Friday is our evaluation! I am very glad to be getting it over with. I still have a ton of work to do to get it all ready but I am pretty sure I will be able to get it all done. I just really need to sit down and get all of the log retrieved from oblivion and printed out and pull the sample work from the year that we want to show like his best work and the things that show dramatic improvement from the beginning of the year to the end and all of that sort of stuff.
I am getting involved in a preschool coop with the lady doing the evaluation and will be meeting with four or five families who home school in the area we are moving to. That is promising. It will benefit Savannah and Hope more at this point as it is for the younger group but I am hoping that there will be older little people involved as well. Maybe we could get them to be "helpers".
I also need to plan at least one field trip for November for the support group and start focusing on getting the kids more involved in those activities. I would like to do something that hasn't been done to death with that group. So I will have to think for awhile about that.
I plan to unschool this year as much as possible. We are already half way through a third grade curriculum workbook though so I would like to finish that one and the fourth grade one that I have already purchased. I just don't want to tackle the bookwork as aggressively as as we were. Maybe a page or two a day as opposed to ten or twelve. We have tried that, it sucks.
As we are finishing up our third grade curriculum and begin our fourth grade curriculum over the next several months, I would like to go back and rework the idea for the United States unit study that I started at the beginning of this past school year. Instead of making it a hardcore unit study I would like to just put all of the information together and use it more for fun when and if we ever do start our travelling. I should have a couple of years to get a really interesting bunch of information together. I also found a neat scrapbooking kit for pictures of vacations and travelling that had a USA theme to it. So maybe I will get that and we could do a huge art project where we let them take pictures of the places we visit from their prospective and then scrapbook them using some of the ideas from the kit and their own artistic ideas etc. That would be a great ongoing project that would be a real treasure when it was complete. Then each time we revisit a place over the years they can just add to it. I think it would be interesting to see the difference between what an adult would take pictures of in each place compared to what a child would take pictures of. And then as they grow, their perspective would change and evolve and you could see their development through their pictures.
Maybe. Or maybe that is a silly idea. I dunno. At any rate I am excited to get to try to put it all together.
Posted by gwendolyn on July 30, 2001 at 09:35 AM