Journey to Excellence

We have been reading Charlotte's Web , and doing a study on spiders (and pigs and farms). And we got a REAL education in spiders last week! As we were leaving the house to go to church, Dawson glanced over at our headwall at the top of our driveway and said, "Oh my gosh ... look at that Black Widow!" I told him I did not think it was a Black Widow .. surely not. What I do know is that it was a big black spider clinging to two HUGE egg sacks. Icky! It was not one of those pretty Orb spiders with a magnificent web. No, it was not Charlotte. While I was getting gas in town, Dawson looked up the Black Widow on his iPhone. Sure enough, it looked to be a Black Widow. We came home and researched the best way to kill it, without it killing us first. The prescribed solution involved wasp spray, a stick, and a shield. No, wait, it didn't call for a shield, but Dawson thought it would be a good idea. I thought it would be a good idea to stand 30 feet away and squeal lik...

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...