North America Resources

 As we go through our Around the World studies, I thought I'd share some of the resources we used (or other ones I found but we didn't get to). 

North America page in the Barefoot Books World Atlas Sticker Book

I set out of our little Schleich and Safari LTD animals from North America. They hung out in the playroom all week with us.

Rocky Mountain animals puzzle from the Momentous Mountains set

North American page in his Flag Sticker Atlas

North American Spread from Beginning Geography

North American Animal 3 Part Cards and  North American Wildlife Toob

North American Tray Puzzle and GeoPuzzle (forgot to get a pic of that one)

We also looked through the North American pages in our various atlases (you can see which ones we use here). This spread is from the Lift-The-Flap Picture Atlas

His favorite map was this biome one from the Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth

Some other North America Books

North American Countries Units:

Canada

United States and US Native Peoples

Mexico

Central America and the Caribbean 

Kindergarten Science: Heat and Temperature

This year, we are taking a two pronged approach to science. We are doing activities to meet the Next Generation Science Standards for kindergarten, but we are also learning about biomes to go along with out Around the World Homeschool studies. I've done my best to meld the two so it feels mostly cohesive.

To start us out, we learned about temperature and heat this week. The main takeaways I wanted him to have were that temperature is a way to measure heat (higher numbers mean hotter and lower numbers mean colder) and that things like blankets and coats do not make their own heat, but help trap in heat from our bodies. This concept will help when we talk about things people and animals do to stay warm in cool climates. Another concept we focused on, but that was less important for him to fully understand is that heat always moves from hot to cold.

We read Temperature: Heating Up and Cooling Down as well as a couple sections about heat in our kids science books.

I let him play indoors and outdoors with an infrared thermometer. I had him predict which things he thought would have high numbers and which things would have lower numbers.

We also did a pretty classic mitten experiment. He had three thermometers (we used these), one on a table, one in a glove and one in a glove with his hand. We waited a couple of minutes and recorded the temperatures for all three. I have a quick lab sheet for this for anyone interested.

Art Tie-In

This week we tied our art into science by doing a temperature painting, learning about warm and cool colors. We followed this video from Lolly Arroco

 

Favorite Books at 14 Months

 I've posted a LOT about why I've taught my babies to read and how I've taught my babies to read. Since I know I am always on the prowl for new reading material for my kids, I thought I'd share some of what my current baby loves to read.

Juniper is now 14 months old and while she was my slowest to warm to learning to read, she now LOVES looking at words on Little Reader, watching Meet the Sight Words and having me read to her. We read dozens and dozens of books a day, but she is, by far, my pickiest baby when it comes to books (and everything else). 

1. Roarr! - This book is unique in that it has slides, but makes sounds when you slide it. She loves it, but the downside is that it is short, so we end up reading the same thing again and again and again...
2. Jungle Sounds - This is another sound book, but a lot more complex. It goes through different sounds in the jungle, including animals and things like rain on the leaves. I am planning on getting her Garden Sounds and Seashore Sounds for Christmas.
3. Who's Swimming in the Ocean? - We have two in this series that we were able to find second hand and she loves them both!
4. Pop-Up Peekaboo! Unicorn - Ok, I have a love hate relationship with this book. Juniper adores it, but it is a little delicate for little hands. It has to live on a higher shelf so she doesn't have full access.
5. Noisy Farm: My First Touch and Feel Sound Book - a favorite for both Juniper and Archer
6. In the Jungle - As you open and close pages, the pictures "move" in this book. Juniper loved it so much, I ended up getting her In the Ocean and In the Night. All three currently get read daily.
7. Llama Llama Wakey-Wake - She loves all of the Llama Llama board books we have, so did Archer.
8. Zoom Zoom Baby! - While this is the current favorite, Juniper loves most of our Karen Katz flap books. Some are so well loved that there is tape on most of the flaps... 
9. Can You Make a Happy Face? - I discovered Rookie Toddler Board Books when Archer was little and we are fortunate to have quite a few now. Juniper loves them and he did when he was little. I like that most of them have nice clear text and pictures. We read several daily.
10. Hand Hand Fingers Thumb - We've had several Seuss books over the years, but this particular one has been a big favorite of all three of my babies. 
11. The Very Busy Spider - Juniper likes a few of the Eric Carle books, but this one is the favorite and gets read the most often. I think because of the animal sounds.

How to Keep Your Children Engaged when Homeschooling

 

Image credit

*This is a contributed post

You may assume that keeping a child's attention would be easier when homeschooling, versus when they are in a school setting. While in many scenarios this may be the case, there will still be challenges to overcome and consider. If you are currently homeschooling your child, or are thinking about doing so, then here are several tips on how you can keep your children more engaged when it comes to learning.

