Journey North - Mystery Class starts tomorrow!!!

Not too late to register!!! 

Calendar 2012

Any time Find out How to Participate Sept. - Jan. In fall 2011, monthly "Countdown" Updates are posted to help you get ready for the global game of hide-and-seek. Jan. 30 - Apr. 9 On Mondays, record your local sunrise/sunset. Feb. 3 - Apr. 13 On Fridays, sunrise/sunset data are posted for the ten Mystery Sites. March 16 The "Longitude Clues" are posted. Mar. 23, 30, Apr. 6, 13 Interdisciplinary clues from the Mystery Sites are posted each week. The final week of clues will also provide Contest instructions. (Please Note--out of fairness to all participants, we will only post the clues on their scheduled dates.) April 27 Deadline for your Answers! By popular request, you have TWO weeks to prepare your answers. No lateContest entries will be accepted (out of fairness to all participants). No exceptions. May 4 Locations of the Mystery Sites revealed! May 11 Meet Your Mystery Friends! (Pictures, background information about the sites and greetings are posted.)

Questions? Frequently Asked Questions

Battleship Cove - Field Trip

One of our favorite parts of home educating, is FIELD TRIPS! Today we went to visit Battleship Cove and we were commenting on how INSANE it would have been trying to fit through all those tight spaces if you were there with an entire class of kids! There was so much to see, I had a very hard time selecting which shots to post!

Journey North Mystery Class Locations Revealed!

Today was the big day for the Annenberg Journey North Mystery Classes to be revealed and we didn't too bad!

We were exactly right with #2, 3, & 7 and got the correct countries for #1, 5, 8 & 10. The ones that we got wrong were off by a bit more but not crazy wrong so we are happy with our results! If you joined in on the fun please let us know how you did as well in the comments section!

Looking Ahead to High School - Part 4

If you missed 1, 2, or 3 be sure to check them out!


For History next year we are going with a series by one of our favorite storytellers, Joy Hakim! We completely enjoyed the Story of Science and after all the rave reviews for A History of US we are really looking forward to it. After much discussion we have decided to take two years to do US History, so we are hoping to get through books 1-4 next year and 5-10 the following year. 


In addition to reading these as a spine she will be supplementing with the following resources - 

• America the Story of the US History Channel Series
• U.S. History: Inventive Exercises to Sharpen Skills and Raise Achievement
• U.S. Government, Economics, and Citizenship : Inventive Exercises to Sharpen Skills and Raise Achievement 
• Freedom a Story of US PBS free resources
• For the People (Learn American Government) - Standard Deviants DVD Series
• C-Span Free U.S. President's Poster and other C-SPAN classroom resources
• Hip-Hop U.S. History: The New and Innovative Approach to Learning American History (Flocabulary Study Guides)
  

If you know of any additional resources that might of interest - PLEASE let us know!

Additional Commenter Recommendations -

• Lies My Teacher Told Me

CurrClick - Presidents' Day FREEBIES

CurrClick - Presidents' Day Freebies - This is a direct link to the 5 Free American History Packets they are offering during their President's Day Sale!

FREE - Plimoth Plantation Webcast and First Thanksgiving Resources

Scholastic always has fabulous resources and there First Thanksgiving section isn't any different. They use all the links and connections to Plimoth Plantation and includes the more accurate ~ and often less known ~ information from the Wampanoag Tribes.

They also have a webcast coming up next week that is FREE to all educational institutions. If you miss or can't make the live event, a replay will be available at that link starting Wed, Nov. 17th.

For more of how we have studied Thanksgiving in the past you can take a look at the links in this post.

National Geographic's - Great Migrations - FREE Educational Resources

We love the National Geographic channel and I am amazed that I how somehow missed this incredible series, but am very grateful that someone took the time to pass it on through a yahoo group!

This area of the site has some great extra resources to enhance the experience and may open up some rather interesting avenues of study.

8th Grade Fall Curriculum Picks

Here is what KM and I have decided to work with this fall -

Math -

She did a great job over the summer on the Straight Forward Algebra Book 1 and we decided to take a break from it before she starts book 2. So she will be finishing up the book Word Problems (Practice Practice)
and she completed the rest of Ko's Journey.

