Wooden Valley Homeschool Academy

This year, Ellie got an "inventor" themed basket. Hot glue gun : Big roll of rope: Pulleys: (the rope fit the pulleys, which I almost did not think to be certain of) This book: plus Duck Tape: Scissors. And candy of course! Other ideas: tools, wire/cutters, motors and circuit sets, popcicle sticks, Penny got a writer/planner/scrapbook theme: Washi Notebook Stickers Scissors Colored pens (I highly recommend these colored pens, they write smooth and the retractable means no pen caps to lose!) More stickers This book (because "EB" wanted her to have it). and candy of course! Other ideas: actual planner (she already had one) planner accessories like bookmarks, charms, personalized cover etc. Both of these books are a homeschool moms dream! fun and exciting with opportunities to learn history, geography and stem! I may do a series of blog posts about what we did with the stories to expand on the books. *any amazon links are my affili...

Ellie is taking an enrichment class this term and the first 2 lessons were about flight, Amelia Earhart and the Wright Brothers, so we pulled out some flight books to read this week. Amelia Earhart: Courage in the Sky (Women of Our Time) Talkin Bout Bess: The Story of Aviator Bessie Coleman Amelia Who Could Fly This book, a fictionalized story of Amelia Earhart's childhood until her first flight, was available through overdrive: Amelia Earhart: Young Air Pioneer (Young Patriots series Book 1) Ellie and Penny have listened to it multiple times, (they LOVE audio books). Quick pic I snapped while she was "in" class We also found there is an "Air of the Wolf" unit in her Cub Scouts curriculum book so at the den meeting that week, the scouts all folded paper airplanes and learned more about how air works. (no pics of that, sorry) Then a week or so later, by sheer luck or homeschool magic, the Evergreen Air and Space museum hosted a ho...

Penny, my 4 year old, loves writing but hasn't figured out "sounding out words" for spelling yet so she constantly asks "how do you spell..." So I made her a name book with photos of her favorite people. Plan #1 was to make photos on my phone with names under using a photo collage/edit option and print the pictures at Walgreens and either punch for rings or slip into a small photo album. Then I saw these " picture plates " at Lakeshore Learning Store and decided to use my new Sprocket. I prefer Home-made, hand written, and diy style educational supplies vs everything being ready made, computerized etc so this plan appealed to me, plus I can can easily add to it without going back to Walgreen's. Supplies: Photo/name plates Or you could just use notecards.  A way to bind them, Since I have a arc style punch , I opted to use some  Happy Planner Discs that I had leftover from old planners.  But you can use something like ...

We are loving the Harry Potter Build Your Library Unit study .  We started with The Sorcerer's Stone of course The unit study includes making a reference book of Magical Devices, starting with the Put-Outer There are carefully selected copywork and dictation activities. I used a free worksheet generator to make copywork pages for the selections.  After learning about what Knickerbock Glories are, we decided to write our own recipes: Then made some with ingredients we had on hand, (you know for educational purposes) We did later buy the Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook  which has recipes for this and many other treats  one day, some letters arrived via owl to invite the kids to listen to the next chapter.  I found one of many "hogwarts letter envelope template"s off of the google.  And then Ellie learned how to address an envelope by practicing Harry's address in the cupboard under the stairs.  ...

I was inspired by a chapter in Children of the Noisy Village and it being chick season (and seeing chicks at the farm supply store) to do a egg/chick unit study. We got some books from the library: A Chick Grows Up by Pam Zollman and  Hatching Chicks in Room 6 by Caroline Arnold coloring the chick life cycle pictures. Checking out the membrane looking for the chalazae We printed some free coloring pages , label egg parts   label chicken parts and life cycle pages from the google, and watched Magic School Bus Cracks a Yolk .  (also on Netflix ) We of course had to crack open some eggs to examine (and cook them for dinner). Since the air pocket is on the big end, we were careful to crack in the middle to be able to examine the air pocket. This is a great video about how chicks breathe on YouTube Ellie also got out her microscope and remembered she had a foul feather slide in one of her sets and examined it. *any amazon li...

I decided for the sake of my own thought process, to split South America into sections. We started in the Amazon Rain Forest. (we later moved to the Andes mountains) The BYL curriculum has a lot of the stories we read when we focused on Central America listed for literature, so I wanted to find something else for the Amazon. Here is what we did: We LOVED Journey to the River Sea  Which is a great story of an English orphan girl sent to live with a relatives in Menaus on the Amazon River. I found  this free discussion guide  to go along with the book. Read: Magic Tree House Afternoon on the Amazon Which was a great quick introduction to the layers of the rain forest and a few animals, but the storyline was meh. Somewhere I learned that Pink River Dolphins are a think and only live in the Amazon, so we got some books from the library Journey of the Pink Dolphins Pink River Dolphins (Jungle Babies of the Amazon) (this was a great simple book th...