By the time our school year finishes on June 24th we will have been homeschooling for almost 15 weeks (not including two school week-long - breaks where they didn't officially have work, but we still did some activities).
Since this blog is meant to capture our memories I don't want to forget the time that was spent together with the girls homeschooling them. I will be dividing the posts into five-week increments to capture a small glimpse into the types of activities we've been doing together and how the girls have been learning.
Our school runs an IB curriculum from the lower primary years through to graduation. Our topics are divided into a Unit of Inquiry, Language, and Mathematics. Madison's schedule was laid out relatively straight forward (with some adjustments as they've figured out the balance for workload), but the twins had more flexibility so I took time to make a schedule for them incorporating those topics and using activities provided by the school and some of my own from time-to-time.
When we started homeschooling Madison was in the middle of finishing a Unit of Inquiry (UOI) where they were Researching foods. She did some research into how things go from the field to our plate and did some practical applications like making ice cream and eggs. Afterwards she moved onto a UOI called "How the World Works" where they did two experiments a week and looked as things like writing a hypothesis and a conclusion. In mathematics they started looking at place value and grouping things into tens. Her Language has been a combination of descriptive writing assignments, observations and reflections from stories and pictures, and learning about sentence components. She also joined her sisters activities if she was done with her schoolwork or had been working diligently.
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| Madi making scrambled eggs |
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| Making ice cream in a jar |
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| Blackberry scones! |
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| They made slime! |
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| Ribbon dancing |
Slow-mo video of hand washing/germ experiment
Evelyn and Olivia have been doing a Unit of Inquiry around art. The started by looking at colors and how they mix, how we can relate colors to emotions and how art can make us feel, and then they spent weeks looking at different artists and their techniques. The mathematics for them has included shapes, number and pattern recognition. For Language they have been practicing their names, going through the sounds of the alphabet, and working on associating objects and pictures with sounds for reading.
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| Car tunnel activity |
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| Exploring types of lines |
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| Car park number recognition |
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| Mini volcanoes |
Time-lapse volcano experiment
This is just a bit of what we covered in the first few weeks of homeschooling / online learning with the girls. It's definitely had its ups and downs and has been a learning process for all of us, including the school. Thankfully we have a great support system in the teaches and counselor and staff that have helped to make things manageable for our family. Stay tuned for the next few weeks of activities. :-)
