Social Studies: A great resource for this year has been Give Your Child the World, by Jamie Martin. It is a book of books for a variety of ages, from all around the world. I probably should have mentioned it in my post for our first learning period, but I didn't think to. During this second learning period, which covered October and November, we spent a lot of time exploring our community, learning about government, and how to create change, all on a very simple level. The kids wrote to our local representative, commenting on traffic flow and safety in our neighborhood and asking for changes to be made to make things safer. We continued exploring the presidential election process and talked after the election about what we can do, locally, to support our neighbors and the issues we believe in. Also during this learning period, we read about, learned about, and celebrated some of the Jewish holidays, in keeping with Waldorf 3rd grade studies for Little Brown Mouse. When we covered this when Lala Bug was in 3rd grade, some of the celebrations resonated with me, and I have considered them each year. I love the idea of a new year, casting off one's wrong-doings, and asking for forgiveness of oneself and others during Rosh Hashanah. We also enjoyed apples dipped in honey and tossing our mistakes from our pockets. Lala Bug also grew in appreciation for American Girl recently, has shared the love with Little Brown Mouse, so many American Girl books have been read. We could do an entire year of American history with a certain set of the American Girl dolls!
Math: Lala Bug settled into math club this learning period and likes all the playfulness of it. She is using an online program as part of the math club, which we also tried at home. It is fine, but she doesn't like it as much as Khan Academy (which we use sporadically) and I really don't like using one more resource! Mostly, this learning period, we stuck with Beast Academy and the Key To series, as well as games!
Science: We got ourselves sucked into and somewhat stuck in a geology block this learning period. I say stuck because as I write this, it is actually nearing time to write a summary of our third learning period and we are still dipping our toes into geology. It has been fun to move in and out of geology exploration when you live in a place like California! Science has also been following interests; reading books (we are still enjoying an older series called Destinations in Science), exploring outside, and enjoying Mystery Science. For our 3rd grade farmer, we learned about and participated in harvesting corn (some of which we later gave as holiday gifts), and all of us enjoyed visiting clustering Monarchs after raising our own.
Writing: Writing continues to be tied into what we are learning, although Lala Bug really enjoyed the creative writing class she took this learning period, through our charter school. She worked on all sorts of ideas in this class and from it blossomed a girl who spent tons of time creatively writing on her own. She also wrote a suggestion-filled letter to American Girl and is in the middle of a couple of stories that have the potential to go from short to mini-novel. Little Brown Mouse likes me to scribe his stories and he is more and more full of them these days. He is also learning cursive.
Language Arts: I might have to refer to the writing paragraph above, with the addition of commenting that I have been working, slowly, through The Wand, from Brave Writer, with both kids, in large part because it is teaching phonics, grammar, and writing in a more systematic way than I had been doing previously.
In addition to the core topics at home, we incorporate lots of play, nature exploration, Little Brown Mouse was in a soccer club, both kids were in a soccer group, 4-H was active, and both kids took classes through our charter this learning period.
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