Attentiveness

Up until this point in the school year, I have been creating our curriculum. I've planned unit studies around different topics that my kids enjoy and it has been a lot of fun! The downside is the amount of time it has taken for me to prepare the lessons. 

This summer, we will be adding another member to our family. Once little munchkin comes home, I will have a lot less free time for lesson planning. I have loved doing unit studies, so we are going to stick with that teaching strategy for now. But we have recently started a new curriculum called Konos. It is organized by themes. Each theme is a character trait. Then each theme includes 5-7ish units that relate to the character trait. We have started with attentiveness. The concepts we have studied that have to do with attentiveness have included all 5 senses, parts of the ear, sign language, Helen Keller, Alexander Graham Bell, frontiersman, orchestra/music, and a lot more!

There have been so many fun projects so far. I don' t have pictures to document them all, but here are a few select pictures:

We learned about braille, and the kids wrote their names in braille using glued lentils. 

We've still be keeping up with math. Here are a few new fun  math games. C is doing a math train… connecting popsicle sticks in order to answer math fact questions. 

A is doing Math Mountain to practice adding numbers.

As we studied hearing and specifically learned about Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone, we were able to take apart an old phone to see how it works. We were even able to reassemble it since A was sad that it would no longer work once we took it apart.

Frontiersmen! We've studied Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, tracking animals and wideness skills. This week, we are getting together with another homeschool family to go on a wilderness expeditions, complete with costumes, trail guides, tall tales and animal tracking.

This is an idea I snagged from my nephew's teacher. We put together writing folders with prewriting forms, cover sheets and story pages. The kids have been working on developing good fictional stories. Here C is writing about the Wild Kratts saving a baby joey.

I am super excited to say that we've made it to April and we all still love homeschooling. It has looked different than I had envisioned it, and our days have changed and adapted throughout the year, but we still enjoy learning together and the flexibility of our schedule.