Traveling and a Blogging Break

Just wanted to let you all know that we will be traveling the whole month of July. My internet access will be on and off and I don't think that I will have the time to update my blog. So, I'm going to take a blogging break. Hope you all have a great month of July and I look forward to catching up when I get back!

Summer Review: Science Lapbooks

We have been working on lapbooks for the past several day to review what we learned this year in Biology. We used the pictures from my program Biology for the Grammar Stage and the narrations that she wrote in her notebook from this year. Here's a closer look at the plant lapbook...

Here's a closer look at the parts of a flower book. We pasted the parts of a flower poem next to the booklet and then I had princess draw lines to the different parts mentioned in the poem. She knew each one without my help.

Here's a look at the types of seeds book, for this we just colored the pictures and labeled them.

Here's a look at the parts of a plant book. We pasted the parts of a plant poem above the flap book and them cut one of the pictures so that it would show the four different parts on different flaps.

Then we wrote her narrations from the student workbook under each flap, here's a look at that...

This was a really fun project and a great way to review. I was really surprised how much princess remembered. You can see more pictures from our other two lapbooks over at my yahoo group. Hopefully it inspires you to look at review time in a different way!

A Little Change...

I've finally figured out how to add buttons to my header on my blog! It's so much cleaner than having all those things down my sidebar. Hope you guys enjoy the changes! Now back to trying to figure out how to reschedule some of the book in Biology for the Grammar Stage because they went out of print and trying to put together Great Scientists of the Middle Ages.

Story of the World 2 Plans

I have already put my plans up over at my yahoo group, but I thought that I would post alittle something about them here. This year we decided to use Sonlight books to suplement Story of the World rather than going with Core 2. I know myself and I know that if I don't have a plan it will stress me out. So I set out to write a "Sonlight" style plan for Story of the World 2. What I ended up with was plans that include read-alouds, copywork, timeline figures, scheduled maps and some readers. I'm pleased with the finished product, now I just have to wait to use them, that's always the hard part!

Weekly Report-Last One of the Year

I have to say that I almost cried several time today, it's silly I know, but this year has been so much fun. I don't want it to end, but alas all good things must come to and end. Plus there's always next year! Anyways here's a look at our final week of the 2008-2009 school year...

Language Arts: Princess finished by reading the Titanic, which she enjoyed, but she was upset that the boat sank and mad at the people for not being prepared with enough lifeboats for everyone. One of my favorite movies is Titanic, so I was having flashbacks the entire book, LOL. We also did a week of Level 1 from Writing with Ease just to make sure the she would be ready for Level 2 next year. I think that she will do just fine and I'm really looking forward to starting this in the fall. Thank you to my dear friend who was kind enough to ship this book halfway around the world to me!

Math: We wrapped up multiplication by 4 and then we made a skip counting book. For princess skip counting has been the most effective way to memorize her multiplication facts. So we will use the book the practice the facts over the summer. Here's a look at some of the pages from the book...

History: We read about the fall of Rome and the last Roman Emperor. Then we put together our notebook and pulled down the timeline so we could make a booklet out of that. That's when I got a bit misty. We've had such a great year and it was neat to see all our memories wrapped up in a neat little notebooks. Here's what they looked like...

I just have to thank Susan Wise Bauer for writing Well-Trained Mind and Story of the World and Sonlight for having such great books for me to choose from! The two of you have made this year great! I'm hoping that next year will be the same, since we are continuing along the same path.

Hope you all had a great year to and I'm very excited to get started again next August!

Weekly Report

We are in the home stretch now, only two more weeks to go. Here's what last week looked like...

Language Arts: We tried something new this week. I split up the reading time into oral and silent. Princess has been reading to herself for a while now, but only when she chooses. I figured it was time to add it to our school day. So she read and I read, then we talk about what we just read. So far, so good, plus it's nice to get some reading done for a change. It should help me to complete the last book on my Education of Me list.

Math: We worked through the section on multiplication by 4. We also played a few games on the way!

Science: We continued to work through my new book, Great Scientist of the Ancients (which you can download from my yahoo group here). It's been alot of fun to learn about these scientists who were also philosphers and mathmeticians. I have to admit that I have learned alot as well!

History: This week we talked about the beginning of the end for the Roman Empire. We talked about what it meant to be so large and how the empire was split in two. We have only two spaces left on our timeline, I can't believe what a wonderful year this has been and how much princess has retained. Thanks SWB for writing Story of the World!

Others: We continued to read the Lamb's Tale's version of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. Princess is enjoying this one and so am I. We also have recently acquired a recorder, which I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing. It's quite an ear-piercing instrument when played at random, but hopefully with a bit of training I will begin to enjoy hearing her play instead of running for the Advil!

Hope you had a great week, thanks for reading about ours!