Australia unit

I made a pdf containing all the resources that I used for our Australia study couple of months ago.
Here it is

Texture city

This art activity was inspired by Texture Cities at Art Lessons for Kids. We simplified the activity a little bit. First we hunted around the house for some textured materials -felt, scraps of fabric of various textures, scraps of leather, different paper (wrapping paper for gifts, paper bags, tissue paper,paper towel), aluminum foil etc. Then D. drew the landscape using crayons- I only asked it to be a city and for details to be big enough and not to color them yet. After a small break D. picked out scraps of materials and a spot where to put each. I helped him trim scraps so they fit nicely. He glued them on and colored the rest using oil pastels. Some watercolor stains over the paper tower castle too :)

Our K curriculum

So, D. is done with Kindy! They had a sweet graduation ceremony at our co-op. We had a great year and so far, homeschooling works out terrifically for us. We signed up for another year at our co-op, which was wonderful. We got ESL support, found new friends and got a lot of helpful advice in general. One of the best parts is that our co-op loans the curriculum for the whole year, so I don't have to spend a lot of money on books and workbooks.

It was challenging for me to pick the curriculum last year because I wasn't quite sure what I was doing and what D. would really require. Some books that I picked were more useful, others less. The most useful of the huge pile that we had were the following:

TheWriting Spot by Writing Source

First Thesaurus(Words for Writing) by Ruth Thomson was and is the most helpful, we will keep using it for the first grade as well

We used D'Nealian for handwriting practice, plus Writing Without Tears (Letters and Numbers for me) for printing

In addition we used exercises with graphed paper (they are also very helpful for math practice). This activity is extremely popular in my country, I have yet to find English version. It's quite simple really- the parent dictates to a child who has his or her pencil and graphed paper ready- "move your pencil one square to the left/right/ up/down and so on", child proceeds to make a small picture out of it. Here are a few samples from the books that we use:

this one requires a child to finish the picture

this one asks the child to guess where will the bee go- to the garden, meadow or to the woods, here is the key:"start at the red dot: 5 squares to the right, 3 squares up, 6 squares to the right, 4 squares down, 3 -to the left, 2- up, 5 to the right, 1 up, 2 to the right, 2 down 5 to the right"

this one is used for "dictation" a parent reads instructions and the child draws : 1 to the left, 1 up,1 to the right, 1 up, 3 to the left, 1 down,1 to the right, 1 down, 1 to the left, 2 down, 1 to the left, 1 up, 1 to the left, 1 down,1 to the left, 2 down, 6 to the right, 4 up"

This activity is pretty easy to make up at home, all you really need is graphed paper and some imagination, oh and some time to prepare in advance. But this is a great game for a waiting room or a restaurant. My son adores it.

For the math we used Singapore Math and some Kumon workbooks

 I also supplemented with some math books from Russia, they are a bit more complicated than American ones, however D. enjoyed working with them and we will continue again next year.

Science...ah. Well we did use Scott Foresman a little bit, but what we mostly did was a lot of nature observations for which we used The Nature Connection book, of which I've written earlier.

 National Geographic Almanac was a huge help for various topics including, history, science and geography

We used  Gifted & Talented: Grade K Reading, Writing & Math (Flash Kids Gifted & Talented) workbook for a warm up and Active Minds Math for extra math practice.

We love our Brain Quest  cards, I'm considering their board game and workbooks as well

These were the basic texts from which we would go wherever our curiosity would take us. We read a lot of fiction and non-fiction too. Library is our favorite place on Earth.:) We did an insane amount of art for which thanks to all the wonderful bloggers out there we never out of ideas :) Some museum trips were great too.

***

We will continue doing school through the summer- D. begs to study together and I have a couple of topics to cover that we didn't have time to talk about. We will likely have another "staycation" it will help us to catch up on museum visits and exploration of local wonders.
Currently I'm busy trying to put together a decent curriculum for the first grade, which i hear is a lot more work than Kindy. We'll see. I'm also planning to make some downloadable documents of our culture/geography studies this past year.

Great movie

Disney Nature makes wonderful movies. We absolutely loved Oceans(I cried), the Earth is pretty amazing too, but today I wanted to mention another one.The first feature of Disneynature it is called The Crimson Wing:Mystery of the Flamingos . This movie talks about life cycle of flamingos and their amazing stay at the Tanzanian lake Natron. The cinematography absolutely breathtaking, the music by The Cinematic Orchestra  is amazing. There are, however, baby birds dying, so if your child is sensitive you might wanna prepare him or her, or even watch it by yourself beforehand to determine if your child can handle it. Mine could, I on the other hand bawled like a baby. :D

Music: