Tuesday, January 30, 2007

It was a good day

Sigh, a good day. For school today we learned about light. I got a kit from Rainbow Resources and as I tried to read a book from the library the girls were looking through the kit. I don't think they paid much attention to what I was reading. I had planned to do the experiments in the order the book listed them, but the girls were having so much fun playing around, I ended up just guiding then towards the experiments they were already doing. Ah, the best laid plans... Maybe this is what unschooling is about. I probably could have just let them go wild with the supplies from the kit and they would have learned just as much. If only I could be the walking encyclopedia that my dh is. He is able to spout out info about almost anything without a bit of prep work. I, on the other hand, like to read the information straight from the library books. I don't even like to paraphrase. I am afraid I will say something wrong. So for now I will stick to planning our topics of study and let the unschooling happen during our nonplanned times.

We also got around to Math and Handwriting. Three subjects per day seems good. Now to figure out which subjects to do which days...

SK and I started our letter writing. I stole this idea from a friend. We have a notebook and we take turns writing to each other. We started yesterday and SK was so excited to write back to me. I am hoping this will be a fun way to improve handwriting and check spelling and grammar needs. We'll see.

2 comments:

Karen said...

Light and colour is such a fun topic to play with. I bet your girls learned tonnes. Bill Nye and Magic School bus are great resources to use as a follow up or prelude. I also used a lot of experiments from Great Experiments With Light by Phyllis Fiarotta when I did the co-op on light and colour because it gave nice explanations about what was happening in each of the experiments. I have a book list and probably a project list somewhere if you are interested.
Karen

Michelle said...

We watched 2 episodes of MSB on light and color. I Tivoed every episode a while back and recorded tthem to video tape (yah, Tvio!) and my oldest has watched them all several times, so she always reminds me about them when we learn about something that has a MSB on that topic. Thanks for your book suggestion. You always have a thorough list to post when your family explores a topic. I like to print them out an keep them in a file for when we get to the topic.