Starting Grade 1

Charlotte finished up all her kindergarten work by the end of May, and we've just been checking off a few, random topics that we maybe have delved into with enough detail (I'm looking at you, health and fitness), but with most of those now completed, and her year-end review happening next week, we decided to…

This Week in Science… Flowers!

Charlotte and Orson love flowers. It's the sweetest thing when Orson comes in with a clutch of buttercups for me, or Lewis, or even Nana! So they've been enjoying our observations and readings about flowers this week. We're using REAL Science Odyssey: Life 1 (RSO) to cover our Life Science Prescribed Learning Outcomes in BC…

Bouncy Pouncy, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun!

We're wrapping up our week of gravity and black holes! The last few chapters of A Black Hole is Not a Hole don't really lend themselves to hands-on experiments, but we were able to pull one experiment out of chapters 4 and 5, looking at how light moves. We started by reading those chapters and…

The Crushing Defeat of Gravity

Black holes are kind of hard to explain to a six-year-old, or a 33 year old long out of university, but A Black Hole is Not A Hole is doing a good job of it. We read chapters two and three, which talked about how black holes are formed following the death of some stars,…

Blast Off!

We've met all our learning outcomes for science this year (and then some!) and Charlotte is interested in moving on to study space, which is part of our Grade 1 curriculum. We're waiting for all the new books to make their way to us, either ones we've purchased, or ones from our school resource library,…

A View of Death in the Morning

We've been knee-deep in dead people for the past month, well, more like the past year to be honest. No fresh ones, no, our dead people are thousands and millions of years old, and Charlotte has been fascinated with the ancient dead since we watched a documentary (Sky People) on PBS about a year ago.…

Organizing our library

We have a lot of books; it's a problem a lot of homeschoolers have. To be honest, we would have a lot of books even if we didn't homeschool, since Lewis and I love to read, and both of the kids have inherited that love of literature. But we're getting to the point where I'll…

Our Top Nature Apps for Homeschooling

We do a lot of birdwatching in our house. It's a love that was passed down to my mother from her father, she passed it onto me, and I've passed it onto Charlotte and Orson. As soon as I mention that there are birds outside, they stealthily rush up to the kitchen window to peer…

Failing to get caught

Everything I read about fostering reading and a love of reading in your children seems to include a section on how important it is for your children to see you reading. I often wonder if the people who write these books and articles have small children of their own.  I find it incredibly hard to…

Another meringue fail

I suffered another meringue fail today. First, we had no icing sugar so I had to grind some in my food processor but I couldn’t find the lid for my Mini Prep, and I find the blade on my big processor isn’t as good for making icing sugar. Second, Orson was yelling at me the…