Second Grade Earth Science: Our first topic of 2015 was Plate Tectonics.
The Week of Earthshock
A week full of Islam, Volcanoes, Earthquakes and Jackpots! Our second week of 2015 was a pretty good one...
The Week of Enlightenment
The first week back after our holiday break went surprisingly well. It was quirky, interesting, frustrating and wonderful. Here are some of the highlights...
Cub Scouting
As I mentioned in my last post, Cub Scouts has been Robert's major extracurricular activity so far in second grade. Since I have tons of pics of THAT stuff, I thought I'd post a bit about what he's been up to. Oh!! I forgot to mention that RockerDad and I have become den leaders this year. It's a lot of work, but it's more rewarding than I ever imagined. The boys in our den are all amazing kids.
The Faceless Ones
Wow... it's really been a long time since my last post. New year, or not, I don't think it would be wise (considering my track record) to say that I plan to post more regularly. :) I have been terrible at taking school photos this fall/winter, but I'll share a bit of what we've been up to school-wise. This will mostly be images, since many of these photos are months old, now.
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| Second Grade Language Arts |
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| Beast Academy, Saxon and Singapore Math |
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| The Fall of Rome and the "Barbarians" (not a term I'm fond of) |
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| Celts... and a battle axe |
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| 50 states study began with the U.S. and where we are. |
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| Hands-On: how centrifugal force of the spinning Earth can make the planet bulge near the equator. |
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| Hands-On: Clay Earth & Axis Tilt | Notebooking: Layers of the Earth |
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| Hornet's Nest (at Moo & Papa's house) and a Praying Mantis (on our porch) |
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| This is all I have... the Greek materials. As you can see, he uses the worktext and I have my own notebook. |
There has been more art (both spontaneous and planned) than I can mention in this post. Unfortunately, I didn't take photos. Robert has created several manga and other types of books over the past months. He also likes to create his own 3-D paper... thingies. LOL... I don't know what to call them. ;)
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| Cub Scouts has been the main extracurricular activity... he's grown so much since last year. |
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| Basketball season has started... sometimes he plays and sometimes he just goes spastic. |
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| ... and then there are days like this... |
...so, there you have it. I am hanging my head in shame over the lack of updating and photo-taking.
A Peek at Our Homeschool
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| A Day in the Life of Our Homeschool... |
This is the part of the NOT Back to School Blog Hop that I usually don't do. The main reason is that I simply can't take pics or keep a play-by-play of a school day. This post will actually be more like a "Week in the Life," since it covers our first week of school. Don't run away, yet! I won't give a detailed account of each day. I've divided it up into time chunks. What I've decided to do this year is tell you what should be happening at a given point (per my schedule) vs. what actually happened.
We'll see how this goes....
First Day of Second Grade
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| He's a second grader! |
This is a short post, since it's really just for the Not Back to School Blog Hop Student Photo Week. It's never easy getting him to act normal in a staged photo. Well... I say, "normal"... but I truly mean by someone else's standards. The goofy pics are normal for him (and I wouldn't have it any other way).
Our Learning Space: 2014 - 2015
We're all set to begin this second grade journey. I've finally finished our school area (which is obviously in our kitchen, since our house is less than 800 sq. ft.). I believe we're finding our groove and discovering what works and what is superfluous as far as our school space. I'm sure some things will be tweaked as we go, but I'm excited about it.
Free Printable Research Worksheet
I've been downloading worksheets and such to use with my son this year. Sometimes, I can't find exactly what I'm looking for, so I piece my own together. I thought I'd share some of them, in case they could be useful to someone else.
Free Printable Lab Report Forms
I've been downloading worksheets and such to use with my son this year. Sometimes, I can't find exactly what I'm looking for, so I piece my own together. I thought I'd share some of them, in case they could be useful to someone else.
