What I am Reading - September - GCKMom

The First Americans: Prehistory-1600 A History of US Book 1 

I was just going to glance through this to prep movies, additional reading and projects for our U.S. history lessons, but I couldn't put it down!!! Full review will be posted soon, but for now I will just say I LOVE Hakim's storytelling skills!  

4th Annual NOT Back to school Day

I tried and tried again to plan a Not Back to School Celebration for our local home ed community, but the weather would just not cooperate! So KM and I decided to go back to our roots and do what we usually do for NOT back to school - breakfast, library and whatever we please!

After the third round of buses rolled by the house this morning, I decided to wake up K, so we could head out to breakfast with CJ. While we waited for our food we played hockey with the twisted straw wrappers and the plastic ad holder.

 Then we headed to the library and and came out with a bagful of books!

 KM spent some time chatting and playing on line with some friends and then

 we decided to bust out the hair dye!!!

While it processed we watched Cyberbully - a MUST see for all teens and parents - on the new monitor! 

It is rather difficult to get the colors to show while it is still damp, I will have to try for a better shot. There are two shades of green - a torquois and a GREEN and purple which is more easily seen! 

What did you do on your NOT back to school day?

Teachers – throw out everything you ever thought learning should be!

Check out my latest article on Unplugged Mom!

Teachers – throw out everything you ever thought learning should be!

You tube Monday - Annoying Orange - Orange Potter and the Deathly Apple

Summer/Fall Book Break

We will be on our 3 week book break from now til the last week in September. In case you are new here, our 10 week on 2-3 week off schedule allows us breaks at key times in the year - like our birthday month - when we don't have any lesson plans or book work, so that we can take full advantage of the season! We take one now because the schools are back in session and our birthdays are this month, one in Dec to get through the Holidays, one in March to get our yard ready and take advantage of field trips etc that start up again when everyone is ready to burst from cabin fever, and then one in June to be able to enjoy our local museums, libraries etc. before school kids are back out for the summer. Generally we have activities and projects planned, but KM just wants to do NOTHING and it will be interesting to see how long that lasts. It might be quiet here for a bit, but on the other hand this nothing time, might give me some time to write, so it might not!

Herring Run Adventures

We had a fabulous picnic with some friends and the littles yesterday at the Herring Run! The day was gorgeous and the kids had a great time splashing and playing pooh sticks! 

Trying some new things

We generally begin our "learning year" over the summer and I tweak and twist things around until I get it just right. This summer I found two things that needed a bit of adjusting.

The first was our posters - they were taking up far too much wall space and making my living room look like a "classroom" I love them because they are great quick reference tools if they are out and visible, but really i don't like the feel it gives my living room! So I finally thought of a solution - we have a stairwell that goes down into the garage that had three very large, vary blank walls -

 This is the perfect solution because really I would not be able to put the 6 foot C-SPAN presidential poster anywhere else, the posters are easily accessible AND I DON'T have to look at them 

We downgraded our cable to bare minimum as we discovered that we can stream 90% of what we watch and save over $120 a month! Since we stream a lot of our ed things I decided to take a monitor that we no longer use - since we all have laptops - and make it much more useful - 

Are you trying anything new out this time of year? I would love to hear about it. 

NOT Back to School Day - TAKE ONE!!!

We had planned a NOT Back to School Beach Day for a large group of home learners in our area, but unfortunately we had to postpone it because of Hurricane Irene power outage related issues. We are hoping that it will be able to run later this week, but today we got to take an adventure to a new spot that we have tried to go several times, Ellisville Harbor in Plymouth. We brought a few friends along and ran into some more as well!

It was a really nice relaxing day. The kids climbed on rocks, hunted crabs, relaxed after their lunch and I got to take some interesting photos!

Ironically we had to reschedule our day and our local schools are all had to do the same as well - they won't be going back until next week as they are all in outage zones! 

You Tube Monday - Conversations I've Had As An Unschooler, pt. 1.

Over the past few weeks You Tube Mondays have been dedicated to comical conversations homeschoolers have had. This will be last in this series, but is one of the best I found!

What do you do when...

a hurricane / tropical storm hits on a birthday and you loose electricity for 9 hours?

Play monopoly for 4.5 hours!!! 

Then have the cake after dark so that it glows brighter! 

