The Nile

One thing I have learned is that Micki loves history and science. I think, in part, it's because I can make those subjects a little more hands on. Of course, the more modalities you can include, the more the student can learn and remember. Also, because she is still very concrete thinking at her age, concrete things make more sense.

Therefore, we made the Nile River and flooded it. We had talked about the delta, and so, she knew that we needed to make a triangle at one end. Yes, I know that the Nile does not have a foil river bed, but I'm not God! We planted some "crops" which did start to grow after the flood started to dry up. The problem came from the fact that we live in the Midwest and the Nile River got flooded two more times and had to fight lows of 40s!

We move along a little slowly...we're still in Egypt. Once we finish talking about mummies and pyramids a little more, on to Sumer we'll go. What has been really cool is that the geography we are learning for Classical Conversations currently goes right along with what we've been learning.

Earth Science in the Kitchen

Welcome to a science project. Micki is studying the earth and this cake shows the layers of the earth.

The center was hard almond bark because the inner core is solid.

Next level is the Outer Core. It's melted metals.

Next level is the Mantle which is melted rock.

The last level is the crust where we live.

We came up with a little sing-song to help remember:

Inner Core, Outer Core, Mantle, Crust, this are the levels of the earth I trust,

Inner Core, Outer Core, Mantle, Crust, you live here with the rest of us!

Not only was it a fun review, but it made a dessert for the Classical Conversations Back-to-School Picnic!

My start at blogging about homeschool

With all the wonderful homeschool blogsites available, I choose instead to do mine on Blogger. Since I have other blogs on this site, I just assumed that it would be easier. Also, I feel "unworthy" to really blog about homeschool since I'm not an expert schooling 7 children at once while developing my own curriculum and working on my own website and speaking at homeschool conventions.

So, I blog here. I plan to share some of my good ideas and finds, some awesome articles I occasionally come across, and Micki stories, of course.

Micki is currently 4 1/2...well, more like 4 3/4. She will be doing 1st grade work this year. Having a 4 3/4 year old doing 1st grade work has it's challenges since she's socially & emotionally at one level and academically at another. Thankfully, in the state of Missouri, you are not required to keep track of hours until the child is 7, so this will free me up to accomplish things in bite-size pieces for her and still get a 1st grade quality education.

We are going to teach Micki using the Classical model of education. The Well-Trained Mind is our inspiration and basic guideline, but if you know me, you know that I'm more than willing to adapt, edit, enrich, etc. to anything I teach.

Micki currently has or will have this extra-curricular activities: Classical Conversations, piano, ballet, and gymnastics. Classical Conversations and piano are the only two activities that I'm going to need to work around, but I think it will work.