That Annual Curriculum Post: Classical Second Grade
It's that time of year, again. I've been (lazily) busy making lesson plans, downloading and creating worksheets and notebooking pages and weeding through the second grade projects I've been Pinning for years. As I near the end (and as our first day draws near), I thought it would be a good time to share the big plan with you.
Midsummer Wrap-Up
I can't believe how fast this summer is flying by... can you?
Well, here's a short update on the past few weeks of fun and summer (home)school.
Summer Update... Getting Back To It
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Baseball and Breaks
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| Opening Day for Robbie's Team, The Mudcats |
I know I haven't been the best at updating, but we've taken a bit of a break from heavy schoolwork lately. Here's what he HAS been up to.
The Leisure Hive (or Summer School Begins)
Do you school in the summer? Why or why not?
I love having the freedom to decide.
The Week(s) of World War Three
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| Ahh.. the joys of having children!! |
Night of the Scientist
Robbie watched Bill Nye's Do It Yourself Science on youtube the other evening and got inspired to investigate. These are not all of the experiments he conducted, but they are the ones I where I managed to snap a photo.
My Boys... (just having a Mama moment)
We simply don't get to spend enough time with Tyler, but when he's here, it's always a blast! Robbie wants to be just like his big brother and Tyler has always been so encouraging and patient with him. I can't tell you how proud I am of my boys.
I thought I'd share some pics from Tyler's last visit...
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| Robbie and Tyler enjoying a backyard game of basketball. |
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| He's growing up way too fast... |
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| It's hard to see, but he's jumping rope with a honeysuckle vine.... look at the air he got! |
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The Week of the Time Warrior
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| Finding Balance in our Days |
This was a week of changes for us. No, we didn't move, again (thank goodness!!). We simply tried out an actual daily schedule.. you know, with times and all that. ;) We weren't total sticklers, but having it as a guide really helped us with our time management skills.
Actually, this schedule worked brilliantly! I might post more about it once we've had a bit more time with it under our belts.
Okay... enough of my yakking... on to the actual post!
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| Our Language Arts works its way across our curriculum. |
It seems to be difficult to snap photos of most of Robbie's language arts work. It occurred to me that I actually DO get pics most weeks, but they're cross-curricular. He does reading, copywork, narrations and even handwriting as part of his history and science. Spelling naturally carries over to every written subject, as well.
Of course, he still does actual work from his language arts books... I just rarely seem to have photo proof.
WHAT WE READ:
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| The many faces of math |
We covered so many topics this week in math (through Singapore, with our skip counting and simply during Robbie's "free math" explorations). The image above shows a small sampling. Right now, I'm simply trying to gently build his stamina. His mind is ready for so much more than we're doing, but he simply needs to be able to write a bit more without whining.
We began our study of Ancient Egypt with some reading and fun, hands-on activities.
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| Sugar cookie mapping was a big success!! (Robbie ate his too quickly.. the completed photo is of mine.) |
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| Robbie's double crown of Ancient Egypt was a long and messy project, but we both enjoyed it. |
We still have a few weeks of Ancient Egypt, so I hope to put together a post of all of it when we're through.
BOOKS USED THIS WEEK:
In his second week of mollusk study, he learned about cephalopods. I found a short octopus reading comprehension sheet online (can't remember where.. if I do, I'll post the link). He did his vocabulary/copywork sheet, ate some octopus hot dogs and read some books.
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| The whole family learned new things.. an octopus truly is amazing! |
BOOKS USED THIS WEEK:
... kappa, lambda, mu ...
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| Greek handwriting, games and making flash cards... |
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| We all enjoyed using our watercolor tubes for the first time!! |
As a family, we really enjoyed the short artist study and art project we chose (Hendrick Avercamp) from our Usborne Art Treasury
book.
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| Basketball: I never knew that 1st and 2nd graders could be such fierce competitors... |
Robbie did much better at his second basketball game. He actually played!! This enabled me to pay attention to the game as a whole... and I was shocked by how good most of the players were. It was a very good game!
So.... what have you been up to this week?
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