Journey to Excellence

Delight-directed learning . I am sure you have heard that term more than once. It's an idea that I love, and try to adopt in our schooling whenever possible. We are ending our school year in a delight-directed fashion. Doing grammar at the window, watching the mama bird feed her babies. Dawson chose to study Knights for the month of May. I wasn't sure how to handle planning lessons for this unit, so I did the only thing I know how to do ... I checked out a ton of books from the library. While at a consignment shop a couple of weekends ago, I found a great paperback book called Knights by Julek Heller and Deirdre Headon. It is delightful , and it's Table of Contents gave me a guide to follow. I chose 10 topics for Dawson to work on, one for each day. This week his daily topics have been: Initiation, The Vigil and Dubbing; The Sword, The Helmet, The Armour and King Arthur. He read the pages in Knights , and pertinent pages from two other books I checked out fr...

What a GLORIOUS WEEK! It wasn't because everybody's attitudes were perfect at every moment. It wasn't because we got everything done that we had planned. It was because I saw some Connections being made. I felt like all we have worked toward this year came to fruition in this one week. MANY times this week, Brynne would be reading one book and making connections from what she has read and learned in other books. She drew things out of picture books that she had learned in studying The Secret Garden and things she had learned in non-fiction books about plants. I smiled more times than I can count this week. YES! On that note, there is SO MUCH READING going on in this house all the time! Brynne has read three shy of 100 BOOKS this year! Many days, she reads two to three books, both non-fiction and fiction, and a chapter of her current Puppy Place chapter book. She is connecting to the stories like I have always dreamed she would. She has also read at least three...

Well after a pretty quiet and sickly kind of week last week, we hit it hard this week! Brynne started the next phase of her The Secret Garden unit by studying plants. We did an overview of the parts of a plant, learned more deeply about seeds and roots, and then ended our week with a study of The Lorax in honor of Earth Day. The basis to our study is "Sue's Free Plant Unit Study" (under Science Freebies) by Funtastic Unit Studies . It is a free download and is excellent for Brynne's age group (probably age 5-9 or so). It was definitely my Favorite Resource this week. To learn the general parts of a plant, we relied on the book Parts of Plants by Wiley Blevins. It is simple, has great illustrations, and was something that Brynne could read in one short setting. Brynne made a flower with all it's parts using tissue paper for the flowers and seeds, a brown pipe cleaner for the stem, green construction paper for the leaves, and tan yarn for the roots. ...