Utilize online learning tools

Thanks to the advancements in technology, there are now many online tools that have been built specifically to help engage with and teach children about a variety of different subjects. If you plan to homeschool your child then you should consider looking into, and using these online learning tools as they will not only make your life easier, but they have the potential to greatly increase your child’s engagement with the subject you are teaching them. From fun and interactive videos found on YouTube to lesson plans created by Learn Bright, you have a huge selection of free, and valuable online learning tools to choose from and explore.

Take regular breaks

In a regular school setting, although lessons are split up to help give the students time to mentally rest, and recharge, often the time given is still not adequate or often enough. At home however, you have the power, and choice to allow your children to take as many breaks as they need, so as to help them concentrate better during the time you wish to have their attention. After all, if you can teach your child for only 1 hour but with their full attention and engagement, the information that they absorb will be much more valuable to them than if you were to teach them for 3 hours and have little to no engagement or interest from them. During these breaks, you could allow them to read from books in your homeschool library so that they can still gently improve on general knowledge and reading skills.

Acknowledge how your children learn best

When you decide to homeschool your children, you allow yourself to teach your kids in a way that best suits you, and them. For example, some children learn better by watching and listening, while others will excel by doing. If you can acknowledge how your child learns best then you can utilize this information to help keep them engaged and interested while they are learning.

Explore the subjects that your children enjoy

Although you will need to produce a variety of subjects for your children to learn about when homeschooling, a great way of keeping the engagement levels high is by presenting them with as many subjects that they enjoy, or get excited about as possible. For the subjects that they have less of an interest in, you could always try to plan other lessons around them, or afterward, as an incentive to complete the trickier lessons.

There are a lot of different ways in which people homeschool their kids, and ultimately it is down to your own personal preferences in how you do it. However, if you are looking for ways in which to keep your children engaged, why not consider these top tips?

Adaptation Sorting Biome Activity

Since we're doing an Around the World curriculum for homeschool this year, I wanted to try to include some biome studies for science. However, I also want to make sure I hit the Next Generation Science Standards to keep my kiddo on track for if/when he goes to public school. Standard K-ESS3-1. asks students to  Use a model to represent the relationship between the needs of different plants and animals (including humans) and the places they live.

For each biome we will be reading about the animals that live there and their adaptations, but I made this activity to add a hands on component. I've included five different biomes with animals that live there and some of their adaptations. I opted to skip some of the biomes because the animals living there were likely to live in some of these also.

To make it a little more fun, I got out some of our Toobs and other animal figurines.

Polar/Tundra Biome

Desert Biome

 Ocean Biome

Temperate Forest Biome

Tropical Forest Biome

Print the Animal Adaptation Biome Sorting Activity here

 

Around the World Unit Studies: Spines and Supplements

 

I am so excited to begin Archer's first "official" year of homeschool. Since the kid has spent the last couple of years obsessed with world maps and flags, an "Around the World" curriculum was a no brainer. What was much MUCH harder was decided exactly which one. 

There are several available that all look very interesting and I spent HOURS reading through their descriptions, booklists and reviews.  Ultimately, I purchased two, Build Your Library Level 0: Around the World and Torchlight Level K Edition 2: Worldly Wisdom to use as book lists and a rough framework, but am changing them up quite a bit also. Both curricula have some excellent books, as well as discussion questions and ideas, so I am glad I purchased them. However, they also don't fit my learner in a lot of ways. We will be pulling in a LOT of other resources, as well as mostly doing our own thing for art, poetry and science.

**Note: For those of you new to the blog, Archer has been reading for years and is definitely not at a kindergarten level in most things. Also, this list is probably WAY too much for your average young elementary schooler. My kiddo loves this stuff and will probably prefer to read most of these over the fiction books for each region. We will adapt as we go. 

What I'm Keeping from BYL0 and TLK

• Order: Build Your Library goes through the world continent by continent, while Torchlight skips around. We're going to go continent by continent (and add in the oceans), mostly in the BYL order. We are going to add a few countries and do some combining though.
• Animal Profiles: BYL has an animal research component we will keep. I tweaked the animal profile page, though.
• Read alouds: we are keeping many of the BYL read aloud books. They tend to do a good job of linking to the countries. We will be adding in others I think might interest my son or fit the region better. TL has a lot of great ones, but we've already read most of them.
• Videos: Torchlight has a lot of YouTube links for the various countries and Build Your Library has some. We will likely watch a lot of these.

