Rocks and Roars
May begins our month of freestyle homeschooling. Our first weeks theme is “rock and roar” because we are studying geology and zoology.
You know you think I'm hilarious.
We started the week with our “nature immersion”. I'm using this book we got when visiting Sequoia National Park. It has lots of different activities so one day each week we're doing a nature day.
For our nature immersion we went to island park near our house. The kids observed their surroundings, made drawings, stopped the dog from attacking geese, and then we went home. It was fun.
For Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday we stumbled quite a bit through school. Between Emma's schedule, all of Calvin's therapy appointments (3 this week, each an hour and a half), my work schedule, and regular homemaking stuff, it was hard to accomplish all I had set out to do. We did study math each day, had some reading time, and music time each day.
Tuesday we watched a lot of documentaries about geology and zoology.
This video was great about explaining careers in zoology.
This video explaining fracking was really interesting. We watched it after reading a Magic School Bus book about the inside of the Earth.
We finished our day with our math and our learning time.
We also watched some documentaries about the History of Indiana. We have been learning more about the history of our state. This one is about the geography. This was a good general overview of Indiana. In this video we learned about the Battle for Indiana.
Wednesday was an independent learning day. I collected all of the random workbooks, either about a specific topic or general learning types, set them in a pile on the living room floor and let them work through however many they wanted. I think they actually had a lot of fun with this. We got to finally use these books I’m amassed over the years thinking that someday we would use them and they got some good review about different subjects.
Thursday we examined rocks to identify them, looked into caves more, and examined animals. We also started a creative writing story about animals. I simply left it up to the kids to start a creative writing story. If they didn’t have any idea in their head to write about I gave them a prompt on the chalkboard, “write a fun story about an animal that has escaped from the circus.”
After the kids identified the rocks using the internet, ebooks, encyclopedias, rock guides, and whatever else we could find I gave them the correct answers of what the rocks are to see how many they got right.
Friday we were planning on going to the zoo but it was raining😫. I'm fine with walking through a little rain but this was no little rain. So instead we hunkered down at home in the afternoon. We popped popcorn and watched a wonderful documentary about Jane Goodall to cover our zoology subject. While it wasn’t what we had planned we made the best of it and I think we all had a nice time.
And of course we had our new friend with us this week. Beatrix is enjoying our family and is coming around to not be so nervous. It was fun to have her learning with us.
Well, that was our week! It didn’t contain much excitement but we got school done, were able to relax quite a bit, and we all had a good time together.
One week of our extra schooling down, three to go!
