I am excited to have found a new curriculum this year for my kids, Discoveryk12. It can be used through the school year on their schedule, or you can use it on your own schedule. You can have them do most of the work independently or you can work alongside them. It covers a great range of topics and uses free resources for reading and videos. We are using it for much of our "academic" studies, but I am still putting together themed activities for supplemental learning. This week, my older girls watched the musical Grease, so I used that as the theme for all the kids. Before anyone gets upset about the moral issues that come up in Grease, we personally use it as a diving board to discuss those issues with our older kids, so this also allowed for life lessons in addition to "school."
Middle School (7th and 8th grade)
Writing- Each girl was asked to choose 3 characters from the movie and write about what they thought happened in their life after the movie ended.
US History- Each girl was to choose one of the following people: Elvis Presley, Debbie Reynolds, Sandra Dee, Doris Day, Ricky Nelson, or Shelly Farbares. They then researched the person and gave a mini-presentation on why they were famous and their contributions to American culture.
Health- I had the girls work on a Smoking Crossword and then work together to create an anti-smoking commercial for the radio.
Physical Education- All of the kids learned and danced the hand jive.
Music- I count watching the musical as part of their music education, but the girls also learned and practiced singing We Go Together, from the musical.
Visual Arts- The girls chose a nonsense phrase from the song We Go Together and turn it into a piece of word art. They were free to design it any way they wanted, as long as the phrase was prominent.
Practical Arts- Each girl created a diner-inspired meal consisting of a burger, fries, and a milkshake. My 13-year old created a BLT burger with cheese fries and a Peanut Butter cup milkshake and my 12-year old topped her burger with avocado and bacon and served it with bacon and cheese covered fries and an Apple Cinnamon milkshake. They also both curated an outfit on Polyvore that was inspired by a character from Grease. You can check out their Rizzo-inspired outfits here and here.
This unit was mostly geared toward the older kids, but all of the kids learned the Hand Jive and the 2 elementary kids also created a milkshake. My 7 year old created a Chocolate Covered Strawberry milkshake that was absolutely amazing and my 6-year old's Cinnamon Banana milkshake was pretty tasty, too. She also decided to curate her own Sandy-inspired outfit on Polyvore. The 4 oldest kids and I also went to the drive-in on Friday night to watch Dolphin Tale 2, Winter's Tale, which will be the basis of next week's lesson. The elementary kids also did a mini-unit on coins which consisted of learning about the people and places found on coins, coin identification, coin rubbings, and an old song I remembered from when I taught the older girls about coins. The song talks about the value of each coin. I cannot find it any more on the internet and I made up the tune, so it is not something that can be easily shared on the blog :(
I don't really do any formal schooling with my 2-year old, but I do set goals of things I will work on with him each week. This week's goals were to work on recognizing his first name in print, identifying the primary colors, animal sounds, and hopping. For his name, I made up a word document and wrote his name out as may times as it would fit. I made the letters, empty block-style letters (under word-art) and increased the size to the largest possible. He liked coloring it, but I am pretty sure he still has no idea it was actually his name ;)
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