Wednesday, February 25, 2009

The Books Arrived

After several weeks of trying to get me head around history and literature this year - we might, maybe have a solution. If we have I like it. Really like it. Its simple, it involves them tailoring their learning. It gets them reading, and I get to explore my own personal rabbit trails again.

Simply - They each read on from where they are notebook what they are interested in - keep a time-line and share with each other at the end of the day what they are learning. The Story of the world is to be our spine, or base book. From there they have each grabbed a history encyclopedia/ text and I'll feed them a steady stream of living books to keep it interesting/ provide maps to fill in and grab out any Veritas projects or source documents that seem appealing. So far I have steered away from ordering the activity guides. Mainly because we enjoy good stories, notebooking, and thinking activities but colouring sheets and questions we can do without. The kids like to organize thier own hands on projects and I like the idea of being able to turn some of the thinking over to them.

Literature is an easy maybe you want to try this as we traavel along. When life calms down I can add in read alouds but not yet. Maybe just wet day stories.

If it works I'll share the best of what they come up with, if it doesn't I'll rethink this again next week.



The photo is from one of the first mission houses in NZ - we did a lot of early history while in Northland over summer. The earlier one at the printers was the Catholic contingent. Both brought literacy to the Maori people either in terms of Maori bibles or local history.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

When my kids were small, we would sit down together and read the whole spine for the year--straight through. Sometimes we cuddled on the sofa, but usually it was while they ate their lunch.

The rest of the year we used library books, book lists, and whatever materials I could bring together and they were allowed to choose whatever interested them. It sounds a little like what you are doing.

My kids knew more history at 8th grade than I knew when I graduated from college.

:)JEan