What I'm Skipping from BYL0 and TLK

• Poetry: after looking into the poetry offerings from both curricula, I decided neither would really interest my learner. Instead, we will be doing Poetry Tea Time as inspired by Brave Writer. I did purchase Around the World on Eighty Legs as a tie in.
• Art: I read reviews of the art involved with both and decided to go a different route. I did buy Around the World Art and Activities pretty cheap, but it mostly has papercrafts. We will do some, but I feel like learning to use a variety of media and techniques is more valuable, so I am going to attempt to focus on that (wish me luck, I am definitely not super artistic). BYL did just collaborate with Soul Sparklettes, so we may go that route.
• Science: Let me remind you that I am a former science teacher, so that colors my opinion on the topic. The science in BYL is pretty much the animal profiles and the science in TL is mostly from Big Science for Little People (and Zoey and Sassafras). The animal profiles seemed insufficient and I checked out Big Science for Little People from the library and it seemed a bit disjointed for what I wanted. Our science is going to have two major components that I am weaving together to feel somewhat cohesive. One set of lessons will cover the Next Generation Science Standards. First, because I believe in them for science literacy and second, because someday Archer might want to go to public school. The other set of lessons will cover the biomes of the world, including the weather, plants, animals and their adaptations. I will try to post what we do for both sets of lessons.
• Folklore Spines: We decided to skip A Year Full of Stories (TL), A Year Full of Animal Stories (BYL), and the McElderry's Book of Aesop's Fables (TL) because they are not my son's cup of tea. He is very concrete and logical, and often folktales are not. I just recently got him to start reading fiction at all. We will probably bring in some picture books for individual countries that I can get from the library, but purchase spines just to fight him on it did not seem worth it.
• Character: Torchlight includes a Building Character component, but the reviews of Mali and Keela indicated that it was not something my son would appreciate. Instead we will focus on SEL through other picture books and eeBoo Conversation Cards

Spines

Both Curricula have many great spines that we're using, but also many that we're opting to skip. I marked which curriculum each came from. I've added a lot of spines and supplements, but keep in mind that this is the kind of thing my son LOVES. We have been collecting these types of resources for a couple of years just for his enjoyment. Our library system also has a lot of these books.

**My hope is to make some YouTube videos showing the insides of lots of these books. I'll upload them as I make them.

Reference-y Type Spines

• Atlas of Adventures (TL)
• Atlas of Adventure Wonders of the World
• Atlas Obscura
• Where on Earth? Atlas
• Lift-The-Flap Picture Atlas
• Lonely Planet Amazing World Atlas by Lonely Planet Kids (BYL) 
• Barefoot Books World Atlas Sticker Book
• Children Just Like Me: A Celebration of Children Around the World by DK (BYL)
• Lonely Planet Kid Travel Book
• Lonely Planet Kids Flag Book
• Flag Sticker Atlas
• The Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth Probably a bit advanced for him to read in its entirety, but we will see. I will definitely be using the maps and relevant pages for biomes
• Prisoners of Geography: Our World Explained in 12 Simple Maps (Illustrated Young Readers Edition) Also probably a bit advanced for him, but we will try it and adjust as we go.
• Ultimate Sticker Book: Flags Around the World (BYL) We've already been through two of these, I'll probably have to buy another and hide it
• LeapFrog Magic Adventures Globe
• with World Cultures Expansion

More Spines

These are the less "reference-y" books that will still come up over various countries/regions, but are easier to skip. 

• This is How We Do It
• If You Lived Here: Houses of the World (TL)
• A Place Called Home
• A World of Gratitude
• Seek and Find Around the World
• Look Inside Great Cities
• What a Wonderful Word (TL)
• What a Wonderful Phrase
• What's On Your Plate? Exploring the World of Food
• Cooking Class: Global Feast by Deanna F. Cook (BYL)
• Around the World Mazes
• Lonely Planet Kids Adventures Around the Globe Activity Book

Animals Around the World Spines

I show the insides of these here.

• Atlas of Animal Adventures (TL)
• Our World in Pictures: The Animal Book
• Maps for Penguins

Supplements

These books and resources still cover a variety of places, but are harder to pin down to one. There's no one section devoted to one countries, rather they're mixed. I'll pull them out where they feel appropriate, fit the calendar date or when we have a lighter week.

• On the Same Day in March 
• Dumpling Day
• See Inside World Religions (may be too advanced for his interest, we will see and drop it if so)
• Maps of the World's Oceans
• Barefoot Books Children of the World
• Here and There: Learn About People here, there and everywhere
• Celebrations Around the World
• Holidays and Celebrations Shine a Light
• December Holidays Around the World
• Professor Noggin's Countries of the World Trivia Game
• The Sun Shines Everywhere
• A Drop Around the World
• Will you fill my bucket? : Daily Acts of Love Around the World

 

Note: Most of these were not purchased specifically for this school year. Most were gifts for my flag/map loving little guy over the last couple of years.

• World Map/Flag Puzzle
• eeBoo Children of the World Puzzle
• Around the World Toob
• World Landmarks Toob
• Flags of the World Board
• Flag Quiz Puzzle