Skills through subjects

Sometimes the skills learnt through studying a subject are just as important as the subject matter. The subject is like a vehicle. Take, for example, the geography study the boys are doing. I do think it is important to have a general knowledge of geography, to understand where countries are in relation to each other, their climates and so on, but this is not the only reason to do this topic. It is also a good opportunity for the boys to develop research skills and the ability to use the internet to gather information. They also need to learn to skim and scan text, to pick out relevant information, to recognise reliable and unreliable sources, to answer questions accurately etc.
The Trail Guide to World Geography study guide we are following this year has a list of drill questions at the front of very week's section. (We are absolutely not following the shedule in terms of numbers of weeks, just doing it in the prescribed sequence). Rather than doing a few questions per day I tend to pick out about 10 questions for them to do in one session. Most of the questions they will not know the answer to, and they have to look up the answers in the atlas or online. Sometimes even the online maps are more suitable than the printed atlas. It depends what you are looking for. This is helping them to learn about using search terms, what to put in the box to help get the answer fastest.
Oftentimes they'll get directed to sites which are not written specifically for kids, and the whole text will be too difficult for them to understand, but they are learning to find their way to the answer they need, because the questions themselves do not require tricky answers, so the answer is usually plainly sitting there if you can cut through the technical details.
So I'm not really concerned about whether or not they remember the elevation of Mt McKinley, but think that it is important that they know how to find this out.
Of course, they do a lot of finding out about their own interests in this way too, but doing this also through a subject means that they experience a wider variety of sources, rather than just game review sites and sports journalism!

More Snow!

More snow, subhanAllah! So, more of the same in our days too, alhamdulillah. The children go out to play in the garden, then they come in, do some educational stuff, go back into the garden again, and so on!
The school holidays have begun, so no activities for a couple of weeks. Many of them would have been cancelled due to snow anyway. We are taking a slow approach to the days. There is no need to rush, as we are home, and can carry on into the evening with learning stuff, if taking advantage of daylight to go outside.

Weather Lapbooks

Yesterday the girls finished off their weather lapbooks.

This is inside Ia's lapbook. The printouts came from http://www.homeschoolshare.com/ . There were many more than those available, but I didn't want to use them all. She also made cloud pictures, to show different types of clouds, wrote a description of the type of weather we are having this month (written before the snow came) and she wrote a little about some of the weather experiments we did during the course of this project. On the back of the lapbook there is a weather words worksheet printout as well.

Other resources to go with this project include:

MET office

This homeschool lapbook blog, which is really FULL of ideas!
We have a good weather encyclopedia at home too, alhamdulillah, so I took some information out of that for them.

Snow Pics

And after that back in to have hot chocolate, listen to Oliver Twist, investigate prime numbers and review surahs before getting ready to go to Friday prayers.

Making notebook pages

There are many ready made notebooking pages available to print off online. Most of them have a box or space for an illustration. But what if your kids don't like to do illustrations?
As part of our geography studies I thought I could use occasional notebook pages with the boys. Yesterday I wanted them to find out a little about Niagara Falls. I know they won't be interested in doing a sketch of the Falls, so instead I asked them to search for an image online, paste it into a word document and then make a title before printing off. Under the image they wrote some of the information they had found out.
The boys don't need to have lined paper to write on, but if I were doing this with Ia I would put a piece of lined paper underneath and trace a few lines for her to write on. I know you can use the computer to add lines, but to me a bit of tracing would be quicker and more ink efficient when making a one off page for one child.

Socks

Has this got anything to do with home education? No, not really, but if you have boys I ask you this.....How fast do your boys' socks disintegrate into holes?
In this house it happens very fast, subhanAllah. How often do I hear the complaint,"All my socks have holes in!"? Often.
How do boys do this?
Today H shopped for yet more socks. Temporary relief, inshAllah.

Weekend maths

I like this activity! Today I did this with U.
Take a handful of cubes in each of three colours and put them in a bag. Then get the child to draw out 5 cubes and record the colour combinations that come out. Each time remembering to total the number of cubes to 5. This will show different ways of making 5 from three numbers.
Of course you can choose a different total number, or a different number of colours to suit your purpose.
I didn't try making a point out of saying "See, we are making 5 in different ways", instead I just let her experience it in her own way.