2016 Aussie Not back to school Blog hop.

 

 

I thought It might be fun to join in with the Aussie not back to school blog hop with Our World Wide Classroom.   This is where homeschool bloggers link up and share their latest post and this week is all about Resources!

 

This year we will be doing much the same as last year using a mixture of unit studies, hands on activities, workbooks and of course just life in general.  You can read more about a typical day for us here and here.

I have put together lots of hands on learning activities for this year and you can read more about them here.  We use Unit studies for science, history, geography etc and I have planned out about 5 so far but I like to let the kids choose along the way what they would like to learn about. The last unit study we did was Vikings and you can read about it here.

I have also purchased the big kids “workbooks” for the year.  This year we will be using excel for language arts and targeting Maths for Maths.  The boys also have a writing book each for developing their letter formation.  Xev, my 5 year old, , has a couple of workbooks to chose from but I mainly want him to have fun and do lots hands on activities.  This seams to be the best for him at this stage.

We started back to “school”early so we could ease back into our routine.  We dont follow a typical School calendar, so we can take breaks when ever we want to.   Its hard getting back into a routine after the Christmas Craziness and to be honest its been a bit of a rocky start to the year.    Its been really hot lately here in QLD and that makes it hard to stay focused.  So we have been taking it super easy and just doing lots of group reading together and a bit of Maths and language arts.

Learning about the Chinese New Year and colouring in dragons.

 

 

Xev has been enjoying lots of hands on activities so far this year.  He is not that keen on book work and that is totally fine with me.  He is only 5 and at this stage I want him to enjoy what he does.

This is an activity to develop his knowledge of beginning sounds using picture cards and objects.  It is Montessori inspired and Xev loves it!  Montessori have a certain way of introducing letters and I am loosely following this method  for Xev this year.  These first letters can make some simple 3 letter words which have the “at”sound.  This is one of the easiest sounds to “sound out” phonetically.  Xev has already managed to read a few words on his own using this method. I am finding it infinitely more productive and fun than any workbook.  You can look up the order of introducing letters here at the Living Montessori now website.  There are a few different orders used and I chose the one that I thought would suit us.

You can do the same activity using objects if you have them.  I just put together these from things we had in the house.

I have purchased the Jolly Phonics magnetic letters (below) and flash cards. Here Xev is just matching letters and practicing the sounds they make.

This is one of the sets of word cards I printed out from the Montessori print shop.  These are very inexpensive and can be used many different ways.  Here Dax is matching pictures to words and then writing out the words in his spelling book.

 

 

A new load of pre loved books from the opp shop is always fun.  The kids love looking through all the new books.  We dont make it to the library too often so I like to have lots of reference books on hand to use in our unit studies or just to look something up.  I have them sorted into general categories so its easy to find what your looking for.

 

And thats about it so far.  Dont forget to check out what other homeschooling families are up to this year in the blog hop!   I always find it so interesting and inspiring.

Check out our crazy happy homes pintrest boards for more hands on learning and homeschool ideas. (and lots of craft projects)

 

Thanks for the link up Our world wide classroom.