be interesting or important. I let them choose for themselves. I also let them choose for themselves where to keep the information. My son chose to do a Power Point presentation and each day added a slide. I gave every links to clip art they could use. My daughter made a poster.

She drew the pictures and just wrote out facts to include.

We also do our music and art related to history, so we listened to Mayan music on youtube and made Mayan pottery (our version of it). You make snakes and layer circles up the pot.

This is my oldest son’s pot.

This marked 40 days into our curriculum, which means time for the portfolio. Every forty days I collect something from each subject and put it in the binder. I’ve never turned in a portfolio, but I keep one just in case we end up in the States and I need to turn something in. I have had to register my kids and turn in “objectives” and a bunch of other information that I shouldn’t have to, but we’ve never been around for portfolio time. I make it easy for myself by writing right in the kids’ assignments. “Do your work neatly and give your paper to a parent when you are finished to add to your portfolio.” Then the kids remind me, and I don’t have to remember. We are supposed to show “progress,” so I have quarterly examples. I try to vary what is in there because we are also supposed to show what materials we used. We are supposed to keep a record of every book read and every resource used. This is impossible. Do you know how many links are on my kids’ school? I give samples of the types of materials they use. We’re also supposed to have a log of what we do. That’s easy. I just print out the curriculum website and it has the assignments for every day. I think it’s all a waste of time and effort!

Here’s another sample of work. My second grader had to draw pictures of his vocab words as part of the vocab sheets I made for him. Here is “exasperated.” Do you see the smoke coming out of the ears? After he drew that he never forgot. Here’s the download vocabulary worksheet. It has a place for the word, the definition, the sentence where you found it and a picture. It has room for two words a page and has a little bit of color on it.

Here’s my daughter’s King Tut sculpture out of butter and flour and colored icing.

I’m sorry I’ve been doing a horrible job of taking pictures of what we are doing for school. Right now I’m just trying to survive nausea and the 105+ heat. Oh, did you know? I’m expecting baby 6 in February.

Today let me tell you about our computer courses. When I started building my online curriculum, several new “official” courses were born. One was computer. Each year they learn a little more about the internet and about word processing. Then each year they learn different types of programs.

First graders just do internet, word processing and typing.

Second graders add on Paint and Publisher (or similar programs).

Third graders learn Power Point (or similar program). There are free versions of these types of programs.

Fourth graders use Scratch which is computer programming for elementary school children. My boys love it.

Fifth graders make a blog.

Sixth graders learn html.

Seventh graders learn graphic design. Inkscape   Gimp

I’m considering Excel (or similar program) for eighth.

My boys love computer. My daughter only touches it because she has to for school. It’s an important skill though. My oldest son, above, has already taken apart computers and hopes his next computer will be one he builds himself. I have finished my JavaScript course over at CodeAcademy. Now I’m learning more html and CSS to use the Javascript together with a website. I’m a beginner though. I can make games like this.  (If you clicked on the link–try day 60, those are little fun things I made to put on my kids’ school. Once a week I add in something just for fun.)

My time it up. My ESL students have arrived. I volunteer and teach some neighbor children English a few times a week. Hope you are having a great week.

And while I’m on old…here is my experiment worksheet  that I use all the time. It just has a place for hypothesis, materials, procedure, etc. I have a younger version too which I call the experiment book because it’s a page for each of those things.  I have added all of these downloads to the Free Stuff! page.

And here’s a picture from our week past.

We just started ancient China this past week and here’s my daughter making a scroll of Confucius’ five virtues.

I hope some of you can enjoy seeing my husband’s crazy desk. We’re not perfect here!

The first thing on our school day schedule is math for the two oldest at 10:00. This is so that my husband is available to supervise and help my daughter with her math and I’m available to supervise and help my son with his math. And I help my husband when he’s stuck on his math. I was actually a math major, so I don’t fear the coming years of math.

Then the older two boys (5th and 2nd) pair up to work on history and science. When that’s done, they split up to finish their work. They can finish by noon. Sometimes there are distractions…

I noticed the boys weren’t at the computer and went to find them. They had joined in an unofficial story time when they heard my daughter reading to the four year old. I didn’t tell them to get back to work.

Our wall body is starting to fill in. It’s up so high so the one year old doesn’t think he can draw on it too.

The second grader really enjoys school. His favorite links so far have been in music and art. Here he is virtual drumming. In art he went back again and again to explore cave paintings.

We are finishing up ancient Egypt. Last year we did a minibook timeline in a binder. This year we are just using timeline pages. Here is what the younger kids are using, putting the date on the line and then adding words and pictures off to the side. The older timeline is used on the computer. You can type right onto it and save and print.

