I truly enjoy blogging and sharing our homeschool story here in this space. I try to share the things that work as well as the things that don’t work. But I was recently thinking about how nice it would be for there to be an encouraging digital homeschool magazine that would be a great resource for those interested in homeschooling in the future, those new to the homeschooling thing as well as those who have been at it for a long time. So, as with most things, I decided to make one! Well, kind of. I would like to make one with your help! I am looking for homeschoolers to…
The Best Pirate Books – Picture Books & Non-Fiction
We’ve been learning all about pirates for the last week in preparation for Talk Like a Pirate Day and of course I had to share a pirate book list! This list includes a bit of everything, picture books, chapter books, fiction and non-fiction. If you are interested in continuing to learn about pirates you can check out a list of the resources we used for our pirate unit study here. We did everything from drawing pirates to creating pirate names, to watching videos about why they actual wore eye patches and of course: reading pirate themed books! Check out the pirate mini unit study resources. Now, on to the…
Pirate Mini Unit Study Resources
One of the units I had on my list to study this year was pirates. And since September 19th is Talk Like a Pirate Day I thought we would learn about them leading up to that day. We’ve only done a few unit studies so far this year but this one was our favorite one yet. Pirates are a fun topic to study but it does involve a fair amount of weeding through fact and fiction. The kids totally got into pirate mode and dressed up in some old Halloween costumes. There are so many great books, videos and resources for a pirate study, we could have studied the…
Fantasy Book Recommendations For Elementary and Middle Grades
I was not a fantasy reader as a child and boy, do I ever feel like I missed out! I wasn’t even a fantasy reader as an adult until recently! I spent the last few years reading some elementary and middle grade fantasy to proof read for my kids and it really hasn’t been until this last year or so that I’ve started to get into older fantasy and I am really enjoying the books! I love that fantasy gives the characters purpose (some version of fighting the darkness) and isn’t so woe-is-me like other books can tend to get (obviously I’m generalizing here). My daughter has been a huge…
Weather Mini Unit Study Resources
We’ve been continuing with our Monday mini unit studies in as part of our homeschool rhythm and our next topic of study was weather! I actually gave the kids the option between butterflies and weather and this is what they both chose. I was actually surprised by that choice. Weather is a broad topic and we definitely didn’t cover everything in one afternoon but we learned some stuff we didn’t know and that’s kind of the goal here. Little bits of learning all add up! I gathered all the books I had from the library on weather as well as ones we had around the house and we…
How I Plan Our Homeschool Year Without a Curriculum
When sharing about our homeschool rhythm a few weeks ago I mentioned that I wanted to write a post about how I plan our year without a curriculum and I got a few online and in-person questions and comments on how I do it so here it is! When people find out that we homeschool and that our school division has zero curriculum requirements I can see the looks of concern and worry start to creep up on their faces. If I know homeschooling is not something they are interested in ever doing I’ll usually be quick to appease their fears by letting them know that I have my degree…
