Homeschool Ballers: We Learn. We Play. We Homeschool.

The kids were really excited to read Pirates Past Noon, because pirates are considered super cool in today's culture. However, after reading and learning the history of piracy their thoughts shifted a lot! The story Pirates Past Noon is based in the Caribbean and we took the opportunity to not only learn about the Caribbean Islands and Sea but also about tropical climate. We ended up expanding our knowledge on different climate zones, the equator and Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, land forms, fresh water vs. salt water, how to read and follow maps and all about boats with our fun pirate ship craft fashioned from everyday household items. We also touched on climate change and what we can do to protect our planet. To be honest, when we start a new unit I have a very vague plan. Every morning I come up with new topics to cover that relate to our unit and I like to incorporate topics that are relevant in our world today. Tackling climate zones and how climate is changing was v...

King Tut's Sarcophagus at the California Science Center This was a really exciting unit. We spent about two and a half weeks learning about ancient and current day Egypt. We were very lucky to have the King Tut exhibit currently running at the California Science Center and saw some of the wonderful treasures kept in King Tut's tomb. The IMAX movie showed us the story of Ancient Egypt and how the tomb was discovered. We all learned so much. We learned so much more than history and geography in this unit study. We studied geometry as we learned about the Great Pyramids. Discussed the social structure of the Egyptians and compared it to ours and also briefly discussed social injustices. We built our vocabulary and became junior Egyptologists! We used the  MTH History and Geography Notebook to track our learning and concluded by writing in Annie's Adventure Diary.

This year I wanted to use The Magic Tree House Book Series to teach my younger two history and geography. We really enjoy Jack and Annie's adventures and I figured it would give us a great variety of topics. We found learning history chronologically a little boring, so following the Tree House series would allow us to learn about different time periods and places every few weeks, while keeping learning exciting.  Along with the Magic Tree House books, we check out other books relevant to the topic and time period from the library. I also pick up an interesting book that relates to the subject being covered, to read out loud to the kids before bed every night. To enhance our lessons, I created notebook pages for the kids to record their learning, which can be downloaded below, along with doing some exciting activities. We just completed Book 2 of the series, The Knight at Dawn.