This school year I had planned to use Ellen McHenry’s Cells with my highly creative 10 year old visual-spatial learner. We had both really enjoyed her Excavating English book, but I can’t say our experience was similar for the cells book. My son was not connecting with the material. If…
At the end of last school year my 10 year old expressed continued interest in learning Japanese. Since Kindergarten he has been learning Mandarin. I didn’t want to add another language to his plate so I decided to let him have a go at Japanese and drop Mandarin for now.…
We are embarking on a study of the continent of Africa this year, focusing on Morocco, Ghana, Sudan, Tanzania, and South Africa. Our study basically consists of books, videos and activities. As a mission-focused family, missions are woven into the study using Window on the World, The Gospel According to…
As I started to prepare for this school year, I searched out available engineering resources for my 5th grader who loves creative science challenges. I found gold! These studies from Engineering is Elementary are free and most of them only require items you can easily find at a dollar store.…
We have now embarked on our 8th year of homeschooling. I take a wide and deep eclectic approach to education which works very well for my gifted learners. Our homeschool is globally-focused so we spend a chunk of time learning about the world, different cultures, and study some of…
We kicked off the first day of school today with a bit of fun. Our first day of school didn’t contain any formal work. Instead, we celebrated the beginning of a new school year. We are starting in July and plan to finish the school year next June with lots…
My 5th grader is a visual-spatial learner who shines when encountering creative problem solving. He has dreams of a future in a STEM field. As a result, I’ve incorporated lots of creative problem solving into his science studies and I’m using a strong math curriculum. Math: Art of Problem Solving Prealgebra, Zome…
This little plan is for my 5th grader. He has had exposure to French in the past, but I decided to wait until 5th grade for formal studies. My goals for his 5th grade year is to become proficient at pronouncing and reading French. I separated different skills into…
I put together this study for my 5th grader and 7th grader. It is a continuation of the documentary-focused Middle Ages study we did last school year. When my boys were younger we tended to do history studies with lots of hands-on activities. Now that they are getting older,…
In the process of teaching reading, I’ve stumbled around once my child completed a set of early phonics readers. I’ve tried several things and wasn’t happy with many phonics-based readers and other readers tended to rely mostly on sight words. So many phonics-based readers were incredibly boring and my…
