The past month of homeschool has been fun. The biggest highlight was a trip to Legoland with our homeschool group.

In our My Father’s World curriculum, we are continuing to make our way through the states in the order that they joined the union. While learning about Alabama, we read about the discoveries made by George Washington carver. In honor of his inventions with sweet potatoes, we made sweet potato pie. A huge hit in our house! A friend of ours helped us with red beans and rice when we learned about Louisiana, since she had lived there for a while. I thoroughly enjoyed it but it was a little spicy for the kids. I didn’t mind-more for me!

One thing I love most about MFW is the emphasis on literature. Reading “living books” really makes learning come alive. As we’ve gone through the Southern states, the stories we’ve read about slavery and segregation have been eye-opening. My only wish is that our library had more of the literature our curriculum suggests that we read.

As we make our way through American History, we are getting closer to the time in history when the Civil War occurred. Our curriculum doesn’t focus on the war too much so we are doing our own mini-unit on the Civil War. I found a number of books to read and a DIG! & DISCOVER: Civil War kit. Since we enjoyed our in-depth study of the Revolutionary War using History Pockets, I decided to do History Pockets again with the History Pockets: The American Civil War.

In science, the past couple of weeks have been focused on the human body. We had done a unit on the body a few years ago. I dug out our The Magic School Bus: A Journey into the Human Body
science kit, human body model and other items we’ve used in the past to use during this unit. We also have this great board game called the Scabs and Guts Board Game. It’s a fun way to learn about the body.

We finished our read-a-loud of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “On the Banks of Plum Creek” over a month ago. Since then we’ve been reading her other books and loving every minute of it.

I’m exploring the curriculum choices for next year already. I plan on doing a science unit over the summer to keep little minds busy. It seems early to be planning for the summer but I know it will be here before I know it.

We also went on a field trip to a local organic farm. The kids learned how the fruits and vegetables are grown and harvested. They got to pick strawberries and take home their own strawberry plant.

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It’s been a while since I wrote an update on our progress in homeschool. We took most of December off. I’m still debating whether that was a good plan or not.

We did some work during the month of December, mostly trying to keep up with math, spelling and reading. But our normal school day routine was set aside because of traveling and holidays. He did lots of MadLibs, played geography and math games on my phone and read tons of books so there was definitely learning going on.

While traveling, we went to the Atlanta History Center. One of our favorite exhibits was touring a farm from the 1800′s. Since we’ve been reading books from the Little House series in school, we were able to see many things we were reading about. We saw a spinning wheel, loom, learned how the children celebrated Christmas, saw a slaves cabin, and the kitchen. It was a great field trip. Other field trips included an aquarium, historical railroad museum, and two children’s discovery museums. One museum had instructors that conducted science experiments with the kids that they thoroughly enjoyed.

Speaking of the Little House books, my son has really enjoyed these stories. I found a few Christmas episodes of Little House on the Prairie on tv and we enjoyed watching what we had been reading. I also own the readers that they used in school during that era and showed them to Ethan.

A couple of new things we started: practicing reading out loud using audacity. It helps my kids see the inflections and pauses they make while reading. Ethan also started using STORY STARTERS GRADES 1-3 to practice creative writing. So far, he loves it!

In our history lessons with My Father’s World, we’ve been learning about the pioneers who moved west. The lives of the children, the hardships the families endured and the hard work everyone contributed are important lessons for my kids to learn. We did some reading about the Lewis and Clark expedition and completed one of our maps from Scholastic 978-0-439-24114-4 Interactive 3-D Maps - American History. My son also received a U.S. geography board game for Christmas that we’ve been playing (Postcards From America Board Game).

We’ve taken a little detour from our science lessons because Ethan has to complete a large science project for his enrichment class. He may do the project on mealworms so we’ve done some research on their life-cycle.

Mostly though, my kids have been struggling to get back into our routine. They are distracting each other and having trouble concentrating. We are taking a lot of breaks and trying to make things fun with educational games. Hopefully they’ll get back into the swing of things before too long.

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