English Language Arts -

We love the Straight Forward Series so much that we decided to try the English Series as well, so she will be using the All-In-One English Series Master Book (Straight Forward) . For vocabulary she will be working on Painless Vocabulary. For Spelling she will be utilizing a variation of the Free Spelling program found HERE. For writing we are going to incorporate some of the review questions from Story of the World's Activity Guide as well as the questions from The Story of Science Student Quest Guide so that we are working on her strengthening her answers to open ended response questions - which in my opinion is the practical writing skill that she needs to work on write now.

Science -

We will be continuing on our journey through the Story of Science on to Newton at the Center. As I mentioned we will be utilizing all aspects of the Student's Quest Guide, but will especially be focusing on the open response questions. We also will still be using the Thames & Kosmos Milestones in Science kit as well as working on K'nex and other projects.

History and Geography -

We will also be moving on to The Story of the World Volume 3: Early Modern Times and again utilizing the review questions for writing. In case you missed how we adapt this for the middle school crowd you can check the post on that HERE.

EXTRAS -

We will also be doing -

• Music - Music Alive Classical Connections to U.S. History
• Piano -Accelerated Piano Adventures, Level 2- Lesson Set (1 Book and 1 CD Set, Lesson Book 2 and Lesson Book 2 CD)
  
• Spanish - Tell Me More and The 100+ Series Spanish, Middle School / High School (English and Spanish Edition)
  
• Health - Human Body & Health: Science Skills : Grades 6-8+ (Basic, Not Boring 6 to 8)
• Global Studies - Global Studies: Social Studies Skills : Grades 6-8+ (Basic, Not Boring 6 to 8)
  
• Computer Technology - I haven't finalized all of the resources for this one yet, but will post as soon as I have them. I do know that we will be basing the main context of the program on the Brain Pop Cool Tech spotlight. We also have a printer, laptop, mouse, digital camera, MP3 player, DVD player and camcorder that we will be dissecting throughout the session.

Ancient Civilizations - DONE!

We have finally completed the Giant Lapbook that we began last spring when we started studying the ancient civilizations! We have a had a LOT of fun completed this, but we are also BOTH rather glad that it is over! All graphics and cuts that were used were from the History Pockets series created by Evan-Moor. While we did not do every part from the books we did do a TON of them! KM is very proud of what she has produced!

We will be taking a break from our History Time Line for a little bit to do a 5 week unit study on Inventors! I will keep you posted and be sure to share links for any useful sites!

Winter Session 7th Grade Curriculum Picks

As we are drawing our fall session to a close over the next week, I figured it was time to look ahead and finalize the choices we have made for the upcoming Winter Session! Since we are always changing things around here, this is of course a rough guess of what we will be doing. Most of our picks for the fall session worked out rather well, but there are some areas that we needed to tweak a bit. Here is our "intended" outline -

ELA -
We have swapped out our ELA system SEVERAL times in the past two years, but I do think that we have finally made a bit of progress in this area. KM worked through Levels 3 & 4 of Writing Strands rather quickly and decided to work through a few workbooks for latter half of this past session and the next.

• She has been working through 5-Minute Daily Practice Grammar, she tends to do all 5 lessons for the week at once on Monday, but she is getting them all correct, so I guess I can't really complain can I.
• Quick Practice Writing Skills is a bit more of a challenge for her - well it varies day to day. There are some things that she just needs a slight reminder on and others that have never been covered, so when we come to an area that needs to be covered completely we stop and cover it. It seems to be working and she is far less weary of asking for help.
• For writing itself we have gone back to the 3 minute non-stop writing and are using 350 Fabulous Writing Prompts. Some of the prompts are not so fabulous in my opinion, but we just skip those ones and take those days to go back over and review or edit her previous days writings.
• We will also begin working through the Grammar and then Writing on BrainPop.
• For literature we will be using Teacher Created Resources for Tuck Everlasting and The Island of the Blue Dolphin. As well as a Scholastic Book Guide for Around the World in Eighty Days which will coincide with our Geography. KM of course will also be continuing her free time reading - not that I have to worry about that.

Math -

• We will be finishing up The Complete Book of Algebra and Geometry this next session so that she can feel confident when she goes back to the Teaching Textbook for Algebra in the Spring.
• I also thought that it would be fun and interesting to take a look at Women Mathematicians during this session. This book features 15 women and we will spread them out covering one or two a week for the 10 week session.
  

