Q & A with Christine Echeverri, author of Earth Party! Why did you write this curriculum? The real reason — so many life forms are disappearing before our very own eyes! Many young students are aware of this predicament. Instead of leveling on guilt and sadness about this, we step back provide a broad introduction […]
Collaboration One aspect that struck me as I wrote Earth Party! was how collaborative living things truly are. Flowering plants depend on wind, insects, and animals to propagate. If left to their own devices, they would not produce fertilized seeds. Plants need animals; herbivores (plant eaters) such as birds, deer, rabbits, and rodents need plants. […]
One of the parts of our day that I really appreciate is — our read aloud. I have come to love this even more with the “Covid-19 World” we find ourselves in. Each morning: I get up, wake my kids up, eat breakfast, and find our story. This makes life doable for me. This is […]
The Power of Story This semester, my boys and I are learning about US history. In my effort to cut down busywork, we are focusing on doing things that matter in the simplest possible way–history as told through story. Currently we are reading Johnny Tremain together. It’s been a huge relief to simply sit down, […]
Open Library Here is a super resource we want to share with you: Open Library. It’s an online resource, brought to you from Internet Archive, that has copies of many current, popular books. You must sign-up for a free account. Once that’s completed, start checking out up to 5 books for 2 weeks timeframe each! […]
When my kids and I studied US history, I went with a literature-based approach, probably not a surprise. At the time, my daughter was in 6th grade and my son was in 3rd grade. For the main basis of our study, I used Beautiful Feet Books Early American History: A Literature Approach for Intermediate Grades. […]
4 Things I Love About This Book It’s Easy to Use During our homeschool time, we read a little more than 1 of the 16 total chapters each week; due to the fact we were on a tight timeline, we needed to finish our study in 12 weeks. With many chapters only 3-4 pages in […]
The Well Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer does an excellent job of empowering families, particularly the reluctant and unsure, they can do homeschooling. The book provides numerous resources to inspire and equip families to become teachers to their children. In the first section, she and her mother, Jessie Wise, recount their experience with homeschooling […]
Stories from Where We Live: The California Coast is one of my favorite resources to begin a conversation about California habitats. I was introduced to this book when my kids and I studied California history as a part of our homeschool curriculum. While looking in the book stacks in the California section of the Children’s […]
We drive on freeways, take commuter trains, and ride light rail to get to school and work. Surrounded by multi-storied buildings, concrete roads, tall fences, and large parking lots, it is hard to imagine the land of California before this infrastructure. While driving around, I often times wonder what our state looked like as the […]
