Tag Archives: homeschool

Homeschooling

Getting locked out, Archimedes, and Alexander the Great.

02/02/2015 Danielle Huddleston Leave a comment

Sometimes I get way behind in my blog posts about the subjects we are doing!

So if you follow our lesson plan at all then you know that this study was in November!

The morning started with a nice short walk at Ray Harral Nature Park.

I had planned to get some school done when we got home from the park.

Our day changed a bit when we got home and I realized I had lost the house key at the park…

After talking it over with my husband, we decided I would just hang out until he got home for the day.

We live in a different town than the park and I was not 100% sure where I had lost it.

Thankfully it was a nice day and we have a walmart close by.

I am also really thankful for smart phones!

We had been reading “Archimedes and the door of science” by Jeanne Bendick for the month of November and this was a great opportunity to get a lot of it read!

I had planned originally to study Anatomy for the month of November but this books was so full of experiments that we just did the book for science.

Getting stuck outside gave us the great opportunity to try out the lever we were learning about!

I tried to get the boys to think of ways to implement it on their own.

My oldest was not good at listening this day and so his lever did not work out.

They both reaped the rewards of my youngest simple machine!

Getting locked out does wonders for creativity!

We should do it more often!

Maybe with a bathroom closer though…

And the dog outside instead of locked in…

This is another book I got for the boys to read on Archimedes.

“The Life and Times of Archimedes”, I know I already blogged “You wouldn’t want to be a slave in Ancient Greece!” but it is such a good series!

These great minds were kind of useless when it came to mundane things, like eating, bathing, and dressing…

Their slaves did small things like keep them alive.

“You wouldn’t want to be in Alexander the Great’s Army!” is another great book in the series!

The boys are so excited when they see these in our library book basket!

I also had both boys read Mary Pope Osborne’s “Stallion by Starlight“, which is about Alexander and watched “Engineering an Empire: Alexander’s Greece”.

For geography we studied maps of the lands that Alexander conquered.

Have you ever locked yourself out?

Please say yes so I do not feel all alone.

Animals, Homeschooling

Bird Watching

01/30/2015 Danielle Huddleston Leave a comment

January and February are peak Eagle watching months in Oklahoma.

You can see more information that I gave last year, here.

We went to River City Park again to check out the nest.

The boys and I have actually gone three times this year already.

I would rather we learn about an animal while in it’s habitat instead of inside looking at a book or the computer.

We do bring ID books or books on that animal if I have them though.

The boys were able to get close enough to this one to actually get an idea of size.

When it took off we thought it would break the branch!

I used my zoom lens for all of these so we were actually still pretty far away.

After viewing the eagles for a while we went down to the river to check out other birds.

There were a lot of pelicans!

The boys and I also drove over to the Keystone Dam to see what birds were around there and found an American Kestrel!

I am not sure about this guy.

Maybe a Juvenile Eagle?

Anyone know?

We usually ID birds using the Merlin Bird ID app.

It is my favorite educational app!

You put in information like date, place, size of the bird, color of the bird, and what it was doing, and it gives you a list of possibilities!

It is great!

What is your favorite wildlife to view?

Do you have only certain times of the year you can view them?

If you go eagle watching, I do recommend you bring binoculars.

It helps the kids really see the birds!

Homeschooling

Our homeschool day ~2015

01/27/2015 Danielle Huddleston 8 Comments

After reading several “Homeschool a day in the life” post at Simple Homeschool, I decided to track how long we actually spent on subjects.

So for those of you who are curious what an at home day looks like around here, here you go.

6:15am try to pull myself out of bed so I can have quiet time. This is also when I try to get my blog post done and up.

*My husband usually goes to work before I get up so he is already gone for the day.

7am the boys get up (this is the time they are allowed up, I do not wake them up unless we have to go somewhere)

7:30am I made breakfast so I told them to come eat.

8-9am the boys play(play was traded for my youngest laying down and my oldest sitting on the couch, sometimes they just cannot seem to get along!)

9am 1^st Lesson of RightStart Math

9:46am 2^nd Math Lesson (we are trying to get through two math books this year so we double up when we can)

10:15am Handwriting Without Tears

10:23am First Language Lessons & Super Grammar

10:35am All About Spelling

10:45am Snack & Break

They usually opt for playing with legos during break time.

I try to do any prep work for history and science during their break time.

11:10am History

We were wrapping up the study we had been doing for the past 3 weeks so I just read to them a mini biography and we put the figures up on our timeline.

Sometimes history involves a lot of reading and can take up a huge chunk of our day.

Or we wait and watch a documentary on the computer while eating lunch.

11:20am Science

I wanted to get some more shots of our Hero’s fountain so we did it one more time before wrapping up our study of him.

Depending on the experiment, science can take up to an hour.

Especially since I often have no clue what I am doing at first…

11:30am Done with school!

We did really good this day and finished before lunch!

That is my goal every day but sometimes the boys have other ideas.

No Geography today.

End of a study so we did not have much to cover today.

Sometimes the end of a study means we are playing catch up though! It can go either way.

12:30pm Quiet time & Reading

They do their school reading usually at quiet time. Right now though my oldest is trying to get through The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

1:30pm boys are up, chores and free time.

We have one or two days a week that we do hiking or fieldtrips, on those days I really try to get anything I have to get done before we go.

I also have them read school books on the way to places and watch any educational dvds I have planned for them in the vehicle.

I hope this helps someone!

What does your school day look like?

Do you enjoy peeking into other peoples lives as much as I do?