Journey to Excellence

I heard that our local zoo was going to have a FarmFest event this past weekend, so we decided to make a unit of it! I prepared a lapbook/notebook for Eli and Brynne to complete. The barn door opened to reveal their farm animals. Inside the notebook were several farm-related activities to complete. (I like how Brynne added a squigly piggy tail to her dot-to-dot.) We read lots of books from the library about farm life: jobs on the farm, animals, equipment and foods. Then today we enjoyed a field trip to FarmFest . The structure of the event catered to Eli's best way of learning and staying focused: They gave each of the kids a passport to use to get a stamp at each station they visited. When it was complete they got a prize. We watched wood carving, weaving and chain saw carving demonstrations. We watched Lexie the cow being milked. Eli and Brynne called me to dinner a snack with iron-worked triangles. We stopped for a bit to create a mosaic piece. ...

This is technically the last Weekly Wrap-up of this school year for Journey to Excellence . School is over for us. Yay!! I didn't plan on schooling over the summer. I thought we'd just have fun. But, then education started becoming a way of life, instead of an institution. That happens in homeschooling, I have found. So, looks like school will continue, somewhat, over the summer. The older two kids won't be required to do anything formal. Kyndal will be working at her job, sleeping late and hanging out with her friends. And other than reading, and working with his grandpa for a couple of weeks, Dawson won't be doing anything other than being a teenager. At Eli's IEP meeting it was clear that he needs some reading reinforcement this summer so that he is fully prepared for 2nd grade next year. And Brynne loves to read. So the two of them will be doing reading lessons every day (a reading lesson sheet, Saxon reader and silent reading). And Eli really wants to lear...

To celebrate Brynne completing the entire study of a letter-of-the-week curriculum, we will be doing a week-long lesson on The Zoo from A-Z . How will we do that? My amazing bloggy friend Stacey at BrainInTrainin (I get so many of my ideas from her) posted about a website for the Indianapolis Zoo. You can download the materials by going here . (It's the 3rd grade program.) I printed off the relevant materials for our study and put them in a binder for a full week of activities. Many of the items in the materials can be used, no matter where you live and no matter how old your kids are. We will do the following: sort and diagram the provided animals using a Venn Diagram to plot animals with claws, beaks and tails sort and chart habitats of the animals (grassland, forest, ocean, swamp rain forest, tundra and desert) choose three animals from our animal fact cards and discuss the different ways they all do the same type of activities, like eating, foraging, moving, protectin...