The Ancient Maya, a history project

Before our mid-year break,

Lu had two weeks to focus on a history project

about the Ancient Maya.

At least once a year,

Lu works on an independent project

that involves research, a deadline, and a presentation.

I only helped with the final editing,

and double checking historical dates.

Lu planned out his project with a timeline

and checklists, and worked several hours a day,

with short breaks in between

for puppy time

and guitar practice.

 

  

Once he was done with the research,

he printed and organized his information and images.

It's hard for me to not get involved sometimes,

so I left him at the stationary shop with generous funding,

to choose his materials. 

And then came the putting-together part!

I was only allowed in the room to take some pics.

But after this one, 

I was informed that it was the last time I could come in 

until he was ready to give his presentation.

On the Friday before our break (the deadline)

Lu was finished with his project at 8:30pm.

Throughout the project, Lu mentioned several times

how "professional" this kind of work made him feel,

and that he really enjoyed it :)

Great job, Lu!!!

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Now we're on a three-week break,

just chillin' with friends and taking it easy

after six months of hard work and loads of learning.

 

Greek Mythology Wrap-Up

A while back I wrote about the start of our Greek Mythology project.

We started in September, working on one story a week,
and just finished up a few days ago.

It was always the highlight of our week -
cuddling up together on the day bed to read,
drawing together, writing, editing, and typing.

Our first story -
He would write the summary, we'd edit together,
I'd dictate the final draft while he typed.

He did some of the drawings on his own,
but I'd usually help out with an initial pencil sketch.

I love how this one came out:

This one was my favorite story when I read the book at his age:

This was our last story.
We were both kind of sad for it to be over.

This was one of my favorites from the summaries:

And here they all are together:
19 stories in 16 weeks.
It was a great project for 3rd grade,
but I don't think we'll have as much time next year for quite so much drawing.
Each session (between reading, drawing, writing and typing) took around 3.5 hours.
A less time consuming alternative could be to do mini-drawings and/or skip the summaries.
We plan to bind them together in a book,
a treasure from our first year of homeschool.

I love that the stories are so obvious in how they are trying to explain nature and life.
This will help in understanding religions, when we start studying them.
For next year, we have a book of Myths and Legends from around the world!

Independent October, Week 2

It's been an exciting couple of days with hurricanes in the vicinity and back-packs ready in case we need to evacuate. Nevertheless, we have been on top of our schoolwork!

Independent October hasn't been quite as independent as I had hoped. So, I figure we'll probably need to practice more self-directed learning throughout the year. He dropped the music project completely when he got frustrated. The same thing was about to happen with the choreography project, but I insisted he stick with it. He got through his "I'm stuck" point and is feeling quite proud of his routine now. The Saber-Tooth Tiger research project proved to be more than he could handle, so it's become a project that we're doing together. The drawing project has been the most successful and completely independent.

Here are some snippets from the works in progress:

In Guatemala, school ends in October and starts back up in January. We were considering switching over to the US school year, which would have meant doing 18 months of 3rd grade, but we're almost done with our 3rd grade stuff and feeling like we'll be ready to start 4th in January. We'll keep working through November and do some testing in December, just to make sure we have all our bases covered. It's been fun going back over everything we've learned and writing up the tests. He really likes tests and I think it's a good exercise in studying, being tested and analyzing the results. I've also printed out some standardized tests - they look dreadful! We'll give them a stress-free try, just to see how we do. I much prefer writing them myself, purely based on what I know he's learned and can handle.

Independent October

We've been working really hard for the last six months,

so we decided to take October as Independent Projects Month.
He chose three projects to work on alone - zero mom interference.
This was our first week and it's gone great.

He chose a drawing project using a "How to draw cartoons" book.
Here are some of my favorites:

He also chose to work on choreographing his own dance piece.His third project is a research report on the Saber Tooth Tiger,
inspired by this Saber Tooth fossil given to him by an uncle.I found some sites for him to get information.
He'll be putting a book together with his findings.

This week, we also:
found a scary spider in our kitchenpicked lots of jocotes - a fruit specific to Central America (I think)
There are Jocote Trees everywhere here, and the kids go crazy for them in October.First, you gotta get your pole ready.
You need to smooth it with a machete and fix the end to catch the jocote.
You stick the pole way up in the tree and try to get the fruit into the catch.
It takes patience and aim to manage this, but he's a pro.

