Gearing Up

I love this time of year! I love the Fall even more, with the crisp air and the start of the new year, but the plans that start percolating in August are almost as exciting. Last week we went shopping for Sarah's first full-size backpack, a new lunchbox, and her first looseleaf notebook, and I think I was even happier about it than she was!

This year Sarah and I have put together a set of themes that we started working with in June (because our Spring was so busy that we decided to take 6 weeks off from playing school in April and May), and which we're planning to work with through the end of the Fall semester. If they work for us we'll continue using them into the Spring, or we may shift to using something else.

Social Studies:
Mosaic Intro to World History part I (starts with the Big Bang)
(this uses Story of the World and the Usborne Encyclopedia of World History, and also does timeline work, map work, and brings in myths and folktales from different traditions)

Math:
Living Math
Good Time Math Event Book by Marilyn Burns
Oak Meadow Fifth Grade
Khan Academy
Logic and Critical Thinking (can't find the name of the book at the moment)
(can you tell how much she loves math?)

Science:
Intellego Weather Unit
Chemistry Experiments
Nature Study
Physic Experiments and Engineering

Spanish:
Coffee Break Espanol
Conversation with friends
Spanish story books

Poetry and Storytelling:
Memorizing a variety of poems together. Familiarizing ourselves with a variety of stories so that we can tell them in our own words.

We're also continuing with Life Skills (cooking, shopping, maps, gardening, drawing, sewing, crafts, building stuff, planning adventures, building confidence with animals and in social situations), and with our miscellaneous projects and topics (NYC, family history, Hudson River, Food Detectives, Family Zine, Family No Free Lunch). She'll also be taking the Active Citizenship and Music classes I'm facilitating, and doing Country Day once a month.

My Super Secret Goals for her, this year, are:
* Improved writing skills (spelling, handwriting, composition, vocabulary, research, analyzing what she reads and forming and expressing her own opinion, introducing the ideas of: metaphor, simile, analogy)
* Improved math skills (more math facts at her finger tips, also more abstract skills, more comfort with the use of math in every day life)
* Increased confidence with social situations and physical skills (soccer, baseball, etc.)
* Expand our narration styles to include scrapbooking, bookmaking, songwriting, dioramas, magazines/newspapers


I can't wait to get started! (We've been doing a lot of this already, this summer, but we're gearing up for Sarah's week of Grandma and Grandpa Summer Camp right now, and visiting with lots of friends who are getting ready to go back to school, so we're taking more days off than we're playing school. We'll jump back in when Sarah gets back from her visit to my parents'.)