2021-2022 Curriculum

I can’t believe that it’s this time of year already! I feel like this past year, insane and limited as it was, flew by. I’ve had a hard time choosing curriculum for this coming year: I want it to be rigorous since my older two are in middle school, but I still want them to enjoy learning. Add to that the fact that I’m not sure what extracurriculars are going to be available to us because of the ever-changing nature of this pandemic, and I’m not sure how much at-home vs. on-the-go time to plan on. But I’ve done my best, and here’s what I’ve come up with:

2020-2021 Curriculum

I love the start of a new semester! The excitement of curriculum planning has always appealed to me. This year I’ve decided to steer my kids towards a bit more rigorous and independent work, both because they’re reaching middle school and are ready for more independence and challenge, and because we have no social life vying for our time. So without further ado, my curriculum choices for this year:

2019-2020 Curriculum

This year was a hairy one, since I was working valiantly to balance academics with extracurricular activities and social opportunities. Here’s our curriculum for 2019-2020:

2018-2019 Curriculum

It’s that time again: time to list another year worth of curriculum! Read on for our choices for another year of mid-level elementary schooling.

2017-2018 Curriculum

This is the first year I’ll have three kids fully in the work rotation, though Pookie did some light daily work for the last half of the previous year. Here are my curriculum choices for everyone:

Experiential Science: Genetics and Heredity

Every other year, my parents rent a large vacation home in some hidden corner of the country and the whole family converges for a week of togetherness.  As far as families go, we have a middle-sized one–ten adults and twelve kids all together–but 22 people in one house is still plenty.  For the most part, the kids’ ages overlap and they have a glorious time romping together while squeezing in a bit of sightseeing on the side.

Somehow, my mom and sister and I got to talking about genetic traits last fall.  This resulted in the kids running around and surveying each other about their eye color, earlobe type, and hand-folding preferences, which in turn led to the epiphany that we should do a full-scale family survey at the next family vacation.

Of course, any self-respecting homeschool parent would be horrified to bypass an educational opportunity, especially one that the kids are excited about.  So we spent some time leading up to our big trip delving into heredity.  In case you’re looking for kid-friendly ways to approach the subject, I thought I’d share a few cool resources.

Our kitchen wall currently displays the most exciting aspects of our study of heredity.

SeaWorld San Antonio Home School Day: A Review

Late last fall we attended a Home School Day at SeaWorld San Antonio.  I was a little nervous about doing so because I could find so few reviews online and they had reportedly just revamped their format for the Home School Day (providing educators as guides and correspondingly increasing the price), but we decided to give it a try–and we were so glad we did!  Since I’m just now taking the time to catch up my blog, I thought I’d share our experience in case someone else is considering signing up for the coming year but wants more info.

Experiential Science: Weather

My kids wanted to learn all about weather, so I cobbled together several resources to make a unit.  You may notice that we watch a lot of videos in this unit.  Not only are videos an engaging way of presenting some of the more abstract concepts related to weather (like air pressure and air currents), but my kids are thoroughly excited about watching videos related to anything at all lately, so any video I found was a win.  I tried to find a video or three (almost all short ones!) to go with each topic, but also a hands-on activity for every topic, as well.  Hopefully you’ll find plenty of fodder for exploring weather, whether you are a video-lover or not.

Much of my unit was based on this 3rd grade unit from the Williams College website, though I adapted the activities for home use.

We started our science unit by talking about water.  Since 71% of the earth is covered by water, it has a big impact on weather.  To emphasize just how much water there is on the earth, we used our big inflatable globe and tossed it from person to person, tallying how often the tip of our right thumb hit land and how often it was in water when we caught the globe.  Sure enough, we had seven “land” tallies and 18 “water” tallies.

Experiential Science: Flight, Part 2

This is the second installment of our lessons on flight.  You can read about our first portion (which covers the four forces of flight and kites) in this post.

Hot Air Balloons, Airships, and Parachutes

Next in the human flight story is the hot air balloon.  After reading Yasuda’s chapter on hot air balloons, airships, and parachutes, we tried creating our own hot air balloon.  We failed, but it was fun and exciting enough to be worth your effort, even if it doesn’t work.  Though Yasuda offered one option in her book, ‘Love objected to it because it relied on a hair dryer to work; he argued that it would confuse the matter by including blowing air in the process of causing the balloon to rise.  While modern balloonists may use fans to help initially fill their balloons, the blowing air is not the mechanism that causes the balloon to rise.

Experiential Science: Flight, Part 1

The kids unanimously agreed that they wanted one of their next unit studies to be about flying.  As I began typing up all of the activities we’ve been doing, I realized that my post was getting super long, so I’ve once again separated our study into parts.  This first part will encompass our study of the four forces of flight and kites.  Our projects with hot air balloons, gliders, airplanes, and more will be coming soon.

I thought it would make the most sense to talk about the history of flight in chronological order.  Thankfully, I stumbled on Explore Flight! by Anita Yasuda.  The book starts with flight in nature–the inspiration for humans who wanted to fly–and ends with rockets.  Included are “25 great projects”–though I had issue with a few, particularly the ornithopter project, which was really just a glider with some added feathers.

Of course, I can’t just use one book and leave well enough alone, so I did quite a bit of supplementing and elaborating by using additional materials.