Mystery of History

I'm not sure how many other people are using the Mystery of History curriculum, but I really love it. It's a great way to piece together world history (so much of what I covered at school focused solely on the UK!) and covers a wide range of other topics in a chronological way.

The only problem I have had with it is that it's sooooo expensive. I mean, it's fine if you live in the US, but shipping to the UK nearly doubles the price of the curriculum, especially if you get charged import tax by customs (yes, even though it was marked educational resources, they decided to charge me anyway).

So I was super excited when I found out you can get volumes I and II on kindle!! Not only that, but there appears to be some kind of promotion on, because despite each quarter of volume II being listed as £6.34, when I bought it I was only charged £1.06! Not only that, but I had promotional credit from my prime account, so I all of volume two on my kindle for FREE.

Pretty sweet deal.

Sadly it doesn't have volumes three and four, but hopefully they'll be released before we get to them, and with all the money I've saved I'm going to go and download the MP3's so we can listen to volume one for revision in the car. 

Autumn term

This season is always super busy, so I rarely have time to blog, but we have certainly done plenty! 

This term the children have been to the west end to see shows twice (most recently "Elf - the musical", which was brilliant, although Cosmo claims he still prefers Phantom of the Opera), spent a day learning to ski and snowboard, had a historical fun day pretending to be pirates with their friends, as well as all the usual activities like parkour, swimming and sports classes. 

Speaking of swimming, Lychee swam five metres with swimming aids last week, and if she can repeat it this week I think she'll be getting her badge. 

We've got up to the Egyptians in our mystery of history curriculum so we made a "daddy mummy" which was a lot of fun. 

We've also bought Cosmo a kindle, which has been brilliant for keeping up with enough books for him to read (we're budgeting about £20/month for him and it's still not nearly enough even at kindle prices!) and lychee is still enjoying weekly trips to the library to max out her card.

This week they had whiteboard pens out again, which she loves so much.

 

Although it's obviously very tiring!!

Today we're celebrating thanksgiving and tomorrow we will be decorating our house for Christmas (super exciting). 

The children have been playing "mayflower" on the blanket in the living room, pretending there's a crazy storm and throwing themselves off their "ship". 

That's all for now, there's loads more, but I have to go finish making a pumpkin pie before our guests arrive. 

Happy holidays! 

In your image...

This week we've started our mystery of history curriculum again. Lychee is now old enough to join in and get something from it, which makes it a whole lot easier than it was last time around!

To be honest, we stopped because we moved house and taking our timeline off the wall meant we would have to reconstruct everything we'd done and I couldn't face doing it at the time. Starting again means rebuilding slowly, which is a lot more manageable. 

Today the children are using play doh to create men in their own image... Which quickly descended into creating their own "beasts of the field" and "birds of the air".  Cosmo is enjoying it so much more having a sibling to encourage creativity. First time around he wanted to make everything look perfect, exactly like a real person. 

Second time around, with a little encouragement from his sister, he's created a six legged, long necked, mammal that swims and has a number on its back which changes each year to tell you how old it is. 

I love how they inspire each other and learn from each other in ways that I couldn't teach. 

Family learning is the best! 

Not Back to School trip

This week is Rosh Hashanah, which is the Jewish new year, and generally when we would restart our homeschool after a loooooooong summer break hanging out with daddy. It's a fun day of starting out with fresh curriculum and books; and eating lots of sweet things (we have fruit, yoghurt and honey for lunch!) to remind ourselves of how sweet and good God is.

Our home-ed co-op. however, prefers to start a little earlier, and this year, we decided to join them on a trip to Prestatyn in Wales. It was so much fun to go with our cousins and the kids had a fantastic time.

We went to surf school at Surf Snowdonia, to great Orme copper mines and on a fossil hunt; we played on the beach, in an incredibly mild ocean; we went to Conwy castle and on an audio tour of an Edwardian house.

It was great fun to catch up with old friends, as one of Cosmo's favourite buddies who left our co-op last year made the effort to book in to the same resort and hang out with us all.

On the way home we stopped in at Stratford-upon-Avon and visited the MAD museum. It was incredible and the kids loved playing with all the exhibits, particularly a typewriter that was attached to fishing wires, which tapped glasses that had been tuned to different pitches.

