Baby it's cold outside!

It's beginning to feel a bit chilly in these parts!! Grace learned a new vocabulary word yesterday that is quite fitting- frost. It is from the book we are reading, Groucho's Eyebrows, a chilling tale of a white kitty who gets lost in snow and is found only because of his "funny looking" black eyebrows, which stand our against the whiteness.

I'm trying to create a lapbook for this unit- I found a Teacher's Activity Guide online, and many of the activities could be displayed in lapbook format. For some reason my creative juices just aren't flowing though.

Probably all the stress and impending doom. Ok, not doom- moving back to OC will be fine, it's just that I really do love Temecula. It will be nice to be near family, and surrounded by so many options for life-based learning- not to mention nearer Shawn's work.

On another topic- Grace has had a very slightly loose tooth for a bit now, and then this morning she told me another was loose- this one is on the bottom and her adult teeth are already growing in behind it. It is VERY loose, it may even come out today.

All About Me Lapbook

Earlier this week I was reading a message from one of my Yahoo Groups that led me to http://www.liveandlearnpress.com, a nice little website with "Learn N Folders" (yet another way of presenting graphical learning)... the sender of the message had just completed the All About Me "Learn N Folder" with her 5 year old son. Grace saw the photos and wanted to do one, so I printed off the pages (luckily it was one of their freebies) and we were finished 2 days later! She really enjoyed doing it, and I was surprised at how well it provided some great "in the moment" learning adventures.

Here it is (click on any picture to see it larger)...

The rest of the week we worked on our A Rainbow of My Own Unit Study from Homeschool Share. We decided to do a folder with this one, because it is a very short unit (meant for preschool really, although several of the "assignments" in the Activity Guide are geared for older kids). It isn't quite finished yet, just a little more artwork she wants to add, and I need a new glue stick to adhere the stuff we did.

We created a new fall board to display all the units we have studied this season so far...


And we played "hide the scarecrow"- one of us went out and planted the scarecrow she made, then took a picture of it. The other had to guess where it was by looking at the picture before they went outside to re-hide it. It was fun and made for some interesting pictures! Slideshow here... at Snapfish.

She also did her own personal lapbook- just for fun...

Loving Lapbooks

We finished our first unit study from (the wonderful, amazing) Homeschool Share site. "Comet's Nine Lives" was the story that it centered around and we did a lap book on cats. We didn't include other things from the unit (hurricanes, islands, etc) in the actual lapbook- Grace preferred it to be mostly about cats- but she did enjoy the other activities. Lapbook photos below...

All in all we did about 20 activities that related to the book, which we read at least 12 times- each time with something new discovered. We used the free version of Homeschool Tracker and I found it really easy to follow our progress. After a few hours of customizing it and setting up the subjects, activities, resources etc it was a simple matter of entering each activity as an assignment, as well as adding in "assignments" after the fact when we would follow a "rabbit trail".

It took us just under 3 weeks- but of course we had more interruptions than usual- I expect that normally we'll spend 2 weeks or so on a unit. According to the cool report I generated in HST to give my ES (we are still reserving judgment on our charter school experience) over 14 days we spent 4.25 hours in Creative Arts, 6 hours in PE, 3.33 hours on Language Arts, 1.5 on math, 5 on science, and 2.75 on social studies. Plus of course all the "in the moment" life skills type learning that doesn't get tracked as easily- although now that I am getting used to using HST I might start throwing in those unschooling, "teachable moments" as assignments, after the fact like I did with the Unit Study "rabbit trails".

The next Unit Study one is set to be "The Art Lesson" although yesterday at the park day where we met with our ES we got some of the supplies we ordered with our Educational Funds and one of the items is a Butterfly Nursery- so she wants to do a Butterfly unit. I need to read the instructions and see if we can even do it in fall! It may be better to save until Spring. I ordered The Art Lesson through Paperback Swap (Swap Your Paperback Books - PaperBackSwap.com and it is on it's way to me, along with 2 others (A Rainbow of my Own and Mama, Do You Love Me?) for future unit studies.

Today we met with our new "girls club" at the park near our house. This was the group of girls we got together to start our own Daisy Girl Scout Troop (which we decided was too much paperwork, legalism and cookie sales)! So we are each going to take a turn doing something simple and fun for the girls- today I organized a simple craft, game and snack (the Pampered Chef Apple/Peeler/Corer/ Slicer was a big hit!) around an Apple theme (since yesterday was Johnny Appleseed's birthday). It was lots of fun and Grace really enjoyed playing with her new friends. She decided as soon as we got home to fill in the inside of the Apple Book that she had decorated a cover for at the park. Apple theme photos, click here...

Our cat lapbook...

Comet's Nine Lives

We finished the Cat Lapbook! We did this in connection with our unit study on Comet's Nine Lives, and we are both very pleased with the result. I realized half way through that I needed to help her more than I expected. At first it felt like I was "doing her work for her" but then I noticed how much more interested she was when I was and I considered that I am showing her an example of how to lapbook in these first few units, not "keeping a record" of what she has done. It is something we will refer back to and read which reinforces and provides an "anchor" to all the many things we did with this delightful book.