Communities and the Environment

A couple weeks ago, Danny and I explored Communities. We learned about rural, suburban and urban areas. Danny had a bit of difficulty remembering which elements/features were part of which areas. She thought the suburbs were within the urban areas and that skyscrapers were buildings found in the suburbs. After some visualizations and real life explorations, she was better able to categorize them. In the Caribbean, we know our cities, housing communities, and countrysides vary greatly from large countries so I asked her to describe (verbally and written) our capital, then I asked her to describe where we live (a suburban area). We compared the two areas and then we spoke about the 'country' (we don't say countryside in Trinidad).

Here's an interactive map for Urban, Suburban, and Rural: Eduplace - Types of Communities

I also gave her two assignments. The first was to look through newspapers/magazines/Internet (<-- this as a final resources since I wanted her photos to be reflective of our island communities), find photos of our communities and paste them into her social studies book. The second was to make a Venn diagram, which highlights similarities and differences, of urban and rural communities.

After covering communities, we decided to go learn about different types of houses. After watching the video below, she went online, found images of houses around the world, and made a collage.

Here's the video we watched: Types of Houses

Bonus Video

In social studies, we're learning about what shapes our environment. We're exploring landforms now but here's a video watched about weather. 

Weather Around the World

Idioms

Pic Source

Here are the link we've used recently for learning about idioms:
 Visual Idioms - Blog
Idiom Learning Games
Understand Figurative Language
Everyday Idioms - Video explaining idioms using illustrations.
Reading Fun - Idioms (A few of the links are broken. I haven't tested all of them, and don't plan to, so a few may be working).

Elements of a Story: Settings

Week One

This year we're working on writing stories. Danny's writing is a work in progress and we're concentrating strongly on developing her grammar and vocabulary skills. We're also encouraging her to read a lot of books and luckily for us, she doesn't need any encouragement. One of the best resources we've come across is Lesson Pathways (it's free). We're currently using their Language Arts pathway and it's a hub of resources, we highly recommend it. 

Our first unit for understanding story writing is creating a setting. Here are the links we're using:

Short Story Elements

Story Settings : Fun interactive activity where the listener has to guess where the story is taking place.

Setting of a Story: Worksheets
 
Interactives: Elements of a story : Learn about settings through the story Cinderella.

Primary Resources: Story Settings Powerpoint : Powerpoint will ask you to download when you click the link. Good intro for learning about settings.

If you're working on story telling/creative writing, hope these links are helpful. We're always open to new resources, so please share in the comments if you've found some helpful tools.

School Bell Rings

I'm a homeschooling sibling (I know there must be a few of us out there!). We (my mother and I) recently took my 12 year old sister (Danny) out of her primary school for numerous reasons. I won't go into a very detailed story but I'll list the most important points that led us to our decision:

1. Danny has dyslexia + dysgraphia and was not adapting to traditional learning techniques.

2. Her former teacher made very disparaging statements about her. We took her out of the school immediately.

3. Her behavioral problems were gradually worsening.

4. We felt like we had to get our own act together. Focus on creating a better family and take her out of an unproductive, negative environment and make her feel empowered and happy.

It's been about one month since we took her out of school and one week into our new homeschool session. Her behaviour and attitude towards school has been a complete 360 (I know I sound like a bad tv commercial but it's true). She even does work without our prompt. I suspect this will start to wear off after a while.

In case you wanted to know, we're using Time 4 Learning, as well as, our own curriculum:

• Culture (Exploring countries and continents to learn their culture, geography and history)

• Body Talk which we're only covering for the first four weeks of the January (sex, hygiene, self esteem, etc).  

• Physical Education: going for walks, yoga, dancing (Just Dance on the Wii included), swimming - separate from her extra curriculars. 

•  Arts and Crafts 

• Cooking