Wednesday, March 25, 2009

They came!!

My Core Knowledge books have arrived! I am in love with flipping the pages and thinking, "I can do this". I am so EXCITED!
I have some thoughts processing through my mind on how I want it all to play out. However I always over plan and begin to feel defeated. So I have opted to put some serious thought and trial and error into play.
This is what I have been waiting for. Some direction to follow to get us leaping forward and reaching our potential. I know right off that I want to concentrate on Math and Writing. However the Core Knowledge books are filled with all subjects and have such great stories, ideas and projects.
With Math I would like to just work on Math facts and repetition. There are great ideas for memorization and games for repetition found in the Core Knowledge books as well as on the website. Writing, I would like to start a writers workshop to go with each of our unit studies. You can find the writing workshop online the Core Knowledge website by clicking here, Writing Workshop. We will also fit reading into our unit study with a monthly reading expedition and a treasure at the end. I would also like to do a Social Studies unit but I know that will be pushing it. Maybe this summer! For now I will just read some of the stories out of the Core Knowledge book at bedtime.
Getting the books in the mail gave me the push I needed to move forward and continue on with our afterschooling studies.

Monday, March 23, 2009

A week of Harry Potter

Spring break was a great afterschooling week. I love having all of that time to fill I can't wait until summer break.
We spent our Spring break having fun with a Harry Potter unit study. This unit study I did not purchase. I collected ideas from the Internet to go with each day of Spring break. Most of them were birthday party ideas as I wanted the week to be fun. I also picked some ideas up off of Harry Potter lesson plan ideas. Of course as always I over planned and had to omit some of the activities. I have found that this is something with afterschooling that you have to accept. You just don't always have the time to teach and play as much as you would like to.

Here is our Harry Potter week.......
Illustrated and made up our own broomstick game.
Matthew taught us how to play Chess and then we practiced our new skills.
Of course we watched as many Harry Potters that we could fit in.
We studied characters and their different character traits.
Made potions. Some for eating and some NOT for eating.
We went on a family hike to pick our wand or should I say for a wand to pick us.
Once we found our wand we practiced some spells.
We also had journals that we wrote in with writing starters... example: A new professor is coming to Hogwarts what is his name and what will he be teaching?
We also studied settings, themes, plots, conclusions, and climaxes in the Harry Potter books.

It was a great week and the conclusion to our Creative Writing unit study.
I can't leave without adding this little Harry Potter conclusion. The week after Spring break the kids school had a book fair and story book character contest. Matthew dressed up like Harry Potter and played the part. He won first place and $75.00 worth of books to add to our family library. Yeah Harry, I mean Matthew!