Wooden Valley Homeschool Academy

I wanted to study more of Central America  before moving from Mexico to South America in Build Your Library.  I got the audiobook: Island Treasures   which is mostly set in Cuba and one of the early chapters talks about old an young coconuts, so we picked up one of each at the grocery store.  After googling videos on how to open each kind, we got them open and taste tested the water, young slime  I mean meat, and the old meat: Some other books we used: Tales Our Abuelitas Told Martina Martinez and Perez the Mouse: Cuba/Puerto Rico  Martina the Beautiful Cockroach Juan Bobo  Puerto Rica (and all over) For a great chapter book that includes many different Central America countries and family history, we loved  Salsa Stories The Jolly Mon With this book we also listed to this Jimmy Buffet song and some Bob Marley Music  More Books:  Dear Deer! Said the Turtle - Ca...

So we planned North America out so that we could be studying Mexico during Dia De Los Muertos  Some of the books we used:   Elena's Serenade This is a book about a girl who is told she cannot become a glass blower, so we also found some videos of glass blowing in Mexico on YouTube.  Grandmothers Song The Tooth Fairy Meets El Raton Perez Nino's Mask  Tortillitas para Mamá and Other Nursery Rhymes (Bilingual Edition in Spanish and English) Uncle Monarch and The Day of the Dead This pairs nicely with the Flight of the Butterfly documentary we watched when we learned about Canada: We also made a day of the dead altar craft from a book we got from the library and watched  Book of Life    while we ate some take-out Mexican food.  For another craft, we found paper flowers plans in a multicultural craft book I had: Basically we just raided the tissue paper gift wrap stash and cut blo...

So I LOVE organizing, I love sorting and filing and color coding and planning. But I am not so great at the implementing of the systems that I create or envision. I HAVE however found this workbox system to help a lot! I bought this organizer rack: This was easy to assemble and seems plenty sturdy enough for our purposes. I did insert the drawers in rainbow order because you gotta love Roy G. Biv! I love that it has 10 drawers for Ellie (7) and 5 bigger drawers for Penny (4) I can put a number puzzle in Penny's math drawer and assignments for Ellie in her matching color drawer. Penny's bins are larger to fit games and more toy-like activities. Red is Math Orange is writing and reading. I have her pick a few books she can read (mostly) on her own each Sunday. Green is science Blue is social studies/geography/history Purple is poetry and art. Since we have 2 of each color, I thought of having her put her finished work in the second drawer of each color, s...

Last olympics I was thinking how it would have beeen cool to turn it into a homeschool lesson. This book has taken the work out of all that for us!!  Winter Games Activity Book 

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Here are the things we did while studying Canada.  Fly Away Home  Map the migration to tie in to Canada/USA connections.  Watch Flight of the Butterflies  documentary  Map flight of the generations of monarchs  Studied monarchs further in various insect books  Read: The Butterfly Garden  This was great to show Relation of Canada USA and Mexico.  Make Maple syrup candy  The Christmas and Dance at Grandpas Chapters of Little House in the Big Woods and the Spring chapter of Birchbark House both talk of maple syrup harvest and maple sugar. This was perfect timing to tie in with learning about Canada.   Watched video of someone reading " Curious George Makes Maple Syrup" book.  CG Season 6 episode 7 is Maple Madness but we don't have Hulu and it's not on Netflix anymore.  Pancake day with real maple syrup  Tomie De Paola Pancakes for Breakfast book   " Snow " in water...

We found this book and got excited to find that Grandma travels the world similarly to "How to Make Apple Pie and See the World" we did in this post So after reading, it we changed out the map labels to go with this book. There was a handy chart in the back of the book that I photo copied for our map labels: We re-read the book and found the locations on our map and added the labels. The monarch butterfly sticker was added to Mexico when we watched Flight of the Butterflies ( which we watched again when studying Canada  The Statue of Liberty slider was added when we studied USA  *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