Tag Archives: sixth grade homeschool

Pete learns to Stonewall, and Poppy dissects a paragraph

09/09/2016 Nichole 2 Comments

Every semester there’s a week when I say “What have I done? We are so over-scheduled.” Welcome to that week. All but one of our not-at-home homeschooling activities has started, and it’s going to take me a week or two to figure out how to juggle our at-home work with the kids’ outsourced classes, sports and other activities.

Here’s a bit of what we did get done this week:

Language Arts

We’re in the final third of “The Secret Garden,” Poppy is reading “Where the Red Fern Grows” for her literature study and Pete is reading both “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” and “The Last Dragon Charmer #2: The Quest Maker.” (Also: I am reading “John Quincy Adams: American Visionary” by Fred Kaplan, and Rockford is reading Stephen King’s “It.”)

For a kid who’s never really had homework before (or who has only had homework, if you want to look at it that way), Poppy has quite a bit of homework this weekend for her writing class. She’s working on finding the key ideas in a paragraph and then rewriting said paragraph in her own words.

Pete’s adventures in spelling have been pretty well documented here. He’s working with a spelling tutor this year. They just started, but he’s having fun with it so far. I am ever hopeful that this will be the key for him.

Math

Poppy is taking a math test this very moment. She’s been drawing angry faces at the end of every long division problem for the past two weeks, if that gives you an indication of how well she and math are getting along.

Science

This week Pete learned about the sun, did some review and wrapped things up with a science test and a project. The test didn’t go so well — there was a lot of vocabulary matching, and the difference between a meteoroid, a meteorite, a comet and an asteroid tripped him up a bit — but the project was interesting. We made a pinhole viewer out of cardboard, tape and aluminum foil, then we used it to calculate the diameter of the sun. We were around 63,000 miles off in our calculations, though. Perhaps our measurements weren’t entirely accurate.

Poppy’s Earth Science class has been studying minerals for the past couple of weeks. She’s had a little bit of homework every week, and she’s done a good job getting it done without having to rush to do it right before class.

History

The kids listened to their “Story of the World” chapter at the beginning of the week, and then we didn’t do history for the rest of the week. We’ll be revisiting this week’s chapter next week.

Extracurricular

Poppy is taking a lot of extra tae kwon do classes in an effort to be able to test for her red-black belt next month. She also has soccer practice three times a week, and she has two games this weekend.

Pete started a beginner chess class this week, and he loved it. The instructor is a Life Master, and he is very enthusiastic and engaging. Pete has been practicing The Stonewall Attack every day.

Wanna read more about homeschooling? Check out the Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers weekly linky thing!

Homeschool

When your homeschooling isn’t so much at home

08/26/2016 Nichole

Most homeschooling families I know eventually reach a point when a majority of their homeschooling isn’t actually taking place in their homes because they’re involved in multiple co-ops or super-active in extracurriculars or doing Classical Conversations or taking dual-enrollment courses at local colleges. We aren’t quite there yet, but this week featured multiple appointments, a couple short-term classes for Poppy, soccer practices and a lot of tae kwon do. It definitely felt like we were away from home more than we were there this week.

Even with all the busyness, we were able to get all of our schoolwork done this week. I give the kids a lot of credit for that. They were up and ready to work every day. (Well, except for today. Poppy was pretty wiped out after two soccer practices and five tae kwon do classes over four days, so she decided to take the day off.)

Reading

Our current read-aloud is “The Secret Garden,” which Pete is enjoying despite his early reservations about it. Poppy started reading “Where the Red Fern Grows” for her literature study this week, and I’m reading it along with her. For his assigned reading, I gave Pete a book I’d picked up for Poppy that she never read. Laurie McKay’s “Villain Keeper” is the first book in a trio called “The Last Dragon Charmer,” and Pete asked me to order book two for him before he’d finished it.

Memorization

The kids are working on memorizing all the counties in our state this year. They finished the first 10 this week.

Math

In an odd turn of events, Poppy did her math without complaint this week while Pete was… less than eager to tackle his work.

Science

This week Pete and I learned about the planets in our solar system. Much time was spent mourning poor Pluto. Today we put together a “planetary bracelet” using string and beads to illustrate the distance between the planets. Marsha T. Cat attacked the solar system while we were stringing it together, and now it’s hanging above the windows in the living room where she can’t get to it.

History

Our “Story of the World” chapter this week discussed Matthew Perry’s negotiations with Japan and also the Crimean War. Volume Four of SOTW asks the students to make an outline of each chapter. It’s been a bit of a struggle to get Pete to do that, so we’ve walked through it together thus far. The mapping sections are also considerably more challenging than they were in Volume Three.

The activity we chose this week was to create a five-day “Medical Record” of a family member, because Florence Nightingale pioneered the use of medical records during the Crimean War. We did not manage to keep it up for five days.

Extracurricular

I believe I mentioned that Poppy went to so many tae kwon do classes? She’s aiming to test for her red-black belt in October, so we should have many more such weeks in our future. She also had her first soccer game of the year this evening. Her team won 2-1! It was an auspicious start to the season.

Wanna read more about homeschooling? Check out the Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers weekly linky thing!

Homeschool

What sixth grade looks like at our house

07/27/2016 Nichole 1 Comment

Way back when Poppy started kindergarten, I couldn’t believe she was already 5 years old. Now she’s about to turn 11, and the more things change the more things stay the same because when we start school in a few weeks she’ll be a middle schooler and I am once again in awe at how quickly the years go by.

Poppy was interested in trying public school out this year, but I was hesitant to drop my always-homeschooled kid into a 700-student middle school. We put her name in the hat for a couple of charter schools, but she didn’t get in to either of them. She was perfectly fine with that. She’s still going to get a very small going-to-school experience this year, though, as we’ve signed her up to spend three hours every week taking classes at a place downtown.

Social Studies

Poppy and Pete will be doing “Story of the World: Volume 4“ together. Last year I bought the audiobook, and the kids enjoyed listening to it in the car on the way to co-op. We’ll do the same this year. I’m sure I’ll also lament the number of hands-on projects that we actually do this year, too.

One of Poppy’s outsourced classes is Civilization and Culture. They’re going to spend the first semester focused on Community and Recreation — the description says they’ll talk about things like the Library of Alexandria and how baseball was invented. It sounds like it’ll be a fun class.

I bought the kids a couple of ginormous “Map Skills” workbooks last year. We’ll continue working through a couple of those each week.

Math

Poppy will be finishing up McRuffy Math 5 for the first part of the school year, and I’m not sure what she’s going to do after that because there is no McRuffy Math 6. I’ve looked at more traditional programs (Horizons, the web-based Monarch curriculum) as well as more fanciful options (Beast Academy, “Life of Fred”), but I haven’t settled on anything yet. The good news is that I have a few months to continue mulling it over.

Language Arts

I’m still trying to get myself to pull the trigger on the next level of Michael Clay Thompson books. The kids enjoyed them and they retained a lot of information, but it’s a very expensive curriculum.

Poppy will most likely do a few Reed Novel Studies books again this year. She doesn’t love it, but they help her to slow down and pay attention to what she’s reading.

We’re outsourcing Poppy’s writing this year with an Institute for Excellence in Writing class. It looks like she’ll have a good bit of homework from this one, which will be a new experience for both of us.

Science

Poppy’s other outsourced class this year is Earth Science.

Art & Music

The piano lessons shall continue. For art, I’m thinking about using Kahn Academy’s art history lessons.

P.E.

Poppy is going into the school year as a red belt, and she’s aiming to test for her next belt before 2017. She’s playing soccer again this year, too, and the league she’s playing in this year includes a few tournaments and away games.