Playsilk Parachute

This is why I love my husband.  Okay, I love him for a million reasons, but his creativity and engineering nature is fantastic for homeschooling.

I can't remember what I was doing, or where I was, but he was left with the big girls for a while.  When I came home, he had created this really cool parachute from a playsilk (we dyed our own from Dharma Trading), yarn, clothes pins, and an empty peanut butter container.

Overall picture

He had drilled 8 holes in the lid (2 for each string), but after a few rounds, realized one central hole (or, two holes, I suppose) is better.  4 locations seems to tangle too much

He just drilled a hole in one side of the clothes pin for the yarn.  

This works best if you have a nice high deck to throw off of.  Luckily, we do.  ;)

They tried several different methods, from scrunching it all up and letting it go, to lengthening.  I think holding it out like Jujubee is doing worked best.  

And let it fly!  

You may notice there is a stuffed orange inside the jar.  It seemed to help when we added a little weight.  Too much weight made it sink too fast, too little didn't give it enough oompf to spread out and fly.  

There you go!  A parachute from a playsilk.  Have fun!

Outdoor Secrets Review

For first grade science, we decided to go with a Charlotte Mason style curriculum - Outdoor Secrets, along with the Outdoor Secrets companion.  The plan was to finish this, then move on to the body on our own.

At first, we did okay.  We'd get the recommended library books, read them as scheduled along with the stories from Outdoor Secrets, and do the experiments.  But after a while, we got really, really bored.  It seemed like we really weren't learning anything that was new, or important.  A lesson on the century plant - a plant which will grow in the desert, blooms once per century, and dies.  Yes, it is important to know there are different plants in different parts of the world.  However, I feel this book was poorly laid out, and the stories were a little hard to follow the way they were written.

The stories are written from the plants (or animals) point of view, but it takes a minute to catch on to what they are saying.  It also personifies pretty much everything in the story.  The sun, the wind, the leaves, etc.  This all would sound lovely, except it just doesn't make much sense, and like I said, is hard to follow what exactly they are talking about.  You don't really get the point until the end, and even then it is not really clear.

Overall, I was very disappointed with this for our Science Curriculum.  I could have (and will next year) done a better job just by looking at my "what your first grader needs to know" guide and getting living books that went along with it.  I don't feel like we learned even half of what we should have been covering this year, which is frustrating.  For second grade, we will either do as I suggested above with the "what your second grader needs to know", or find another guide to go by since it seems to be a bit different than what we were planning.

Our homeschool curriculum choices for first grade

I've talked about it before, but now that everything is finalized I want to share it with you.  We are following the Charlotte Mason Method, and mixing in a little Classical Education.  Those words probably mean nothing or very little to you if you are not a homeschooling family, and possibly even if you are!  Basically, it is just a guide on how we homeschool.

I spent months researching curriculums, reading books, reviews, talking to other moms.  My favorite resources to figure it all out have been Simply Charlotte Mason website, the book The Well Trained Mind, as well as the forums on the Well Trained Mind website, and an amazing group on Cafemom called Homeschooling Moms.  Finally this is what we decided on:

Math - Saxon 1
Spelling - All About Spelling, level 1
Handwriting - Handwriting without tears, my printing book
History - Story of the World, Ancient Times
Science - Outdoor Secrets, and we will be doing our own body curriculum after we complete OS
Poetry - Favorite Poems Old & New, and A Child's Garden of Verses
Personal Development - A Child's Book of Character Building, Book 1
Art - Drawing with Children
Music - World's greatest composers series, starting with Bach
Nature Study - using Hours in the Out-of-doors as a guide, as well as the Handbook of Nature Study
Reading - reading books relating to our Science and History
Literature - following the literature list on www.simplycharlottemason.com
Grammar (will not start until second semester) - English for the Thoughtful Child

Wow, so that seems like a lot.  But the nice thing is that with the method's I am using, most lessons only take 15-20 minute, and of course we do not do every subject every day.  We started Handwriting over the summer, and are about halfway through that book, so we are trying to decide if we should move on to the next HWOT book, or start doing copywork like the CM method suggests.

Another great thing about the method we are using, is that it uses "living books" instead of a lot of text books for subjects like science, history, etc.  So that means, my library has been an amazing resource!  It has saved me so much money, and so far, they have had every book we will need for the first month or two, or a very good substitution.

Wish us luck!