Wednesday, July 29, 2009

HSS: Lots of new materials!

Homeschool Share recently completed it's annual Blast contest and has posted lots of new materials on the website. They have new units, lapbooks and things for workboxes under a new category called Workboxables. Some of the new items Ds and I are looking forward to using are the units and lapbooks for How to Make a Cherry Pie and See the USA and Christmas Around the World.

There are also new units and lapbooks on Ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt, a Spanish lapbook, lapbooks on bears and beavers, Goodnight Gorilla lapbook and a unit on the Laura Ingalls Wilder classic Farmer Boy in addition to many other fabulous parent created materials.



Saturday, July 4, 2009

Planning for Next Year

I am starting to plan for next year based on some choices A17 has made for science topics. Some of these topics include volcanos, polar bears, pumpkins, and birds.


We will start off the school year with a unit on the human body. I am gathering resources from several places including Little Otter's Science Curriculum. This is a wonderful human body study geared toward preschool--first grade and would work well for some special needs students. Our library has many of the books on the suggested reading list.

I will also be taking pieces from several HOAC lapbooks including Human Body and Germs.


We will doing some projects from this book.



In addition to science units, we will be continuing with Touchmath. I am considering supplmenting Touchmath with some living math books from the Mathstart series. I have read a lot about a Living Math approach on Kendra's and Heather's blogs.


Since A17 has been very interested in arts and crafts, I have been putting together a unit for him on art which I hope will have us exploring some different types of projects. We will be using this book :





plus some stories about artists and their work. One of these is the Katie series by James Mayhew.




We will also be checking out the Smart About Art series and Touch the Art which is a board book series with textures.



I like to have a general plan down on paper and then tweak things as we go along. If A17 is really into something I want to be able to spend more time with it or if interest is flagging I can switch gears.



If you are homeschooling or creating a meaningful day, have you made any plans? Comments and links are welcome!