Longest power outage we have ever had to deal with, but we made the best of it! We finally broke down and hooked the generator up after 7 hours because we were worried about the fridge and we let the kids plug in the t.v. and dvd player so they could watch Eclipse! I don't think this is a birthday that he will forget.

Shakespeare Thematic Unit

I have been getting a lot of emails asking about our Shakespeare Thematic Unit, so I figured I would take a few minutes to outline our plan.

KM has been in a Shakespeare group for three years now and since she has a really good grasp on a few plays and a phenomenal understanding of the language, we have decided to cover a good deal of Shakespeare's plays, some better known and some not so much.

We began the summer using the free educational resource kit we got from the National Endowment of the Arts. This kit was incredible!!! KM also spent a good amount of time researching Shakespeare's life by reading Who Was William Shakespeare? and The World Of Shakespeare. We also have been gathering info on all things Elizabethan, utilizing Teacher Created Thematic Unit, discovering the beauty in his sonnets and were lucky enough to be able to attend a  free Shakespeare on the Common performances of All's Well That Ends Well. 

Starting this week we will begin delving into recordings of the plays - all of which can be found on Netflix. Here are the ones we will be covering -

• Romeo & Juliet - 1968
• Romeo + Juliet - 1996
• Macbeth
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Hamlet
• Taming of the Shrew
• Richard III
• Othello 
• O
• King Lear
• As You Like It
• The Tempest
• Merchant of Venice
• Julius Cesear
• Anthony Cleopatra
• Henry V
• Twelfth Night
• Comedy of Errors
• Merry Wives of Windsor
• The Winter's Tale
• Midsummer's Night Dream
• All's Well That Ends Well
• Love's Labour's Lost

Additional Related Films - 

• Shakespeare in Love
• Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead
• Rosencratz and Guildenstern are Undead

Additional Resources - 

• Rocketbooks
• Scholastic's Unlocking Shakespeare Folders

All our lesson plans are done on Homeschool Tracker so if you use it too and would like a copy feel free to ask! I would not recommend this type of intensive program for a child that isn't familiar with Shakespeare and more importantly the language style.

What I am Reading - August - GCKMom

I have been laughing HYSTERICALLY through the funniest home ed books I have ever read!

"Okay Kids, Time for Bedlam!" is a labor of love. It is the lighter side of life, told byDebbie Harbeson, an average mom who rather unknowingly lobbed herself into the often loopy world of homeschooling.This is what happens to you, when you purposely allow your children to skip school to learn at home... and it's a riot! The whole endeavor, needless to say, has been a learning experience for everyone. And hopefully, a story you all can enjoy from the safety of your own home.

Some of my favorite quotes include :

• "We all watched as a couple of eyeballs rolled past her feet and settled under the porch bench."
• "Yesterday four textbooks made a perfect support for our bike ramps."
• "Melissa sat the cheetah on the cabinet, he dialed the number and the cheetah's belly began to ring."
• The ENTIRE content of Chapter Fifteen - Mother Nature!!!

These are all the things home ed mom's don't want you to find out really go on! Best part Debbie Harbeson has made the entire content of the book downloadable and FREE!!! Take a peek you won't regret it! 

What I am Reading - August - Music Kid

MANGA, MANGA & MORE MANGA!!!

NOT Back to School Planning

I was in a big buy store today picking up pet food and some other things and I was so disturbed by the parents shouting at children, juggling school supplies and seeing the children agonizing over the choices that the parents were presenting to them, that it seriously turned my stomach into knots. Each year with all the craziness going on as mainstream schools are starting back up  I appreciate more and MORE that we are NOT going back to school!

In fact we are planning an incredible NOT Back to School Beach Day for area home learning families to meet up with us to celebrate the day that our local school will be back in session! This is the first beach day we have done for this, but in the past we have celebrated with things like a Park Day, Bowling Party, and Family Hikes. This is a great way to get new home ed families together with veterans and to meet back up with friends who may have been busy over the summer! If you don't have a large home ed community around you, you can also have your own "Not Back to School Day" by enjoying things that you have been avoiding all summer, here are some posts of how we have celebrated in the past.

Does your family do anything fun to celebrate NOT going back to school?

You Tube Monday - Tim Hawkins - Homeschool Comedy & Homeschool Blues Song

Over the past few weeks I have been sharing some of my favorite xtra normal and you tube videos on "homeschooling". This guy is really funny! One more to go next week!