We’ve finished week 1 of 36. It already seems to be flying by for me, which only means I’m getting old. Above is my 12-year-old daughter supervising preschool with the 4 year old. It’s nice to have her to do that.

This year we are studying biology for science and we started with the human body and skin.

While we all study the same thing at the same time, like skin, the assignments are broken into older and younger. Above is older…below is younger…That’s the outline of my second grader. They will be filling it in as we study the different body systems. I decided to let the fifth grader do the younger assignments along with the second grader, even though he’s supposed to be in the older group. They are best buds anyway, and I wanted the second grader to have a partner to work with. They are using Mr. Q’s life science textbook as a base.

For history we are studying ancient history and we started with Egypt. The younger kids are doing the lapbook from Pratical Pages. The younger kids also practiced with a BC timeline. Everyone played the pyramid game. It is not easy to get that pyramid built!

We even got a little review of physics from last year.

I mentioned before my oldest son saying, “I can’t write poems” on the first day of school. On the second day he didn’t have to. On the third day the scene repeated. On the fourth day I transformed our chore chart into a cheerful worker chart and threatened the loss of computer time if there were complaints. He asked for help with his poem. On the fifth day he wrote it quickly by himself, following all the directions and without problem. First problem solved.

We were going to wait until July, but it’s 106. What else are we going to do? We started school. We take off Thursday and Friday so Saturday’s a school day for us. And what a day. We don’t have central air, but we still felt it when the power and water went off today. The power was off twice today, the second time for a couple of hours. The water is still off.

The first thing each kid had to do (except the preschooler) was a following directions worksheet. I explain that it’s important to read all of the directions before they click on their links for school and that they need to follow all of the directions. Some of the grades have real follow direction practice worksheets, like my second grader here. Some had those trick worksheets that say to read through all the directions before starting and then the last direction is to not do the worksheet. My daughter did the whole thing. Lesson learned.

The first day was pretty easy stuff, and we finished quickly. The only sticking point was my fifth grader and poetry. I don’t like poetry myself and always put our month of poetry first to get it over with. My son is sure he cannot write poems. But with the heat on and the power out for a couple of hours there was nothing else to do. So he got it done. Little by little. Only 19 more days of poetry to go.

Today we just did some background to early history and science. Tomorrow we begin ancient Egypt and the human body. Hope you are staying cool. (Made with Scratch which is part of 4th grade in the Easy Peasy Homeschool)

My daughter just came in to say the water is back on. Now I can wash the dishes. Yeah!

This year our history theme is ancient history. I’ve already posted lessons on ancient Egypt and China and Mesopotamia and the Mayans. For science the major theme is biology. I’ve been working on the human body so far. My seven year old boy had so much fun testing out a video on the excretory system with me today. He couldn’t wait to tell his brothers it was about peeing. I need an eyeball rolling emoticon here

My oldest son taught me how to make a video of my screen. I tried to make a video about my online curriculum (my kids’ school assignments). It’s not that great, but here it is.

My daughter, just today, had 10 pieces of artwork in her first art exhibition. It was an exhibition of local artisans. There were weavers, metal workers, embroiderers, even dancers.

Everyone has something they are doing. Two boys are working on handwriting a little each day. My daughter is working on her Arabic and I’m having her go through math assessments to see if there is anything she needs practice on. She’s been using only Kahn Academy. I’ve been making the math assessments, one each day, using my new JavaScript skills. I’m still adding to it.

My oldest son and I are still studying JavaScript using Code Academy.  I’m having him do math just two days a week to keep it from slipping away over our two month break.

Other than that they are doing the usual:

working on computers

painting and drawing

playing around — He was one of the tailors in the living room version of The Emperor’s New Clothes.

The last three weeks we worked on a big project. They chose a research topic related to our school year theme and wrote a report, did an experiment and created a 3D project based on it.

I made them present their projects and I videoed them with my laptop, awkward, but the best we have for the job. It was excruciating for them to present, but they did it. I had a science fair page on my curriculum, so I added history fair to it and put their videos there. If  you use the curriculum, send in your kids work, and I’ll post it! Living in a city with no other homeschoolers, we obviously don’t get to have coop and science fairs and such, so this is our best effort. (My son did his 3D project on the computer; he built a 3D model on the computer, so you can’t see it.)

It may not be the best work in the world, but I’m proud of them. Their work is their own and they did their reports by following the instructions in the curriculum from researching to outlining to writing and revising.  Panama Canal  Computers