Even though we began our homeschool years with a box set from A Beka, I began a habit of completely rewriting everything that came out of the box.
Since the hallmark of homeschooling is tailoring lessons to each student, I took advantage of that opportunity by using my toolbox of ideas gleaned from my education degree which was both book-based and interactive.
The math and phonics books helped us keep to a plan, while I created all the support structures to undergird the basics of learning: reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Since my daughter had vision issues, I used a lot of auditory and tactile interactives to teach her phonics.
Thankfully our occupational therapist gave us phenomenal input on how to learn cursive writing.
In short, I supplemented arithmetic with manipulatives that I learned to use in college. Had I known about Math-U-See back when we started homeschool, I’d have used that for our beginning math curriculum.
Nevertheless, my kids and I really liked the colorful worksheets for phonics, penmanship, and arithmetic that A Beka provided.
However too many of the worksheets were flooding us for writing, science, and history. Over the years I figured out more and more how to whittle down the worksheets for essentials versus busywork.
One of the big projects learned in college was the building of unit studies, which I did a lot of in our homeschool.
I looked back to what I especially loved about my early school years that I wanted to reproduce with my kids.
Both my kindergarten and first grade teacher had amazing wall calendars that I wanted to reproduce to use as an interactive to teach time: days, weeks, months, which accumulate into the year cycle, and which can be sub-grouped by seasons.
So I chose a seasonal theme for each month, around which I built the calendar (as seen in the header) and interactive activities, motivational stickers, etc.
The key interactive I’d use for the calendar was that each day, we’d place the appropriate date onto the correct space on the calendar. By the end of the month, the calendar was complete, and we’d start fresh with a new theme the next day.
We’d read poetry about seasons to instill a sense of rhythm and literature appreciation, reciting the poem of the month each day. By the end of the month the poem was often memorized.
Here is a photo of our calendar, with scripture, and our booknook reading corner with Wishbone.
For geography, I found some cute wall maps. One was a cute poster of America that I turned into a bulletin board which can be seen at the bottom of the above photo. Anytime we referenced a location, we’d find that on the map.
At the fabric store I purchased a length of a colorful world map, that I hot glued onto a giant piece of cardboard (probably from a refrigerator) that I scavenged from a store. That was hung on the wall for reference of locations.
We also had a world globe, which we also used to reference locations. Despite the similarity in how the countries are shaped on the globe v a flat map, they also came to understand the disparity.
Perhaps our favorite unit, which incorporated all this wall-art, was about the beach. At the time we were living on the Texas/Oklahoma border, on very flat prairie land with few trees.
When the kids were quite young, we took our first official summer vacation to South Padre Island, at the opposite end of Texas. That was amazing!
Our beach unit study was based on our recent second trip to South Padre. (For more vacation photos check our Flickr set by clicking the picture below).
Soon after we returned home, we read lots of beach books, including Mrs. Frizzle’s hilarious but educational field trip with her students: The Magic Schoolbus on the Ocean Floor. Although that topic was quite a deep dive for my kids, they had seen it in cartoon form on PBS hundreds of times.
Thus, it wasn’t too crazy we did some activities related to wat we learned in the book. But first we started more simply with our hands-on activities.
The kids created their own globe by papier-macheing a balloon (something I had done with my third-grade class, but for the solar system).
After it hardened, I drew general outlines for continents, then painted dabs of color in various spots so they could finish painting the globe themselves.
Then we marked the spot of South Padre Island on their papier-mached globe, which we then compared with the real globe and the flat wall map.
Then we made a flat 3D map (something I had done, again, with my third-grade class, of a map for our neighborhood).
After all that, we made a poster of a cross-section of the ocean floor (seen on the wall above the 3D map) based on what we learned in the Mrs. Frizzle book.
We also posted a college of the beach my kids had glued together from travel brochures picked up on site. Postcards from the area were also featured.
Then the kids dressed up for the Becoming History Presentation to share everything they had learned!
