Dogwood Forest Creek School

Gus is taking a nap for the first time in two or three weeks! It took him forever to fall asleep, but he had just nearly fallen asleep in the car, so I knew he could use the sleep and I waited him out. Now I'll probably have to wake him up when it's time to leave for gymnastics in a little while. But anyway, I don't know what to do with myself now, so I thought I'd take a few minutes to update.

Most all of my books are here for next year's history--think I have enough?


Now I need to go through and make a schedule so that we actually get all these books (or, well, at least most of them) read. For projects/crafts type stuff, I bought several books from the American Kids in History series. There are, as far as I can tell, a total of seven from different periods of history. For next year I bought Civil War Days, Wild West Days, Victorian Days, and World War II Days. The format for each is that it follows a fictional family or two through a year, with recipes, crafts, games, etc. sprinkled throughout. After looking through them, the projects seem to be a good match for my kids' ages and interests. They also mostly have to do with ordinary life in the time period--what the kids might have done--which is what I'm trying to focus on. So I'm tentatively optimistic about those--I went ahead and ordered the Revolutionary War Days book, in fact, to try out this year.

And now I do indeed need to go wake the Guster up to take him to gymnastics (and he missed dinner (such as it was--nachos), so I guess he can stuff himself full of graham crackers on the way). I think I will save and finish later!

Okay, now I'm back. Science: I conquered my fears about needing to do lots of planning and bought Bernard Nebel's Building Foundations for Scientific Understanding. And then I decided to go ahead and start it, rather than waiting until next year...since our science hasn't been super organized anyway and we can keep on doing The Elements at the same time. We did the first lesson (on categorizing and organizing) yesterday, and so far I'm a little bit in love. The kids were very interested and focused the whole time. We talked about how things are organized (our schoolroom, the kitchen, the grocery store) and why (what would happen if things weren't organized into categories at the grocery store?). Then I gave them a basket full of assorted stuff from around the house for them to sort into categories. They spent a long time, worked together beautifully, and came up with one system. Then we talked about other possibilities. Anyway, it all went very well, and I'm excited about it. It's supposed to be a K-2 book (with a 3-5 book planned for later), so Ari's at the top end of that range, but I think it will work well for him--although some of the stuff will be review since we have managed to do some science over the past couple of years ;). The next lesson I'm planning is on solids, liquids, and gases, which we've covered pretty thoroughly this year, so we'll go through that quickly.

And in other science news, we went to the Fernbank Museum of Natural History with Nana and Grandpa when they were here for Thanksgiving, and decided to go ahead and buy a membership. We actually had a membership when we first moved here, but didn't use it much since the kids weren't really old enough. But they loved it this time--we didn't even get to half of the exhibits--so I think it will be a good investment. It's a pretty big hike from our house, but close to our church, so we're going to try to go some Sunday afternoons. Pictures: