Homeschooling Semester 2

Our year of homeschooling has come to an end!  I am still surprised that we homeschooled.  I just wasn't something that was ever in our plan.  I will always be thankful for this year for many reasons, but mostly because it felt like a gift of time.  

I loved that we could take a walk around the neighborhood lake mid-morning,

 

and go out for lunch dates every now and then.  

I loved that we could take bike rides whenever we wanted, 

and take picnic lunches to new parks.

I think Reid and Georgia Kate grew closer during this year and they both definitely fell in love with reading.  

For my records, here is a breakdown of our curriculum for the second semester...

Reading Lessons and Read Alouds:  Both kids completed their All About Reading curriculum with about 3 weeks to spare!  Reid's program had 63 lessons and Georgia Kate's program had 54 lessons.  I am hopeful that this curriculum bridged the phonics gap from 1st and 2nd grade.  We finished the semester with a novel study on Stuart Little.  Our other read alouds for the semester were The Very, Very Far North, Toliver's Secret (which tied into our Revolutionary War study), and Henry Huggins.  

Writing:  We completed the writing process on another piece of realistic fiction and the kids each did a research paper on a marine animal to tie into our marine biology science unit.  

English:  writing and punctuating dialogue correctly, dictionary skills, comparatives/superlatives, conjunctions, helping and linking verbs, verb tenses, irregular past tense verbs, and prepositions.

Math:

Georgia - She completed her Math Made Fun curriculum. This semester covered graphs, time, money, measurement, and an introduction to multiplication.  She's also continued to work hard on memorizing addition and subtraction facts. 

Reid - We finished most of book 3B in his Singapore Dimensions curriculum.  I am going to give him a little break and then we are going to do one more chapter in July (area and perimeter) to make sure he's where he needs to be for next year.  This semester he worked on multiplication and long division, fractions, measurement, and geometry.  

Social Studies/History: Our big history unit of the semester was the Revolutionary War.  We spent most of our time on the Boston Tea Party and George Washington.  We also covered US symbols and landmarks.  The kids also mastered all of the states and capitals.   

Science: I am using different science units from The Good and the Beautiful.  This semester we did The Human Body (skeletal system, muscular system, respiratory system, circulatory system, nervous system, digestive system, urinary system, immune system, and integumentary system) and Marine Biology (ocean characteristics, ocean zones, tides and intertidal zones, coral reefs, marine invertebrates, marine reptiles, fish, sharks, and marine mammals).  The Human Body unit was really fun!  We went a little more quickly through Marine Biology, and only briefly touched on certain topics, but I think they enjoyed it. 

We all loved our hands-on science this year!

We also had an invention day and made catapults with Emersyn and Aubrey.  

We took two field trips with the Joneses too.  

Our first one was to the Houston Museum of Health.  The kids loved it!  

The second one was to NASA!  Rhett got to join us for this one!

Homeschool was so much more fun with these friends!  We did our own thing with our curriculum, but we made a point to meet up every week at a park. Then we celebrated with an end of year party at Altitude! 

When we wrapped up the year (officially on the same day Rhett finished preschool), I think we all felt proud and a little relieved. ;) We did it!