Guest Posting & A Giveaway!

I love to read.  I think books are such wonderful pathways to adventure and learning that we spend a lot of time reading here - for fun and for school.  Usually those two purposes become pretty blurred, because school can be really fun.

One of the ways that we play around with books is to hold monthly book club events.  I say "event" because this is no round-robin discussion.  We don't sip tea and nibble on cucumber sandwiches while secretly wishing that it were over already.

Instead, we do what the characters in our stories do - and one of our favorite characters of all time is Lily Lapp.

Why is she so special?  I'm guest-posting today over on Suzanne Woods Fisher's blog about that.  She's the author behind The Adventures of Lily Lapp series.  Hop on over here and find how to start your own - or kick the adventure up a few notches - in your kids' book club.

I'm also writing book club guides to accompany our favorite stories.  The first is now available in my TpT store.  These packets include everything that you need to host a great book club event with your kids.  You can find out more here.

Want to win one of your own?  Use the widget below and enter to win your own "Response Activities for A Surprise for Lily."  
 

Entry-Form

"A Surprise for Lily" Response Activities Are Here!

I love sharing fun and educational ideas with you.  

I love great books even more.


That's why Suzanne Woods Fisher's Adventures of Lily Lapp series is so wonderful for kids:  it's a high-quality story with wise characters, fun adventures, and brimming over with learning opportunities that are fun for everyone.



I realize that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for digging into a book and finding all the great things that you can do with it, so I've done it for you!  New in my TpT store tonight are sixteen pages of science, cooking, sewing, history, discussion, art, and mission activities that are all pulled from A Surprise for Lily. Everything that you need to host a kids' book club, literature group, unit study, or family read aloud time is here.  

By digging into the story literally and trying your hand at Lily's activities, your child will be able to relate to Lily much better.  Your child will be able to understand Lily's choices and discuss her trials and triumphs with you.  S/he'll be able to compare his/her life with Lily's from a knowledgeable perspective - and you might just discover some new talents at the same time.

So hop on over to my TpT store and check out Responses to "A Surprise for Lily" for yourself!

Ice Cream & Dinosaurs & Chinese ... Oh, My! Our Home School Curriculum

When you teach in a public school setting, you teach what you're told to teach.  You teach to the objectives in the curriculum, and maybe, if you're lucky, you'll have enough wiggle room and time to be really creative with how you teach those things.

In our state, the requirements for homeschoolers are very open-ended.  There are really no requirements about what we teach, only about the records that we keep, which is both a blessing and a curse.  It's hard, at first, to figure out what to teach; but once you get started, you'll wonder how you will ever stop.

That's what has happened to us.

As a certified teacher, I panicked at first when I didn't have a curriculum.  Trying to figure out how to set thirteen years' worth of goals at once sounded impossibly hard ... until I remembered wisdom from the Old Testament:  Do the next thing.

I sat down one night to figure out what our 'next thing' was, and it's evolved into this.

We want our children to be great readers and thinkers and problem solvers.  We want them to know how to learn, how to look at problems critically, and how to work together.  We think they should be kind, caring, and responsible adults who are able to lead and support their families.

Translation:  They should be able to read well, answer questions, figure out stuff, know where to go to find more answers, handle basic math, hold down a job, etc.

There.  That's not so hard.

So, since we like to get totally immersed in our education, we study things for several weeks at a time, usually, so that we can get at them from all angles.  We want to read about them, build them, replicate them, play in them, eat them, grow them, and whatever else we might be able to do with our topic of study.

So for this upcoming year, after talking to the kids, examining the opportunities presented by our local library and homeschool group, we've chosen to study these things during this upcoming school year:

• Ice Cream
• Camping
• Ancient Egypt
• China
• France
• Zoology - in particular dinosaurs, tigers, and elephants
• The first Thanksgiving in America
• Art - drawing and color

For a few of these units, we'll be using prepackaged materials to supplement what I create. Voice of the Martyrs has a great Egyptian lapbook, and so we'll incorporate that into our studies.  We can't learn about ice cream without reading Ebenezer Bleezer's Ice Cream Store, and we'll learn how to make arrays with our sundae toppings.  We're starting an art co-op and will be using See the Light's Art Class DVDs.

Mostly, we'll read lots of good books, examine art and cuisine and music and folklore of any given location, study maps, and write all about our findings.  We love the Imagination Station books, the Magic Tree House and Magic School Bus chapter books, as well as lots of other random books we find all over.

So that's our plan for the upcoming school year.  If we finish all that, I'm sure there will be new things just waiting to tackle.  One kid currently wants to learn basket-weaving and the other wants to study Chinese ....

What will you be learning about next school year?

Back to (Home) School 2013

It's that time again!  The stores are beginning to hold their back-to-school shopping sales, and people everywhere are discussing plans for the upcoming school year.

I'm knee deep in plans, books, and curriculum for our next semester.  As I do, these are the things that I'm thinking about ...

My Big Helper is now eight and entering the third grade.  She's a great reader but isn't as fond of writing as she used to be, although she continues to be rather good at it.  She loves to learn about how people live and is growing an interest in science, but mostly she likes to do 'projects.'  She wants to build, cook, sew, or create what happens in her studies.  She works rather slowly because she thinks about all aspects of what she's doing and prefers to do everything cooperatively.  While she works independently, she tends to carry that work around the house so that she can be beside me, wherever I might be - whether I'm working with her brother or completing some housework.

Art is another new interest, and it, too, has been growing rapidly.  She recently started her own art business and is excited about the possibilities this may create.

She's very mission-minded.  This is something that I have to be intentional about encouraging, as this gift of hers is not one of mine - but it's very important to her, and so I'm learning along with her.

Her book club, although currently on summer break, will resume in August.  My Big Helper is excited about getting together with her friends once again to interact with literature.  She is a wonderful reader, and the possibilities for her are now limited only by our imaginations, so I'm trying to dream big.

Which brings us to my Little Man, who is no longer so little.  He's six and entering first grade, and for the past few months has been determined to have his own book club and monthly gathering with friends.  When he asked me several months ago for this, I told him we'd start one when he could read chapter books - and so he promptly worked very hard on his reading.  He now picks up and reads short chapter books in a single setting, so his very own book club will begin in September.

Of course, this means that My Little Man now loves to read.  If he doesn't have a book in his hand, then there was one there just a few minutes ago - and you're sure to find several under his pillow, tucked into his bed rails, and beside his seat in the car.  If he's quiet and somewhere in the house, chances are good that he got distracted when he walked past a book, and I'll usually find him on his tummy, head in his hands, eagerly devouring the pages.  He'll read anything - fiction chapter books, preferably mysteries or adventure stories, or any kind of non-fiction research book, from dictionaries to field guides to books about animals and machines.

Math comes easily to him, so I'd like to move him through the rest of his first-grade math goals and into harder ones quickly so that he has more options when he's older.  He's very mechanical, as well, and I love to see how he's able to explain movement and basic physics.  

Science is his favorite subject, so we read lots of science books and spend time just discussing how and why things work.  This thrills him to no end.

Writing is not exactly his favorite thing, but he does well at it - and he likes to write in his journal.  He's not enamored with lowercase letters, so although he knows well what they look like, convincing him to use them is a bit of a struggle.  If this is any indication, he's going to be a brilliant doctor someday.  ;-)

Me?  I love to read, and besides that, history is my favorite subject.  I like to learn about the people - how did they live, what was important to them, what did their everyday lives look like.

Why do my likes matter?  If I'm teaching in way that's totally foreign or uncomfortable to me, then our lessons become more stilted.  We have worked out compromises on our differences.  For example, I'm learning to be more scientific and mission minded because those things are important to the kids.  They have learned to get their hands dirty, to read recipes, and ask questions because those things are important to me.  This balance keeps all of us happy and enables us to learn together as a group, with each kid working to the best of his/her ability and taking assignments as far as they are able to go.

This post is linked up with A Classic Housewife's Back to (Home) School's 2013 carnival.  Come back next week to find out more about the curriculum we're planning to utilize in the 2013-14 school year.