Science -

• We have decided to put off Story of Science again as KM wanted to slow down a bit on her Physics so that she could really investigate each area more closely. So for the next session she will continue with her Physics Workshop Kit from Thames & Kosmos. She will also continue to supplement with Brain Pop.
• We are also going to revisit Chemistry. She had done a bit of it last year at our co-op, but I think we will try to dive a bit deeper this time around. I have gotten a light textbook - Chemistry of Matter - from Paperback Swap and she has agreed to try it. I have the Periodic Table from Basher Science Books - WHICH SHE LOVES! - as a stand by in case the text flops. I have a lot of projects and kitchen chemistry things to add in as well as BrainPop - AGAIN!
  

Social Sciences -

• For history we will be working on Ancient Rome and finishing up volume one of Story of the World. This will also conclude our Giant Lapbook! I will be sure to post all the info on that when it is complete! This will be our final history pocket as well. KM is very happy that we will also be continuing with the Horrible Histories series, which despite mixed reviews from others, has been going over very well with her! We started out with the books, then I purchased the animated series on Ebay and now have been using the resources for the CBBC series.
• We will be finishing up Rand McNally's Intermediate Geography as well as doing a cultural study of each area as it is covered in the book. I am using several other resources for this including Global Trek, Hands-On Heritage series and Art Projects from Around the World.
  

Health -
KM really likes the Learn to Be Healthy site - though some of the content is a bit below her level, most of it seems to be sinking in and she is moving right along through it. They do have a high school level, but I don't think she is ready for that set just yet. She is also working through the Health topics on Brain Pop.


Electives -

• Staying with our strong Science focus - per KM's request - she will be studying weather and meteorology this session. I will be listing our resources for this in a separate post.
• For her foreign language she is going to be doing Spanish. We were lucky enough to get a FANTASTIC deal on Tell Me More by Auralog through the Homeschool Buyers Co-op last summer and she is REALLY enjoying the program. The voice recognition software is great and the homeschool edition has worksheets that you can print off to supplement with. I will be supplementing with two workbooks - Let's Learn Spanish Grades 7 & 8. I also picked up to sticker books that I thought KM & SC could do together. This would help reinforce the basics for KM and would introduce SC to a bit of Spanish as well.
• Music Alive! is still a big hit and we will continue with this through the next session. We also will be taking a look at some opera pieces from Opera for Everyone and will be going to the Boston Lyric Opera's presentation of Barber of Seville.
  
• Piano Adventures is working incredibly! She will be starting on Level 2 and I am amazed and awestruck by how well she is playing with no outside instruction. There was talk of an interest in Flute, but I am not too sure how serious that was...
• She will be continuing with Drama at our co-op and they will be working on another Shakespearean play with music and dancing, but the title has not been disclosed yet!
• We will be continuing to work through the Meet The Masters for our art practical and theory section. She will also continue on her cross stitch work and may start some sewing as she interested in working on her costume for the play this spring.
  

Again I can't stress enough how much of a guideline this is and it is in NO WAY set in stone. I am very open to changing things that are not working and try to make sure that KM feels that she can be honest with me about how she feels something is going.

Curriculum Picks for Fall Session - 7th Grade - Social Sciences

Now on to our picks for Social Science:

Social Sciences - The social sciences comprise academic disciplines concerned with the study of the social life of human groups and individuals including anthropology, communication studies, economics, human geography, history, political science, psychology and sociology.

History -
We will be continuing our journey into ancient cultures and first stop in the fall will be China! Though we will be continuing to loosely follow the Complete Book of World History, I was pointed toward History: The Definitive Visual Guide and I am seriously thinking about switching over to that, but I will make sure to keep you all posted on that!
For China we will be using the Ancient China Thematic Unit and focusing on Between the Dragon and the Eagle. We will then move onto the Ancient Americas.

Geography -
Our co-op will be doing a full year Geography class, loosely following the Trail Guide to World Geography and I will be supplementing with a few resources.

Cultural Studies -
As well as touching on the cultures of areas that we go over in geography we will be doing some specific cultural studies as well starting with Investigating the First Thanksgiving and Holiday's Around the World.
Investigating the First Thanksgiving website
Holiday's Around the World Websites -

• http://www.lessonplanspage.com/SSChristmasAroundtheWorldK1.htm
• http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/holidays/
• http://www.education-world.com/a_lesson/lesson213.shtml