Under Construction

I'm in the process of moving over all of our schooling posts from another site and creating this blog in time for the start of school after Labor Day.  So all of the links may not work yet, sorry!

The Erie Canal

We're working our way through the Industrial Revolution; did the Cotton Gin last week, Erie Canal this week....here are a few videos that we watched:

Russia

And we're off to Russia for a week or so.  We're reading chapters 17 and 26 in Story of the World, Vol 3; learning about Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.

Grammar worksheets

I've scaled back a little to just Reading, Writing, and Math for the time being.   Here are a bunch of grammar worksheet links that I've found...a lot of them go along really well with First Language Lessons, Level 3.  I don't have the student workbook, and even if I did, I think I would still need some more reinforcements, so this is what I'm using and it works great!

1,025 noun worksheets (and more)
6th grade grammar worksheets - yes, I think they could be used for 3rd grade *cringe*
Daily Grammar - these are great, short little sheets, perfect for quick review
a blog with a bunch of grammar links....maybe they're the same as what I'm putting up, lol.  I haven't looked through it all yet, but there's a lot!  Very helpful!
Gigglepotz - ??? about the name, but a bunch of different worksheets
Language Arts worksheets
Fantastic worksheets - this is the site I go to first.

Preschool/Kindergarten activities/file folder games

I have a few links on the side from when I first started this blog and my oldest was only in preschool.  I was really excited about FFG and the kids liked them, but eventually things tapered off.   Well now that I have a 3,2, and almost 1 year old, I'm looking to get back into file folder games and other bagged activities for preschoolers.  It's becoming clear that it's a necessity.   I'm going to spend a few days, hopefully, working on making a bunch of things and organizing it all and having a preschool bin for them to get activities out of to play with during school.  So hopefully I'll have some pictures soon, since pictures are fun! 

In the meantime, I was reading a thread on the WTM forums about this very thing and found a bunch of great links, and I also went through my bookmarks folder and here are a bunch of links about preschool activities and file folder games:

My old preschool/kdg links
my old 'lots of games' links

preschool centers ideas/links
preschool activities ideas
LOTS of preschool activity ideas
Montessori preschool ideas
Tot School
ChildCareLand FFG
more TotSchool stuff
Totally Tots - cute blog
Shirley's Preschool Activities
Preschool Education
Preschool Express
a blog with ideas
another blog

Aztec, Inca, Maya

Maya, Aztec & Inca Hands-on Heritage Activity Book
Life in Ancient Mexico Coloring Book
Time Travelers New World Explorers
Story of the World Vol 2 and 3
Trail Guide to World Geography

We actually made it through Meso America in about 3 weeks.  And I had it scheduled for 2 weeks, so that's not bad for us!

We did Lesson 11, 13, 12, and 14 out of the Time Travelers, covering Pizarro, Magellan, de Soto, Verrazano, Cortez and Coronado.  Along with that, we used SOTW Vol 2. chs 32 and 33, and ch 1 out of Vol 3.

For the first week we did week 6 out of Trail Guide - Mexico geography and the second week was week 7 - Central America.   (I love Trail Guide.  It's so fast and easy and the kids are learning a lot through it.  It takes some time to actually memorize the countries/capitals and we're not totally there yet, but it is a very thorough geography curriculum! And very easy to move weeks around to tie the geography into history.)

We did a Stone of the Sun worksheet from the activity book and looked at pictures of it online.  We also looked at a fantastic photo set of Peru/Macchu Picchu on flickr.

We watched a History Channel movie In Search of History: Lost City of the Incas and
Treasures of Peru: Dr. Merry's Nomad Travel  and Mexico to the Max.

We also colored Mexico coloring pages, a Mexican flag, a pueblo diorama from Time Travelers, and an Aztec war club and 'feather' headdress from the activity book.    There is also a neat Inca artifact craft in the Time Travelers that we didn't get to, but probably will eventually just for fun.  I just never had the supplies for it.  There was also some handwriting/penmanship sentences in Time Travelers that we used.  We also did the explorers books/maps/timelines in Time Travelers....when we get to the end of the unit I'll post pictures of all of that.

I'm so bad about doing the food in the Time Travelers, but I bought some instant mesa flour to make tortillas with the kids for Aztec food.

I have the first Classical Conversations audio cd, and we did history tracks 16 and 17; songs about Meso-America and the Aztecs.


3 more craft ideas I found:
Aztec calendar
Mexican pottery
Aztec Sun



The handle-less clubs and headdresses:

Diorama

We made the paper dioramas from the Time Traveler's cd.....it's so funny to see the difference between boys and girls.  Aiden's Coronado is getting ready to kill, and his soldiers are getting ready to steal a donkey, and all of Alysa's soldiers and Indians are friends.  They loved doing this, and this was a fairly easy project to do.   The paper people don't really stand up that well, so I taped them down.



Aiden's diorama



Alysa's diorama