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

Learning about the systems of the human body was the most exciting unit we have done this year. The kids were just as interested and engaged as I was and that is always a plus. When I did this lesson with my oldest son some years ago, we enjoyed it but not this much. Although I repeated some of the same activities with him, there were so many more we incorporated this time around. I decided to share everything here in one blog post to help all you busy homeschoolers. It's time consuming looking for books and sifting through relevant videos on YouTube. Below you will find the books we read and activities we completed along with links and PDFs. It was a lot of fun for us, I hope you find this post useful!

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.

Making the choice to home school is no easy decision for any family. You question if you can do it, how you will do it, where you will do it, and how it will affect your child.  When you finally find peace and sign on to homeschooling and think the hardest decision is behind you, you're left to figure out what curriculum to use to make sure your child receives a top notch education at home. For me, settling on a curriculum is daunting....every year. Every home school parent must understand that what works for one family may not work for you and your family. Speaking to veteran homeschoolers can be a relief and sometimes it's overwhelming hearing them talk about how they create their own materials or use their child's interests to create lessons and unit studies. For some people, not having an outline or a plan can be stressful, for others this can be liberating. I personally prefer having a plan, it keeps me organized- without this I can't function well and feel u

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.