School Days

We are homeschooling our amazing Anna girl this year for second grade, and in the process have discovered that we are not huge fans of any one particular curriculum.  As a result, we have decided to blend several styles of homeschooling, and use standards of education to ensure we work on the right things.  I thought I would use this blog a bit to share what we do.  Ideally I would like for this to be a resource for ideas for families who are homeschooling, or doing things on their own like we are.

So far we have covered things like double digit addition and subtraction (with very minor carrying), greater-than and less-than, comparing amounts using comparison words, ordering whole numbers, identifying place value, and writing/reading numbers in expanded forms.  We have covered writing a letter, consonants, vowels, putting things in alphabetical order, spelling words, vocabulary, and reading.  We have been working on understanding what a community is, and how we fit into it.  We've discussed neighborhoods, the universe, maps, talked about various services, types of transportation, and signs.  In science we have done a unit on the ocean, focusing on the vocabulary words that are used for water and animals in the ocean that we don't otherwise use.  We did a few science projects and art projects for the ocean unit as well.  We are now working on the life cycle of a plant, and have enjoyed doing some art projects to help us understand.  We are also watching a show on Netflix called Wild Kratts - it is a wonderful educational show about wildlife that is really perfect for this age group and younger.  Our next unit will be on animals and animal groups so this is great preparation, and she thinks it is fun!  We have focused a great deal on art projects as well as music, which will be seen throughout the upcoming posts.

Today we are focusing on matter, specifically solids vs liquids.  It's a rainy day and sometimes you just have to go with what works.  We are all enjoying the cool weather and the rain.  Anna was already wet after running around in the drops and wanted to jump in some puddles.  I figured this would be a wonderful lesson about mass.  Because the ground is a solid, it can hold her body weight while both standing and jumping.  The ground is dense and capable of holding her light body.  Liquid is not as dense as the ground, and also not as dense as Anna's body.  We used the jumping puddles to explore how a solid moves through a liquid.

Happy schooling!