Journey to Excellence

This was another great week! It seems our studies (and the beautiful weather) have been getting us out-and-about the last couple of weeks. This week we went on a field trip and a hike, and called it all "school". Dawson ~ 8th Grade Dawson and I began reading The Swiss Family Robinson and skipped ahead in our A World of Adventure Curriculum to the Age of Exploration . This was totally selfish on my part because I have never read The Swiss Family Robinson and since we are running out of time I was fearful we wouldn't get to it. In fact, we are only doing 17 days of the Age of Exploration, to read the book and do all of the lessons surrounding it, and then will be finishing our year going back to The Renaissance. Since this Age is mostly about just reading about adventure, I have Dawson doing LOTS of vocabulary words from the chapters. I like the "flashcard method", so have him writing the words on one side and the definitions on the other for easy self-qu...

Well, this one is late! We had such a beautiful weekend here this weekend that we spent it outdoors doing gardening and yard projects. I didn't have my usual day of sitting in my chair, catching up on DVR'd shows while planning lessons, inputting grades and posting my wrap-up. I am starting this week feeling behind! While Dawson is working on some vocabulary cards for our new read, Swiss Family Robinson , I thought I'd work on my wrap-up. Dawson ~ 8th Grade We finished up our unit on The Middle Ages last week, and that usually means watching some videos and doing some cooking. We watched King Arthur and Tristan and Isolde and Dawson cooked spaghetti with garlic and herbs and herb tomato crostini for our family for dinner on Thursday night. He took lots of tests to finish the unit, two language arts review tests and his Science test. I typically prepare a study guide for Dawson on his units and then a pretty difficult test. This science one was over plant scien...

The highlight of our week last week was definitely related to food ! On Tuesday night Dawson {finally} cooked us the Greek meal he had been planning. Oh. My. Gosh. It was delicious! This kid can cook! He made Greek salad, Feta stuffed chicken and Lemon custard cakes. And we had grapes and cheese for an appetizer. Dawson ~ 8th Grade We are finishing up our unit on Ancient Greece and the Human Body Systems for science. He spent a great deal of the week studying for a vocabulary test and for his upcoming tests on Ancient Greece and the body systems. We finished Classic Myths to Read Aloud by William F. Russell. It was an excellent study of the myths. Dawson took a vocabulary test over 61 words used throughout the book and made a 90%. That was a great grade! But I was more impressed when he came down Thursday afternoon with his book The Last Olympian from the Percy Jackson series and pointed out two of his vocabulary words that were in one sentence in the book. Isn't that...

I've mentioned that there is a possibility that Dawson will return to public school at some point in the future. Even if he doesn't, he may decide to obtain a higher education after high school. Because of that I think it's very important to prepare Dawson for mainstream education, including how to take tests. But how do you give a test over material that you do not read? Our A World of Adventure curriculum includes a lot of outside reading on topics out of books we check out of the library. Many days he spends 15-30 minutes in Social Studies and/or Science reading additional materials. Our curriculum also does not have worksheets or written tests. I have been creating them on my own with a couple of online resources. {More on that later.} Again, how do you give a test over material that you do not read? My solution? .... 5 Facts . Every time Dawson reads outside materials, I have him write five facts from that material and put it in his spiral. For instance, he has been ...