Our final three weeks of this year have been (or are currently) occupied by our nearly-transcontinental travels…
You could say that the final three weeks for us have been (or are currently) homeschool-ish. While we’ve seized plenty of learning opportunities, it hasn’t been with our normal reading selections and math assignments. It’s been with reading pamphlets and books about national and state parks, and visiting historical sites, and doing Jr. Ranger activities, and seeing geographic locations in real life. This would be why I’ve referenced one of our absolute FAVORITE picture books, Ish by Peter Reynolds.
Any time we’re doing anything (like learning to draw something new, or drawing the USA freehand, or drawing continental blob maps, or drawing the Great Circles of Latitude on a blank sheet of paper), we give ourselves a break from perfectionism and say that it looks, “ish.” This book has provided a fun way to embrace the freedom of tackling new things without the normal fears of failure that can cause so much anxiety in children (and adults!).
Not only that, “ish” is a great way to bare my often not-so-great cooking.
So… homeschooling has looked “ish” for us. This means that we still have yet to read the following books from our reading plan. I just couldn’t fit all these books in our luggage. (Unfortunately, we had to pack clothes instead.) But… we actually have already read these books because my children grab them as soon as they arrive in the mail (or we’ve owned them since the last time we were studying American history).
So, here’s the truth: We often fall behind on our own reading plans. But because our homeschool group meets only 24 weeks, there are another 12 weeks to “catch up” on anything that we missed (assuming a conventional 36-week school year).
Okay, so here’s what the plan is for the final three weeks:
It’s not easy to find books that gently handle an event like 9/11. That’s why I love the picture books, The Little Chapel that Stood (bottom right), The Man Who Walked Between the Towers (bottom left), and Fireboat: The Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey (top left). All three of these are fantastic. Our children love them. I love them.
Moving on to the study of the Constitution (Weeks 23 and 24), we have If You Were There When They Signed the Constitution, which covers the history behind the writing of the Constitution, and Our Constitution Rocks, which takes you through every sentence of the U.S. Constitution and tells you what it means. (I’ve come across some books about the Preamble that I have not liked much due to the underlying political stance, so I just narrowed it down to these two books. And because they are both a bit long, it works out well to read them over these final two weeks.)
To wrap up our study of American history and geography, we will re-read America the Beautiful, a lovely picture book with several tie-ins to our history sentence memory work over the course of the year.
Finally, we have a few items on our shelves for U.S. Presidents. Not pictured is the Presidential Scrapbook, which we’ve enjoyed due to its simplicity, illustrations/pictures, and the built-in quiz. Stuck on the Presidents (bottom right) is good one for the sticker-book and timeline fans, and the The Look-It-Up Book of Presidents is a good overall reference for Presidents. Our boys also like So You Want to Be President? (left), but there are so many great books about the Presidents that it’s hard to strongly recommend one over the other.
So that wraps up the plan for our final three weeks. As soon as we return home, we’ll dive into preparing geography projects for our homeschool group’s Geography Fair. After that, I hope to write about our adventures across the Great American Southwest, which is what we ACTUALLY did during this three-week period. But I leave this here for those interested in seeing an inside look at the books on our shelves for the final three of Cycle Three!