You can see our video of what we did below:

Cousin day and the natural history museum

This week saw the first 'cousin day' that we are attempting to add into our schedule. The plan is to have my sister and her kids over for a day and take turns teaching them, giving one of us child free time every fortnight so that we can get more done.

Depending on what your criteria is, cousin days was a success. 

Work was slow, distracted... Etc but everyone had fun. The children learned a little about life cycles of various animals and then each gave a presentation ins particular one. Cosmo chose snakes.

Lychee coloured some butterflies and we talked about symmetry. I was fairly surprised to see that she actually understood the concept. 

On Tuesday we went to the natural history museum with our homeschool co-op and had a great time. 

Cosmo was a little upset because his digital camera got broken on the bus, but he soon enjoyed looking around, particularly when we got to the human biology section. 

Lychee's favourite part was the butterfly exhibit (no surprise there!) and as well as loving all the butterflies she was completely overwhelmed with all the beautiful plants and flowers. She could not be a girlier girl. I have no idea where she gets it from! 

The children were both excited that they already knew the life cycle of a butterfly, but enjoyed stamping the stages on cards provided and watching the chrysalises hatching. 

You can see more photos on our travel blog if you use the links at the top :0)

What's in the Bible discount

In case I haven't made it clear enough in the past, we LOVE 'What's in the Bible?' DVDs from JellyTelly.

JellyTelly actually have a tonne of free videos that you can watch, including some episodes of 'Adventures in Odyssey' and, my children's personal favourites, 'Clive and Ian's Wonderblimp of Knowledge' (how do they come up with this stuff?). My personal favourite's are Dr Von Schniffenhausen's science lessons.

Anyway, as much fun as the freebies are, the 'What's in The Bible?' DVDs are out of this world great. They bring together short, funny clips on a theme and introduce children to concepts such as 'salvation' and early church history in easy, manageable ways. My children have learnt loads and we've really enjoyed it too.

They make an excellent addition to any christian home, and right now JellyTelly are offering 20% off through a referral scheme. You get 20% off, I get a $10 gift certificate. Win, Win.

Click here for 20% off

And just to whet your appetites, here's a clip of one of my favourite songs from one of the DVDs. 

Synonyms and the Book of Centuries

As with most homeschooling blogs we've been a little slow over the summer. One of the joys of home educating is being able to enjoy the sunshine whenever you like and not having to stick to a schedule.

With that in mind, we don't actually break for the whole summer like some other families do. Although we don't formally hand in registers to our co-op, we continue with a relaxed pace - nothing to strenuous, but a little now and then to ensure that we don't get completely out of the habit of learning.

One of the games we've been playing is called synonyms. I made it up, but it's really fun and Cosmo loves it. We basically wrote lots of words on lolly sticks (actually they're waxing spatula's from my old beauty business, but lolly sticks would work just as well) in categories. For example, ten of the sticks have words that are synonyms for 'big', such as huge, gigantic, enormous, massive etc... and ten have words for 'small', ten have words that mean 'delicious', ten have words that mean 'brave'...etc...

Then I flipped them over, shuffled them and continued to do the same with more categories.

The game is then to shout a word, such as 'small' and then everyone has to try and snatch as many sticks that contain a synonym for that word. The winner is the person with the most sticks. They then get to chose the next category.

I'm trying to introduce games that a) broaden Cosmo's vocabulary and b) make use of grammatical terms. Being an avid reader, he has already grasped many grammatical rules (such as where speech marks should go, that a capital letter should start a sentence etc...) but you can't absorb the vocabulary to diagram sentences from just reading. Someone has to explain to you the difference between a noun, adjective and a verb for you to understand what those words mean.

I've been reading a bit more about the Charlotte Mason method of teaching, and I've fallen in love with the idea of a Book of Centuries. It's the perfect accompaniment to the Mystery of History curriculum that we already use.

A Book of Centuries is basically a timeline in a notebook. You have a double page spread for each century, and as your child finds out about a person or an event, they can write about it, draw pictures, or create a lapbook in that double page spread. It's a fun way to record what they are learning, and keeps it accessible to flick through and revise. Everything is in order, so it helps the child to get an idea of what happened when.

