Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Field Trips and Special Guests

It is about time to put together another post of Photos from the Classroom! We have been doing so many things lately. Here's a quick snapshot.

The group as a whole finished part II of the Human Body and is now working their way through part II of Norse Mythology, with two exceptions. Becca is doing Egyptian Mythology instead of Norse. Leah, who is 14, doesn't do MLBs with me at all anymore. She has a plan of self-directed study this year.

Leah finished reading Pride & Prejudice, wrote her final project (a brochure on social conventions of the Regency Period called Miss Elizabeth Bennett's Time Traveler's Guide for Ladies), and is very happily putting together her own time travel adventure. She and Becca were inspired by Becca's "Monk Day" last year, and are planning a "Regency Day" for Saturday... so we just got back from getting a bunch of books from the library which would have been suitable for young ladies to read. Based on this list, we checked out:


Leah and Becca's Saturday is looking quite lovely and relaxing, with all of that watercolor painting and reading and doing embroidery and decoupaging and visiting with friends and keeping up with their correspondence. Leah has written a complete daily schedule. We also purchased all of the ingredients needed for the menu she came up with. Here are just a few of the dishes:


(And she managed to persuade me that they really did have ice cream back then, so I got her vanilla.) More on Regency Day to come... and she's promised to be a guest blogger and write a post about how it all went.

Then she and I skip around in time and begin Hamlet on Monday.

The book group which finished Holes got together last weekend for Dinner and a Movie and we greatly enjoyed watching the film adaptation. Becca couldn't get over how faithful it was to the book! Of course, the screenplay was written by the author of the book, which helps. We also enjoyed a fun coordinate graphing game based on Holes.

My teenage group is now playing the Stock Market Game (How the Market Works) to lay the foundation for our final novel study of the year, Out of the Dust, which takes place during the Great Depression. This, along with going more deeply into Algebra, will also serve as our final Math topic of the year.

There have also been field trips and special guests over these past few weeks!

Miss Aliya came in after we studied the Immune System to teach us about the Lymphatic System. The Lymphatic System is related to both the Immune System and the Circulatory System. She had lots of props and it was a wonderful hands-on presentation! Miss Aliya also helpfully donated a SCOBY to my Organic Chemistry science club, which just finished studying Cellulose, and Leah happily grabbed it and dove headlong into making kombucha. The cabinet at the bottom of my laundry chute is now the Kombucha Cupboard.

Mark Fletter, beekeeper and science teacher, came in twice, once to set up a bee swarm trap in our backyard (which we are watching daily... Zac is extremely excited to see whether any bees find it), and again to help us wrap up our study of the Human Body with a very energetic lesson!!!

The Farm Day kids also went to the off-the-grid Maginel's Farm (Organic Energy Works run by Jim and Mary Maginel) to help out on the farm for a day and see their adorable baby goats.

My group of students also visited Southern Illinois University Carbondale's Morris Library for the super-cool annual Edible Book Festival. I am going to try to be on the committee which sets this up, so that I can get more homeschoolers involved! The past few years there has only been one entry in the under-18 category. And what could be more fun than combining a love of books, a love of puns, and a love of cooking!

Today it almost seems like Spring. The weather was just beautiful on the farm! Leah got a beekeeping lesson from Mark and he shared some photos with me. Can you spot the Queen in the second picture? She is just to the right of center, and much longer than the other bees.


This post contains affiliate links to the materials I actually use for homeschooling. I hope you find them helpful. Thank you for your support!

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