An Easy 13 Colonies Travel Brochure Project In an effort to share more of our project-based learning, I thought I’d highlight Caleb’s latest middle school research & writing assignment. As part of a Colonial History unit study, Caleb and I read a two great books about the 13 colonies. Afterward, I asked him to choose…
Sadly, the formal study of economics is left out of most of the curricula I’ve run across in my 11+ years of homeschooling. An understanding of economics is EXTREMELY important as our children grow up to care for a family, learn to tithe and give, and become the financial leaders of our country. Unless we took…
(This post contains affiliate links.) In this final installment of my unit study series, I’m going to share with you how to design a unit study that is fairly in-depth. For those of you new to this series, you can catch up by reading… How To Plan a Unit Study Unit Study Projects Planning a…
We’re finally into some practical posts in my series about unit studies! In my first post, I wrote about how I design unit studies for our homeschool. In the second post, I wrote about incorporating project-based learning into the units. Now, I’d like to share a very short and simple study we completed on magnets….
I’m a huge believer in project-based learning! Keep reading to learn why and to get tons of project-based learning ideas for your homeschool! Just what is project-based learning? Quite simply, it’s a learning method in which your children dive into a subject and complete a project to show what they know. Projects can really be…
From the time I used the Five in a Row curriculum with my little bitties up until now, I’ve loved unit studies. Whether they are literature, science, or history-based, unit studies weave our learning together in meaningful and often exciting ways. You can learn how to plan a unit study in four simple steps! But,…
(This post contains affiliate links and links to my business website, Shining Dawn Books.) Target Age Range: 3rd-7th Skills Covered: volume, length, width, height, formulas, 2-dimesional shapes, 3-dimensional shapes Snap cubes are great for teaching perimeter, area, and volume in a hands-on way. This lesson focused on volume and understanding the formula for finding…
If you live in Central Kentucky, you are blessed when it comes to homeschool field trips right outside your door! Besides the oodles of places you can visit right around the corner, there are several fabulous opportunities within a reasonable driving distance, too. Some of our best homeschooling moments have happened on field trips. In…
My {Shortened} Story About the Beginning of Our Homeschooling Journey I bet you didn’t know we never set out in the beginning to be a homeschooling family. The wonderful twists and turns of life led us in this direction and I’m so incredibly thankful! I was a public school teacher before having children, and the…
In October, we were blessed to take a *free* pontoon tour of the KY River in Frankfort with my parents. The city offers this tour weekly late spring through early fall as a unique historical guided tour of Kentucky’s capital city. Boats, dams, bridges, flood walls, historical sties, historical stories and more made for fascinating…
Welcome to the Charlotte Mason Carnival! This edition focuses on Ms. Mason’s Principle 18: The Way of Reason. 18. The way of reason: We teach children, too, not to ‘lean (too confidently) to their own understanding’; because the function of reason is to give logical demonstration (a) of mathematical truth, (b) of an initial…
Target Age Range: 4th-8th Skills Covered: reading, addition/multiplication, calculator skills, problem solving, charting data (This post contains affiliate links and links to my business website, Shining Dawn Books.) The King’s Chessboard by David Birch is a fantastic book – both for math and character training. In it, the king foolishly agrees to doubling a gift…