EternaLearning Academy

We are working our way through the Fiesta! series of books about the world. So far, we have been to Argentina, Bolivia, and Colombia. Now we are on China. I was going to do a D country, but he LOVES China so I figured we would do his favorite things for now. His Ti-Ti helped me find China-centric stories in a series called “Historical Tales”. He is already engulfed in them.

I was able to find this fantastic book series divided by grade levels. I borrowed it from the library, then decided it would be worth buying so I did. The book is What your third grader needs to know. I also purchased the next book in the series, so we are totally covered.

Problem: scheduling. There is a lot to cover. Some things are easy, but others are not. I hate making him learn things he isn’t interested in, so I am trying to make sure that I keep the learning relevant to his interests. For instance, we can study haiku to cover poetry right now. We can study geography through China, history of China, and social & cultural studies also through China. If I can continue to keep things unit centric, I think we will be just fine.

SOOO I sent in our Letter of Intent to the school district in our area on the evening of March 30th, but I know it didn’t go out till the 31st. They have 10 days to reply, so I am waiting. In the meantime, I have to figure out my IHIP (Individualized Home Instruction Plan) so I can have it in the envelope ready to go when I get the reply that they received the LOI. I have it in my head, but putting it on paper may be a different story.

I have begun using the free Homeschool Tracker program, but it’s so not my style. I have decided to probably pick up the notebooking method more since I already know how many hours a day we do formal school and how many hours we do an unschooling thing. It’s insane to me since Jersey had NO paperwork at all. *sigh* Gotta do what I gotta do.

We got my son into a lego club at the local library. They build something within an hour at the library, then name it and put it on display for 2 weeks. Pretty awesome. Here is his first creation called “The Warehouse”:

My husband and Taz started talking about something on tv, which turned into a conversation about diamonds, which lead to a conversation about what to use them for including teeth, which ran into the comment my husband made about how people used to have teeth made from ivory and even from wood. I began looking up pictures of wooden dentures, which lead me to the story of George Washington and his not-so-wooden-teeth, which lead us to information on hippopotamus ivory, which none of us had ever heard about before… Gotta love learning!

I was able to combine a whole slew of skills into one time consuming activity: making a chart.

We were able to take a survey online of what favorite zoo animals people liked. Then we gathered the information, calculated the results, put them in graph form on paper, transferred the results to the computer…and VOILA a masterpiece! We had to do the math for the measurements of the page we did to make sure that everything fit, too. Here is the computer version of what the results were: