Canoe Field Trip

The one thing I knew from the beginning of our homeschool journey is that if we did homeschool I wanted to have plenty of field trip experiences for our children. I love the idea of hands on experiences that help make what we are learning real and apply to the now. One of our field trips we've taken this year was canoeing down the river. We were learning about the Pilgrims coming to settle the New World and ideally we would have gone out on a sailing ship on the ocean or at least toured an old one. That not being really possible in the land locked state we live in we did the next best thing we could and "sailed" around a river and used our imaginations. Perhaps not authentic in any way, but everyone had fun and we got out and talked about what it would have been like to be on the ocean on a bigger ship. On another note, I think this would make a great creative date idea (hear that Jon!).

Grammar Workshop: Nouns that name people

Every week we do what we call a "grammar workshop" where we work together and learn different grammar rules using books and other ideas to work with the information and make sure we have it down. For example, while doing nouns one day we might identify nouns in a passage from a book and another day we might write a sentence with a noun we found in our passage and again another day we might draw a picture of the noun. Just different things. I use First Language Lessons for the grammar rules and a good order to present them in but I present the material and work with it in my own way and to fit our themes. Today we continued our discussion on nouns that name people and as an assignment we listed as many different common nouns for people that we could come up with. At first it was rather slow getting the kids to be excited about it and I had to help them by asking things like "Who helps you at the library?" Then they got to thinking and remembering that Halloween is coming up so our final list included nouns like:

vampires, witches, zombies, monsters, goblins, dryads, fairies, naiads, princesses, princes, queens, kings, and commoners

I wish I could have learned nouns like that when I went to school. Halloween nouns- I love it!