I know that since we started our timeline in our hallway, I have a much better understanding of how different cultures evolved world wide, and how the pieces of history fit together. I'm obviously a visual learner, but this stuff has never sunk in for me before.

As great as our timeline is though, there is not a lot of space for information, just a small picture to remind us of an event. I think the book of centuries is a great accompaniment to go with it.

If you'd like to start your own book of centuries, you can find a template for it on Simply Charlotte Mason and the best part is that it's free to download. There's actually some other really great resources on that site so I'd encourage you have a look around whilst you are there.

I suspect we are going to have to do a section on the olympics soon as Cosmo and Daddy have and such a great time attending some of the events. I'll blog about that soon, but in the meantime you can see a couple of the photos on our travel blog.

Not the royal wedding...

It's hard enough to get my kids to sit through a real wedding, of people they actually know. Let alone one on TV.

 

My sister's kids, now they are a different breed. They were so excited that the princess (?) was going to marry the prince. They wanted to watch the entire thing in absolute awe.

 

The thing is, we suspect Cosmo is ASD and he thinks everything he sees on TV is real anyway at the moment, even if it's just a cartoon. As far as he's concerned, it's just another prince marrying another princess which is really something that happens every time he's at his cousins house (they enjoy watching disney).

 

So we decided to take advantage of the fact that everyone else would be otherwise engaged, and spend the morning at the somewhat empty museum of natural history and the pitt rivers museum in oxford. I'd never been, but my sisters kids have and they absolutely adored it. The best part? It's free.

 

Cosmo was super excited because we got to ride on a train and he really loves trains. What I hadn't banked on was how much Lychee would love trains too. I have never seen her as excited as she was grinning out the window and flapping her arms madly. They really are like two peas in a pod!

 

So we got to the museum of natural history and it was brilliant. Giant dinosaur skeletons, glow in the dark mineral caves and bugs galore. Cosmo's favourite was a giant Katydid which he went back to over and over again.

and kept telling us 'I like bugs!!' which is the title of a book he got out of the library last week. It's obviously done the trick, because he has gone from being super scared of them to thinking they are really 'cute', so definitely worth looking for if you have a toddler who has a little phobia.

 



The crocodile was also a big hit.

 

Now remember how I said my sisters children were of a different breed? And how they loved the Pitt Rivers museum? Well, those two statements couldn't have been truer as we entered the exhibition.

 

Not only was it too dark and crowded for his liking, he thought all the ceremonial masks and shrunken heads were terrifying. So we didn't end up staying very long at all! Instead we met up with his aunty Caitlin who is studying at the university and went for dinner and a walk around some of the colleges with her instead.

 

It was a lovely family day out but summed up well when we got home and I asked Cosmo what he had learned today. His reply:

'When there are two bits of road together it's called a dual carriageway and you can drive on it really fast'.

 

So much for educational objectives!!

The Mystery of History

The Mystery of History Part One - Creation to Resurrection has arrived!

I'm so excited. I've been flicking through and it looks like we are going to have a LOT of fun with this. I will warn you though, that it comes ready for a 3 ring binder. I have yet to find anywhere that sells these in the UK :-(

Still, it's not so hard to punch new holes in the pages.

We read through the introduction to this quarter this morning, and although I'm sure Cosmo didn't absorb all of it, he enjoyed being read to and the conversational style of the text. It asks question like 'Are you curious about how the world started?' which he loves answering 'yes!' to. I also think it's great that he is becoming familiar with new words. Every time a word popped up that he hadn't heard before (such as 'Cuneiform' or 'Kushite') he asked me to stop and point to the word in the text for him.

This afternoon we are going to make flash cards of all these new words and add them to a new file I am starting. When we re-read through this next (I'll start the curriculum again when I feel that he is old enough to be following the content better) he will already know these words and should make the absorption of information easier for him.

To be honest, I'm flying through it myself whilst he is napping. It's so exciting to me, having never studied history, to be able to see where different events and people around the world fit into the time line of biblical history. To be honest, I've never heard of most of them. I obviously didn't listen much in school, but it's fascinating me now.

So far this curriculum gets five stars. I'll let you know if we encounter any problems as we go along.