Without going into great detail, several things happened at PACE this year that led us to the decision to homeschool Jalen. I never thought I would be a homeschooler. In fact, I was not a fan of homeschooling in general. But homeschooling has proven to be an amazing experience for Jalen, for me, and for our whole family.
There is a lot of support for homeschooling in South Carolina. The primary courses are reading, writing, math, science, and social studies. We are using The Good & the Beautiful for ELA and science. The creater of this curriculum is LDS, but the curriculum is non-denominational Christian. It teaches traditional parts of speech, including diagramming, and incorporates art and poetry. I love it. The science lessons have lots of experiments. For math we are using Singapore which I have liked. For social studies we are using The Story of the World, which is a whole-world approach, which I also like a lot. It also has a lot of hands-on projects. In addition to this, we have been working on times tables, days of the week, months of the year, what holiday comes in what month, Roman numerals, how to use thee/thou/thy, and other things that Jalen needed to have reinforced. It's been nice to be able to customize the learning to him and what he needs.
One of the things we've done for science is Mark Rober's Crunch Lab Kits. They have been so much fun and Jalen builds them together with David. They teach STEM principles. Mark Rober is LDS and was a scientist for NASA.
The first project was a disk launcher.
Next there was a coin spinner.
Then a trip wire.
They even set a trap for Baylie!
We built a volcano.
He did a diorama of the Nile River.
Built an Egyptian pyramid from sugar cubes.
We tried to make eggshell geodes, but they didn't work very well because they broke.
Our rock candy sugar crystal creation was much more successful.
But we had trouble getting it out of the jar!
It was still tasty though!
We went to a rock shop so Jalen could see a variety of rocks. He was fascinated!
He bought a geode and we brought it home to break it open.
It was beautiful inside!
Brother Harris brought him over a whole bunch of rocks!
We did some reading outside.
He did some Chinese calligraphy.
He made "Phonecian" pita bread.
He made an Egyptian death mask. First he cut out strips of newspaper.
Then he dipped them in a glue/water mixture and pasted them onto a balloon.
It was a bit messy!
He covered half of the balloon. We let it dry in between layers and did about three layers.
After it dried, we popped the balloon. David helped him cut out the back from cardboard and glue the mask to that. Jalen then spray painted everything gold.
The final step was to paint in details to create his finished mask. It turned out really cool!
He made a chariot.
And we burned incense.
We made a tasty creation to study the layers of soil.
Doing math.
We went to the temple to do baptisms and then to a Greek restaurant.
Greek salad
Gyro!
He made a wind gauge.
We did an evaporation experiment and learned that water only evaporates when the lid is off the jar.
We made a rain gauge just in time for some heavy storms.
We made rain.
I made a memory game of the Greek gods to help him learn who they were and what they did.
The adventure continues and we are all loving home school so much!
No comments:
Post a Comment