Family Book Club

Hosting a Family Book Club is by far one of the best things I ever did as a homeschooler to build community.  Family Book Club consisted of our family and three others.  The book club evloved to meet the needs of each family from the beginning.  It was to be all ages, a specific genre each month was the only direction we gave, the kids chose their books and prepared a project to go along with the their verbal book report.  We all met at one of the families homes once a month for potluck and then the kids would share what they had read.  During book club we all had the chance to visit and make connections with eachother.  Our book club lasted for about three years, it was a great time with other homeschooling families and a chance for the kids to get kudos from friends for work well done.

Snow Day?

This is the debate in our homeschooling family.  Should we take snow days?  Granted it doesn't snow much here but we homeschool.  I have tried to explain to the kids that schools are closed because of transportation and because we're homeschoolers we don't have to drive to school so we should still be doing school.  I'm sure you know how well this goes over.  So needless to say my kids are taking a snow day and I'm working on lessons . . . . . . Happy Snow Day?

Real Science 4 Kids: Chemistry Level II; Chapter 2

This week I struggled teaching this lesson.  The information in Part 2 is pretty intense and if you check out the recommend appendixes, it's even more so.   It is definitely workable and  ideas always come to mind to reorganize the information.  After figuring it out, I called a friend from my homeschool group that has a chemistry background to verify that what I thought I understood was correct.   After talking with him I realized that I needed to share the ideas of three types of covalent bonds so the kids understood that they existed and how they are formed.  From there we'll move onto Chapter 3 learning to write equations.  An advanced chemistry student may want more, if that's the case definitely check out the appendixes however you may need some additional texts to get the full picture.

Multiplication - Place Value Tip

My son is in 4th grade and working on double and triple digit multiplication. We use Math U See for our math curriculum. This idea comes from his video however we came across this a few years back from another source when my daughter was learning multiplication. We have found that using a sheet of lined notebook paper and turning it sideways makes beautiful columns for keeping units, tens, hundreds, etc. organized. We do have to rewrite the problems but place value is kept clear and he is able to get the right answers which of course adds to his overall math success.