Let the crisp September, coffee on the front porch mornings begin! This time of year is the perfect time to start studying the leaves, and their changes with the season! Below you will find resources for teaching about he leaves and how to incorporate your very own backyard into your lessons. A good place to start is teaching how and why the leaves change color. Here is a great visual aid from Science Bob (if you don't already, go follow him on facebook he has excellent resou

What is the Skeletal System? You have a skeleton inside of your body (endoskeleton) made up of bones. Insects and crustaceans have skeletal systems on the outside or their bodies (exoskeletons) that are made of hard plates. Biology4kids.com does a great job illustrating the importance of our skeleton: Your bones or skeletal system gives shape and form to your body, but it also plays other important roles. The main functions of the skeletal system include: Support—the skeleton

This week we are learning about the different layers of soil! What is soil? Soil is the part of the earth’s surface comprised of disintegrated rock and humus that provides the medium for plant growth. The development of soil takes time, between hundreds and thousands of years, and consists of diverse materials which are both inorganic and organic. The inorganic materials are the non-living aspects of the soil such as minerals and rocks while the organic materials are the livi

Having a pen pal helps promote many key developmental skills. Sure we can hop online any time and be in contact with someone from the other side of the world, but having a snail mail pen pal has it's perks too! The most obvious skills practiced with sending and receiving letters in the mail are reading and writing. This is a great opportunity to focus on practicing punctuation, capitalization, and long hand writing as in not short cutting phrases like "that was funny" into "L

This week we started learning about the Moon, and it's 8 phases! Here are the 8 phases, in order: New moon (no moon) > Waxing Crescent > First Quarter > Waxing Gibbous > Full moon > Waning Gibbous > Last (or 3rd) Quarter> and finally >Waning Crescent. Teaching this can be a tad tricky for some, as it is hard to decipher the phase when looking at black and white diagrams. One thing that helped us is to realize that the moon is actually the lit or white part depicted in the pic

Today we learned about Pablo Picasso and tried out some cubism style self portrait art! It was a blast they really enjoyed it! We watched a short video about Pablo Picasso, you can watch it here: After the video we set up our table, to include a mirror so they could see themselves to paint! Once they were finished with their paintings we let them dry a bit and then came back to cut them up into shapes. Finally we pasted them down out of order! Some paintings we studied: The W

Overview: Curriculum from Oak Meadow *Disclaimer- This is not the full curriculum. It is available for purchase at www.oakmeadow.com this blog simply is a way for us to keep track of supplements we use, and may be helpful to others using the same curriculum. Language Arts: Monday Finish reading Heidi Create a story board of Heidi Wednesday Work with spelling words Add new journal entry Friday Take spelling quiz Social Studies: Tuesday Research and draw state symbols Explain