Resources for a Unit Study on coal mining communities, including FREE Amazon and YouTube video list, website links, book lists, and templates for student projects and reports. Perfect for grades 4-8, but could easily be aged up or down to suit a general family unit study as well. via Walking in High Cotton
Continue Reading...Do you have a kiddo that loves comic books? Or a kiddo that hates chapter books? A reluctant or struggling reader–easily overwhelmed by page after page of text? I do. I have 2 actually. And I am SO GLAD we discovered a variety of clean, appropriate, quality graphic novels on the market today. Fiction, non-fiction, and even adaptations of classic literature that use Shakespeare’s original text! They’ve been a huge help in keeping our dyslexic and reluctant readers engaged in independent reading–when standard chapter books were failing in a flood … Continue Reading…
If you’ve been following us on Facebook, you’ve probably seen some of our Shark Week activities. We’re doing a summer unit study on Marine Biology (along with our unit on Archaeology) and Discovery Shark Week has been a great fit for some hands-on family fun learning! We’ve had some ocean-themed food, some shark games, and our big group project of building a paper mache shark! This is a very simple project with no special supplies needed. We had everything on hand already. I’ve shared it here in a lot of … Continue Reading…
Well, the school year is starting to wrap up. Now that our Spring Break road trip is behind us, I’m focused on pulling together some unit study materials for the summer. Our family topics this year are marine biology and archaeology, and this year we’re really focusing on professions in those fields. We want the kids to start seeing and understanding what following your passion really looks like, day-to-day. What jobs do people do if they love history or ocean animals? Archaeology started out as a bit of a stretch for … Continue Reading…
About 2 weeks before leaving for our road trip, the boys and I watched the premiere of the new Men Who Built America–Frontiersmen series. Episode 1 was about Daniel Boone leading the first group of permanent settlers through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky. The settlement was called Fort Boonesborough, and it played an interesting role in the Revolutionary War. Since we were getting ready to leave for our trip, and Kentucky was already on our route, we Googled “Fort Boonesborough.” Turns out there’s a state park (with camping!) at the … Continue Reading…
Our recent spring break road trip adventure was 10 days and 4,000 miles together. We had a great time and are already plotting our next trip! I say “plotting” and not “planning” because this was a very (very, very!) loosely “planned” trip and I’m sure the next one will be too. Our family likes to call our NOT-AT-ALL-PLANNING style of planning “being flexible.” {smile} Everyone keeps asking me how in the world I planned our awesome trip…well, in my mind, I didn’t. We laid out a very basic route with a few … Continue Reading…
One of the special projects I did when planning our spring break trip was making fun 50 States passports for the kiddos to get “stamped” as we traveled. It wasn’t that hard, and I’ve got a free printable for you if you’d like to try it yourself. I found a lot of ideas and a few awesome templates on Pinterest, but I didn’t want to mimic a real international passport too much. The Ladybug just got back from a mission trip and we spent a lot of time emphasizing (and re-emphasizing!) … Continue Reading…
We’re a little behind around here, but we wrapped up our summer unit study on pirates (our astronomy unit study is continuing because we’re just loving it too much to stop!) and I wanted to share some of the fun projects we did! One of our hands-on projects was to build a pirate ship that would really float from corks! Flexibility has become our family motto! With relaxed learning plans, there’s no need to feel behind or rushed. If it takes longer, that’s ok. You just keep fitting it in, … Continue Reading…
In the spring I mentioned that we would have two family unit studies this summer. One is our Astronomy unit study–which is continuing casually through the whole summer and has been very fun so far! (I’ll have an update on one of our projects soon.) The other topic I chose this year is Pirates. I had no idea they would overlap so much, but space pirates is totally a thing so it’s worked out great! The history of Pirates is an interesting topic because it can involve a lot of … Continue Reading…
We’ve continued with our slow, steady, and FUN family Astronomy study this month. So far we’ve already seen and documented several moon phases including a full moon and a new moon; visible Jupiter; visible Mercury, and learned to recognize the Big and Little Dipper. We’ve also watched several space and sci-fi movies as a family, including a special at-home family movie night presentation of Rogue One (which my kiddos hadn’t seen yet) and a splurge on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 in the theater. We’ve been keeping a list of … Continue Reading…
When outlining our simple family unit studies, I mentioned that I like to use a fiction read-aloud on the topic as the backbone of our unit. Then I laid out our summer-long Astronomy unit study for you and there were no fiction books! I struggled with finding fiction books in the space and sci-fi genre because it’s not one that I’m very familiar with, personally. It took a lot of searching, chatting with our librarian, and reading reviews on Amazon to find a list of books to consider that meet … Continue Reading…
Have you gotten your FREE Summer Unit Study Planner? I’ve been hard at work with mine, laying out plans for an Astronomy unit study and a Pirates/Maritime History unit study for the family this summer. I’ve put quite a bit of time into gathering resources and planning activities because I enjoy it. We don’t get much for family vacations and holidays around here with the farm to keep an eye on. So we have to make up our own, local, staycation-type fun for the summer. I’m going to share my resource … Continue Reading…
A book, a movie, and a field trip about the same topic equal an easy summer family unit study! Summer brain drain–ugh! For 3 months the kids run around from camp to craft to sleepover wanting fun and games and play time all day, every day because SCHOOL’S OUT so we don’t have to do any more of “that learning stuff.” Um…not around here! So what’s a busy, working mom to do besides frantically shuffle the kids from one STEM camp to another and continue to spend her nights tracking … Continue Reading…
We tend to think of John Deere as tractors and green hats and forget that John Deere was an actual person. A person who never built, or even saw, a real tractor in his life. Speedracer had to do a famous American project one year so the whole family got a big dose of John-Deere-the-real-person for a few weeks. It turns out there’s a lot of biographical information available about John Deere, but it can be hard to get your hands on because it’s buried under all the tractor books! … Continue Reading…
I’m out the door in the morning the same time the boys head to the end of the driveway to catch the school bus. When they get picked up, I head to work. So we’re all heading out the other day and the Cowboy comes racing back in, “Mom, where’s your phone?!” Between my laptop, purse, lunch bag, and coat, I had no idea. He stormed through the house, grabbed it and headed back out. We had a Bald Eagle. In the driveway. I dropped my pile of junk by … Continue Reading…
