A few new ideas!

Today is a snow day, for most this means a free day, but for me it means a full day of planning. I try to plan out unit studies and lesson ideas on snow days, when I have no baby to feed and settle into a nap, and no kids to keep quiet or busy. I have been doing my usual wander through different websites I like, finding ideas, and have realized that, unintentionally I have created my own unit study, hhmmm, not sure how that happened! We have been studying the universe, and the beginnings of everything, the girls have chosen planets to study in depth, writing about them and drawing them, later today they will sculpt them out of paper and glue. We also have plans to create our own board game of the planets, sort of trivial pursuit like, which should be fun, and educational, since we have to find questions enough for a full game. So without meaning to we have combined science, writing, reading, and history into one study, go me!!!!!

So, in my creative wandering today I stumbled onto some free templates for lapbooks, very interesting, and hey they are FREE!!!! I checked them out, and realized that we can make a lap book of the universe pretty easily, and I can really get into it since it is kind of like scrapbooking. I love the look and all the stuff that can be added to the lapbooks, making them very interactive and chock full of information at the same time. Plus if the girls do a good job they can last until Gabe gets to that stage and he can use them. These could be very fun, and now my head is spinning with ideas of how this idea could be applied to so many different topics.

I will add this disclaimer here, I am strange, I admit it, and my approach to some schooling topics is very different than the norm, but hey, I homeschool and adopted, so the norm is not really my center anyway:-) I have always felt that history and science should be taught from the beginning, like Genesis 1:1, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth... So this is where we have begun, and we will very slowly work our way through history, studying each time period in order. This way the kids(and I) will have a good grasp of when things happened in time, and not be confused about whether the Spanish American War came before or after the Boston Tea Party, (sadly I am not sure of the dates of either of these events). This method of study will also allow us to wander off into different areas of interest as they relate to the time period we are in. This should be interesting, and in depth without covering the same time periods over and over again, like I did in public school.

Okay so I am quite excited about this whole concept, and now the ideas are really racing, so I must go and write them down before I lose them all. Sorry for the ramble, it often helps to "talk" to an impartial party to sort out ideas in my head, and right now the only other party here to talk to is myself, and anyone else who is unlucky enough to read this post, sorry all!!!:-)

thanks for being my sounding board, Jamie