First Day of Apologia Botany

The kids were super bummed out that we had to miss our Nutrition Co-op today (because Jaedah had literally vomited all night long and just to be safe and not spread around germs we all stayed home).  I figured I'd make it up to the kiddos by doing our very first science lesson with the new Apologia Botany curriculum that just arrived yesterday and have a fun nature filled day studying what we learned.  First we read the section that defines botany (the study of plants) and the two older kids sat with me on the couch while we did so, then we went over to the table and Isaiah wrote all about what we read - about botany, nature and the use of a magnifying glass in the study of botany.  Moriah copied a sentence that I wrote out for her to practice writing letters and words.  Then we went outside on this beautiful and warm day to study plants, Isaiah used the magnifying glass to look at leaves up close and personal, then drew some pictures and glued leaves and flowers on to the paper as well.  Moriah drew flowers on the chalk board, drew trees and flowers on her clipboard and then made flowers with play-doh.  In all, they had a great time learning about plants ;-)

Two New Homeschool Curriculums

I am very excited to announce that I just purchased two new curriculums for our homeschool.  After sitting down with Isaiah to kind of reevaluate our homeschool (and surveying his likes vs dislikes).  I came to the conclusion that we would make school more fun and follow along more of a Charlotte Mason approach to things.  Thus I allowed him to drop the phonics and handwriting workbooks all together and instead he will  do more copywork from the literature that he reads and also narrate more for history.  We currently use Sonlight for history, literature, geography, readers, read alouds, language arts and science; and Math U See for math.  We will also be dropping Sonlight science in exchange for something totally new! After hearing (and reading) so many good things about Apologia Botany I decided to go with it.

I intend on incorporating this new science curriculum (which will have many fun science projects) and we will also be adding in a fun art elective called Artistic Pursuits (which will basically teach the children about art history, famous artwork, and art techniques to create their very own works of art).  I will teach both subjects twice a week to Isaiah and Moriah.  The curriculums will both have a reading portion and a project portion.  The Science will also have vocabulary, copywork and notebooking assignments mainly for Isaiah to do.  We are very excited to get into these studies because the kids are interested in learning about seeds, plants, and the study of them and they both really love doing art projects.  A few weeks ago we did a project with a kidney bean and watched it grow into a huge plant, this interested them very much.  We are all really looking forward to the mail deliveries this week ;-)