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.

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!

Games with Books

I wanted to make a quick post about a book I found at my library called Games with Books by Peggy Kaye. The book includes activities for 28 popular children's books. Books include such titles as Chrysanthemum, Blueberries for Sal, The Carrot Seed, Winnie the Pooh, Charlotte's Web, Beezus and Ramona and The Borrowers. The ages go from preschool to third grade. I think many of the activities can be adapted up or down if you want to do them with a group. The activites range from something simple like making blueberry ice pops or a dot game to silly sentences, creating graphs and crafting a Borrowers home. The ideas can be adapted for other books as well.

Peggy Kaye also has other titles such as Games for Math and Games for Learning.

Ocean Unit

A17's Ocean unit this spring ended up so large that instead of using a file folder lapbook, we put everything into a Bare Book. Bare Books can be purchased in a variety of sizes and are great for big projects or something that is ongoing like our Flat Stanley project. This ocean book contains resources from Homeschoolshare, project packs Under the Sea and Clownfish Adventure from Hands of a Child, activities from Evan Moor, Enchanted Learning and other online sites. These first pages also include booklets listing the books we read, for example DK Eye Wonder Ocean.

At the end of the book is a separate book containing all the coloring pages of various ocean animals. Most of these were taken from the Color and Learn series book entitled Ocean Life.


A17 chose to focus his report on what he called a "shamu" whale or orca. On the left page is a fact sheet containing things he wanted to remember from the books we read. On the right are photo cards and one fact of different types of whales. Last is a whale pop up book featured in a previous post

A17 chose which ocean animals to read about including dolphins, sea turtles, jellyfish, star fish and sea dragons.

Underneath the minit books for dolphin pod and echolocation, A17 put Boardmaker pictures for the definitions. For mammals in the ocean he used dolphin and whale.

This page uses Boardmaker pictures to describe why ocean are important and has some glitter fish.To go along with the Clownfish Adventure lapbook, we watched the Nemo movie and read a book called Just Keep Swimming. These pages include minit books about clownfish and manta rays, and information on characters on the Nemo movie including the Tank Gang and Bruce the great white shark!

We made several more pop up books based on the whale pattern. This one is called My Book About Dory.We included photos of some of the art projects that A17 enjoyed. You can find these posts here.

The last couple of pages are pocket pages that contain several books on ocean animals we found on Enchanted Learning and in our Evan Moor books.

Pirate Lapbook

For a pirates lapbook we read a Magic Tree House chapter book , Pirates Past Noon by Mary Pope Osborne. Many of the Magic Tree House books have research guides which go along with them--in this case we read Pirates. These guides are packed with lots of neat info and drawings and A17 really enjoys them. Another great book was DK Eye Wonder: Pirate.

The lapbook components came from several sources including Homeschoolshare and Hands of a Child. I purchased the lapbook Ahoy Matey! from HOAC. The Magic Tree House items were found on the Random House website which has teacher guides for some of their books.

The left side of the lapbook contained a minit book on some key vocab from Pirates Past Noon, a list of the books we read, a tabbed minit book on pirates, a minit book on parrots and minit book of A17's favorite pirate jokes.

The right side has an eye spy minit book, a Magic Tree House Passport, a book on words with the letter P , and minit books on island and compass. The MTH Passport includes 4 pages which are used to summarize the book. For compass you might want to try an experiment making your own with a cork, needle and a pan of water. There are several variations of this online.

Pirate Crafts

A17 finished a fun unit on Pirates. We decided on a pirate unit after he had so much fun doing a pirate skit at AAC camp last summer. Aarrgh!! For this craft we found a wooden box ( JoAnn's) and painted it black. Then he glued on wooden decorations also found at the craft store. Inside are gold coins cut from craft foam. We also used the foam coins to play a pirate board game.

The second craft is a foam kit from Michaels. This was a bit trickier due to all the glue and needed to be completed in stages. The sails didn't go on exactly right, so we improvised!

For the map we started with off white paper and printed out a map. We crumpled up the paper then smoothed it back out. To give it an old look we used a wet tea bag and "painted" all over the paper. For a quick dry, I used my hair dryer.

Work Job Board

Although we have been doing the workbox system lately, I wanted to share another type of visual schedule that has been a big help to A17. We have used the work job board at home and at therapies for years. For us, the workbox system is an extension of our work job board. I made the board above from an inexpensive dry erase board I found at Walmart.

The child picks a preferred activity--for A17 it could be computer, music, or any other fun activity. I have specific cards for these but keep a generic treat card for something unexpected. At therapy the "reward" is doing a favorite activity like gait trainer. Then I or the therapist chooses the work or "job" activities that must be completed before a favorite activity. When each job is completed, he takes off the card. This helps him know what is expected and gives him something to work toward. I also use this to break down a more difficult task into steps.