Sunday, March 2, 2008

New Homeschool Unit(s)

Despite the fact that it is 30 degrees out, and has been hovering in that range for days, we'll be starting out "spring" unit of home school tomorrow. The 2 spring units are the last 2 units of the curriculum we've been using, and when I started reading through them I got really confused about how the timing was supposed to work. The unit we're starting now recommends going the first week to see sheep being sheared, but that doesn't happen until May. The second spring unit includes some stuff that's supposed to happen in April, and other more "early spring" type things (starting plants for a garden & such). BUT there are other things that build on each other such that I can't just take the 2 units & switch them. So, I've gone through and kind of done a bunch of picking & choosing and rearranging to try to make the timing of everything work (Add to that, that ideally one of the things we'd be starting NOW is this summer's garden but our life is way too "up in the air" to be doing that, so we'll be doing some container gardening instead (& even that might have to go live at Mama & Papa's house (or Grandpa's, since he's the gardener) when we put our house on the market, we shall see . . . ). Anyway . . . the two units are called Texture & Rhythm respectively, but we're going to be doing them kind of together. So this will be a 12 week unit instead of the normal 6 week unit (& actually, I think there's an extra week or two in there as well, to get the timing right for the sheep shearing) and then we'll be done with our official waldorf preschool curriculum we've been using for over a year now.

We'll start the unit with a trip to the library to fill out our book list. In addition to the resource books listed to the left (and some additional resources we'll use later in the unit), our complete book list for the full time is as follows:

Houses from the Sea
The Snowy Day
Seven Blind Mice
A House for Hermit Crab
Sing A Song of Popcorn: Every Child's Book of Poems
Halibut Jackson
What Do You Do with a Tail like This?
Fairy Houses
We're Going on a Bear Hunt
Henri Rousseau: Art for Children
Dancing with Degas
A Picnic with Monet
In the Garden with Van Gogh
Sharing with Renoir
Sunday with Seurat
A Magical Day with Matisse
Red Berry Wool
Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices
The Song of the Swallows
I Am A Bunny
Where Butterflies Grow
Pancakes, Pancakes!
As Big as You
The Summerfolk
And the Good Brown Earth
When Clay Sings
When the Wind Stops
The Lion and the Little Red Bird
The Tales of Tiptoes Lightly
Here Are My Hands

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