Bilingual Homeschool Group

I facilitated a Spanish geography class during the "Home-school Learning Lab" at our library today. What a great group! Seriously, we are lucky to have such a wonderful community right here. This super awesome library is Durham County East Regional and the Children's librarian, Tanika schedules and coordinates the Home-school Learning Lab. It is every Thursday 9:30-10:30. They have had classes on gardening, composting, fruit anatomy, Math riddles, library scavenger hunts and other fun things! I usually leave CJ in the group alone as I chase Naomi around the library during the hour. We usually have a little over a dozen students ranging from age 5 through high-school age. We had a lot of interest in starting a bilingual home-school group here in Durham, so I started a yahoo group just now called Bilingual Home-school and uploaded a few bilingual workbooks I've made you can access once you join the group :) If you would like to join the group and can't find it by searching yahoo groups: bilingual homeschool Durham NC, send me an email at otanna@gmail.com and I'll send you an invite!

English/Spanish World Map

We do geography on a weekly basis through Classical Conversations. One thing we try and incorporate to our home-school days is tracing and free-hand drawing the world map. I just made a Spanish version of the world map we've been using and am super excited about it. I also made a blank template with just the latitude lines for practice drawing the map free-hand in the correct placement on the map. Here is a picture of the Spanish map. I uploaded the pdf file to Teachers pay Teachers thinking many other educators may find this helpful in their classrooms/homes. I have the maps in sheet protectors on our school desk for tracing with white board crayons. I am so excited about this :)

Quizlet

Quizlet.com is an amazing resource. It is a place to search for and make your own virtual flashcards. You can then play speed games and/or just use the cards like flashcards to learn the material. I've been translating the cycle 2 memory work for English, Latin and Science for this school year and have been putting the sets on Quizlet. CJ's profile name is warriorknights.

CC Cycle 2 Spanish- Bilingual Reading Comprehension

In effort to blend our Spanish learning with the weekly CC memory work, I have matched pages from our "Bilingual Reading Comprehension" workbook with corresponding topics from each week for cycle 2. I'll be using this with our CC community class I'll be teaching in the afternoon session after our Foundations morning.

CC Cycle 2 week #	CC subject that the reading comprehension worksheet loosely relates to for the week	Title of worksheet/pg numbers	Page number English/Spanish
1	Science	Deserts	145/146
2	Geography	The Earth, land and water	141/142
3	Science	We eat leaves	79/80
4	English	Names	53/54
5	Science	Monarch Butterflies	95/96
6	English	Who lives in your house?	97/98
7	Science	Stars	113/114
8	Science	A Fall Day	65/66
9	English	Our Community	105/106
10	Science	Months of the Year	83/84
11	Science	Pilots	129/130
12	English	Taking Turns	109/110

Curriculum 2013-2014

Our curriculum for the upcoming school year, 2013-2014 includes:

The guide for Classical Conversations. This is our "CC" work. CJ memorized a huge portion of the memory work last year, I was amazed to say the least.  It is exciting to learn so much right alongside him.  We are part of the North Raleigh Community, this will be our second year with the group. We definitely wouldn't be homeschooling right now if it wasn't for the CC community. Our highlights from last year were the weekly presentations. CJ presented on a variety of topics from "how to make a paper airplane" (his very first presentation in class) to a story he wrote about "Wormy", a little inch worm that lived a very short but eventful life with CJ. CC officially takes up 24 weeks of the year, all the work is divided up into the 24 weeks.

We will try and read through this novel before September since the history covered in this book overlaps with history we learned in Cycle 1 of CC.

This book will bring us through the same time period of history we'll be studying in Cycle 2 of CC.

This version of The Odyssey is right at CJ's reading level. The writing is size 14 or 16 font, it looks to me and there is a nice space between lines so it's not too daunting for CJ. Right now we're reading it during family story time in the evenings.
 
The past year I did a lot of printing math from edhelper.com and by February he was already adding double digits with carrying and subtracting with borrowing. He got really good at general addition and subtraction problems and started memorizing skip counting songs through CC.  Then I got scared we were moving "too fast" with math and wanted to make sure I wasn't missing "lessons" I should be doing. I got the Saxon Math 1 and 2 student workbooks and plan on going through them with CJ to make sure we haven't "missed" any essential math lessons. It will give me peace of mind that he is grasping the concepts and if he speeds through these great and if we have to take our time with them, that is fine too. Saxon has a lot of repetition to make sure they've mastered the task and has a formal assessment, with recording form for every lesson. This past year we used some Singapore Math workbooks level 1b and some Math U See. We'll see how he likes Saxon, we may go back to Singapore if it's not a good fit.

We did a few lessons from this book last year. Each lesson is simple and quick (can complete in a few minutes a day).  Many of CJ's friends from CC use this book as well and have memorized the poems in the lessons, so CJ asked me to get this book so he could be like his friends who knew all the cool poems :)

CJ completed the student book level 3 this past year using Jolly Phonics. He loved the student book and the fun characters. So I'm going to get the grammar workbook and got this dictionary for his desk.



We started this book this past year but didn't get very far in it. We'll continue it and use bilingual books, songs and flashcards as our Spanish for the year.

We've been reading this Bible first thing in school since Easter 2013, when we gave this to CJ.

We got this book last year and found it very user-friendly and a nice reference for the history and geography covered in CC.
CJ has a blank journal with drawing and writing space, I plan on having him write entries weekly.
For Cursive practice he'll be completing his second Prescripts workbook, writing words and sentences this year (last year he completed the letters/drawing lessons Prescripts workbook).

We'll try and keep a field trip journal/log and start a science experiment log.

Ready for a great year!!!!

Field trip to Mexico

We spent the month of May in California with Grandma, Grandpa and Uncle Dan. One of CJ's highlights was spending a day in second grade with his buddy Chad. We help support Chad's education throughout the year and CJ and Chad have been exchanging letters this past year. CJ also gave a presentations IN SPANISH to his class, showing them how to make paper airplanes.

Cycle 1 End of the Year Museum

We turned the school room into a little museum to show Daddy everything we learned during the CC school year. CJ completed 4 lapbooks, made his own "sistene chapel" under a table and had lots of art to share.