With the extra time that Independent Projects Month is giving me,
I get to spend more time with my other kids -
This is the youth group that trains at our art center in the mornings.
They haven't seen much of me since we started homeschooling,
even though they're just downstairs.

This is a project that I started 10yrs ago and have been full-time directing since.
This year, the project is being run by one of our graduated students.
It's been hard to let go and delegate, but it's allowed me to homeschool,
and he's doing a great job as junior director.

The Pluto Monologues

Last Saturday my son invited friends over to watch him perform "The Pluto Monologues".

We started our Unit Study of the Solar System back in May and finished our mobile in July. The Solar System had us oooohhhhing and aaaahhhhing the whole way through, and we weren't ready to stop there, so we decided to extend our Unit Study with this theatrical project.

We wrote the first half of the script together, and he wrote the second half pretty much on his own. An actress friend of ours came in one morning to work with him on his acting and stage directions.

Although we did the Unit Study in English, he wanted to do the theater part in Spanish (his first language), which meant translating all the terminology we had learned.

Here is a rough translation of the script:

Grant-writing Skills

October is International Children and Youth Month, and I've been feeling like we're ready to throw in some unschooling. I don't think we could use it as a year-round style, but it would be nice to give it a try. So, I've told my son that we will celebrate the special month with independent projects.

After a decade of working in social development, I consider grant-writing an important skill to have, especially for creative people. So, today we worked on proposals. The first steps were to make a list of several projects that he'd like to do, we talked about the different ideas and evaluated the logistics - resources, space, time, parent availability... I told him that he could either do one big project, or several smaller ones. He narrowed it down to three projects: making a book about the Saber Tooth Tiger, writing and composing a song on his guitar, making an elaborate painting and framing it. Next, we worked on making a schedule and distributing time among the three projects. This was a good exercise in time administration. I filled in certain times on the schedule because I do want to keep two hours a day for straight-up grammar and math, and a few other specialty classes that he only has once a week - like third language and soccer. The rest of the time was up to him to play with. He got a bit flustered with so much information on the weekly table, so we worked through it together. We'll spend the rest of September working on mission statements, objectives, and methodology for each project.

Solar System Mobile

We finally finished our Unit Study on the Solar System.

We studied each planet and decided to make a mobile for our final project. During our research, we were very impressed by the size comparison of the planets. So, for our mobile, we decided to focus more on size.

Most mobiles make the planets to the wrong proportions, because doing it to scale would make the smaller planets too tiny to really see, or the larger planets too big to fit in a room. We wanted to show the amazing differences in size, so it didn´t matter that our Mercury is only half a centimeter in diameter.

We looked for rocks to represent the planets,
and didn't worry about them being round or not.
For Neptune we found a rock with a quartz patch,
that looks like a face.
For Saturn we found a yellowish rock.
For Earth we used a blue marble, which served as reference for the sizes of the other planets, and is the only round planet in our mobile.
Dad helped us cut wire to make spirals for the orbits, after I nearly pinched a piece of flesh off my hand with the wire cutters.
We used very thin wire to wrap around each rock
and then hung them from the thicker wire we used for the orbits.


Finally, we hung our solar system around an extra-large light bulb that represents the sun.
It's quite an abstract representation,
but I love how original it looks.
And as it hangs from my son's ceiling, I know he will often look up and reflect on just how huge the universe is.




For the research part of our project we watched Space School Videos.
You can find them all on this YouTube Page.
We're also working with these Worksheets on the Planets.
This Video on star size comparison is a must see!
The whole project cost us less than $2 (for the wire).

When we come back from our Summer break, we plan to stage a Solar System play - Pluto's Monologue. We'll learn about the Roman gods (and one Greek one) and practice memorization, speech and theatrical expression. We had planned to start a third Unit Study on the Human Body, but there's time for that next year and we're so fascinated by the Solar System. After all, that's what it's all about - finding a passion and flying with it!

Main Project - Dinosaurs

We do a Main Project, or Unit Study, every 1.5 - 2 months.

Each project is developed around one central theme.




Our first Main Project was about dinosaurs.