Wooden Valley Homeschool Academy

 When I saw the bonus lesson in A River of Voices by Blossom and Root for the Golden Age of Piracy, I got excited!  We decided to spend a good few weeks reading pirate books, watching pirate movies and documentaries and doing some pirate crafts.  I decided to keep us in pirate mood, I would decorate our kids craft shelves on theme.  We had the pirate treasure chest and Jake Pirate toy. The Lego Pirate ship was something my husband had put together. We added a globe, some treasure (mardi gras beads, and some old casino chips we had) and some sea shells. I made pirate word cards  (free printable PDF) and bought the flag bunting for an added touch. So our kid pirates can trade dubloons for shells or jewels, or just compare weights of our treasures we added a balance scale .  The main book that we used was Who Was Blackbeard   and we used the unit study from Waldock Way that goes with it and  Pirates by John Matthews   This was a wealth of knowledge and we spent a lot of time looking

While I prefer an unschool attitude with our "teaching style" I still like to keep track of things we have done, goals for doing things, and ideas for expanding on topics. This I wanted my planner to have: Flexibilty Weekends Expandability Sturdy Color Customization to change with time. Not TOO bulky and flip around flat like a spiral (not a 3-ring binder) Here is how I semi-homemade my homeschool lesson planner. This planner allows me to show plans and structure to our home learning charter school guide and keep track of To-Do's for the school requirements I looked at the teacher version of the Happy Planner but opted for the non-teacher version since I wanted weekends and didn't need many of the schooly stickers and inserts. I opted for the BIG Happy Planner  vs the Classic size since it's already 8.5x11 and I can easily add regular size printed or copied or notebook papers. I took the vertical HP and divided the 3 daily sections into mo

To finish up our Harry Potter Unit Study we enjoyed chocolate frogs and watched the movie. I bought the molds here.  *any amazon links are my affiliate links, if you buy anything after visiting my links I might get a very small commission, this does not cost you any extra

We have done a few dinosaur studies over the last year. One of the Wolf rank optional requirements for Cub Scouts is a study of dinosaurs. We watched a lot of Dino Dan and Dino Dana, and used the resources in this TPT unit: Most recently, we went to this store: Prehistoric   in Lincoln City on our vacation. In addition to lots of fossils, and animatronic dinos, they have a fossil dig and geology sluicing activity. A few days later was Paleontology day at Ballyntyne Learning Farm Teacher Kiely did a lesson on how fossils form over millions of years and how Paleontoligists find dig and study fossils. After examining some real fossils, we went on a hike up the hill at the farm, found some real deer bones (likely left from a cougar meal) to examine and found dig sites Kiely had set up ahead of time: kids found multiple "fossils" at their dig site. Here is another blogger post about making them at home. On the walk, kids gathered leaves, sticks and pieces of