Meant To Teach

The school year is off to a great start and I thought I would blog about it. This year for my 7th grader, we are doing Character Quality Language Arts by Donna Reish . This isn't the first time we have used pieces of her curriculum. We did  samples  of the program last year. This year we are using it as our full language arts curriculum for my middle schooler. My 10th grader is also using Meaningful Composition , also by Donna Reish, this year as well. I definitely recommend it and I will say, I found this curriculum while looking into Institute for Excellence in Writing. To be truthful, I didn't want to pay that much for a writing curriculum I didn't know would work. So I came across Meaningful Composition as a MUCH less expensive option and with the Checklist Challenge, it seems to be very similar to IEW. Meaningful Composition vs. CQLA: Character Quality Language Arts incorporates everything into one. It covers spelling, grammar, vocabulary, writing, dictation, and i...

As we were getting settled in the car from a normal Friday afternoon park day (months ago by the way), my oldest daughter (13 at the time) asked, "Mom, can I tell you something?" She then preceded to tell me, "I was playing and then coming up to find you and I overheard someone's mom talking about me with other moms." I then preceded to ask her what she heard, who she heard it from, and so forth. At that point, I just told her that I'm sorry she heard that, we don't want to be like that, and to let it roll off her back and move on.  When kids are doing it to kids, or even when moms are doing it with moms...it can be easy to dismiss it and move on. However, when moms are talking about children...sometimes it is easier said than done for sure, especially on my end as a mother. I bring this topic up, because today I had a an old friend message me and tell me about a very similar situation. However, I think it is a bit worse. I don't need to go into...

My oldest daughter has been taking Biology, but really with an Anatomy emphasis, because she is thinking of going into the medical field. As we have finished learning about the skeletal system, integumentary system,  and muscular system, we ended a unit today dissecting a chicken leg. My youngest was intrigued too, so of course, she did it with us.  Many animal systems have skeletal systems similar to ours.  Our leg is very much like that of a chicken including the femur (thigh bone), knee (hinge joint), fibula and tibia  (smaller bones of the shin), cartilage, and ligaments that are all part of  our skeletal system. We pointed out all of these things in our chicken leg.  We even went a step further and broke the largest bone to observe the bone marrow. We talked about people actually can give bone marrow for people with life threatening diseases like leukemia.   I've never been a fan of dissecting anything, it always grossed me out in ...

This is something I've definitely needed this year and I know I will need all four years. So I created an excel spreadsheet, as well as a PDF (I have an actual paper version in my high schooler's binder) to help make sure we are on track through these four years. I thought I would share what I use to help with planning out our goals for highschool. You can print one or download one yourself from my FREE PRINTABLES link.

So this week, my youngest daughter has learned about the water cycle. We have used In The Hands of a Child's Water Cycle Unit . In the unit, we have to do an evaporation experiment. We have actually done one of these before years ago when learning about clouds. You can see my post here when we did it in 2012. This time there was a BIG difference! I'm about to tell you why. It was more than just a learning experiment of evaporation, it actually ended up being a learning experiment about WHERE water is evaporating from for my youngest and oldest daughter, too. In 2012, we lived in Tennessee. When we did our water evaporation experiment in Tennessee, it took days or maybe even weeks for all the water to disappear. It definitely took a couple of days or a few for the water to even move down the cup. Now in 2017, we live in Arizona...that's right - the DESERT! Anyone see where I am going with this? With this experiment, we filled the water to the line we marked on the cup...

We've really loved our Layers of Learning curriculum . The past two weeks we have done some map work on the Byzantine Empire as well as learned about Turkey and it's capital Istanbul (formerly known as Constantinople), read Anna of Byzantium, and definitely had some fun doing some hands on art. We learned about holy halos in art, which are just circles surrounding the subject in paintings. Often this was painted on priests or other religious leaders. We did some chalk art drawings of our own. We also learned about mosaic art. The girls had a lot of fun breaking up some old plates and doing this project. 

This is the 2nd Presidential Election we have been homeschooling. You can see some of the things we did in 2012 here  when my kids were a lot younger. This year, we've really covered the election a lot deeper with watching debates, touching on the real issues, and learning about the electoral college. I'm loving how my oldest seems to really be forming her own opinions about this election and our government. She is taking her half a credit of government this year. For this election, we've played Election Bingo with vocabulary. They loved this. We played a lot. You can find these for FREE at  Growing Book by Book . They enjoyed looking at some Trump vs. Hillary campaign ads. They actually went on to the candidates' websites to see their platform on issues.  I also gave my girls an assignment of doing a Pepsi vs. Coke persuasive paper. The girls were to decide which one was better and tell me why I should think that. In writing their persuasive pa...