Andrew Gabriel

 

Andrew Gabriel was born at home on Wednesday, November 24th at 3:45am. We’re both doing well, and I’m spending the week in bed I’ll update the blog in a couple of weeks with big news. Hopefully my book will be available and I’ll show you the massive amounts of resources I’ve made to go along with it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Africa

As usual all of the links here are also found on the Links to All Things Free for Homeschoolers blog. We are homeschooling at a minimum right now as I’m 36 weeks pregnant! But, we are moving along.

And we’ve moved on to Africa. We learned about grasslands and rivers and focused on Kenya and Ethiopia, though we read about modern Egypt as well. I also had a book on hand with a history of the continent and an African folklore book. For their creative writing one week, they wrote a short story of the style of one of the folklore stories, which was how an animal got a certain characteristic. I loved my son’s story about how frogs got their long tongues.

For grasslands we used our same biome website.

My son made a river lapbook piece from here to put on our wall map. It’s a worksheet, but he just cut it out like a piece and it folds in half and everything. We have a geography workbook that I got for 50 cents and we did a couple river worksheets from there.

We used the same continents lapbook to make Africa lapbook pieces.

We did a Livingston coloring/notebooking page.

Played all of these online African geography games/tutorials. I had the big kids label a map of Africa with the different geographic regions found in one of the tutorials.

Kenya lapbook

Ethiopia lapbook

Here are lapbook pictures. You can download these lapbooks on the Free Stuff! page.They require very little writing. In the lapbook downloads there are video links so you can listen to their languages. The country lapbooks were the very first ones I made, and I’m finally getting around to using them.

When I was making these, I actually had friends from Kenya and Ethiopia. The Ethiopians were refugees, and the Kenyans were migrant workers. But I got to eat both of their types of bread since they all loved to share meals with our family. The woman in the picture above the recipe is making what is in the recipe.

It’s Finally (almost) Ready!

 

This is the cover of my book (front and back).

 

 

I wrote this last September and then worked several months on editing it. Then it has sat and sat and I’ve been waiting and waiting. But here it finally is! I will get my proof copy in a little over a week. Hopefully you’ll be able to get your copy in December!

This book is for teens and adults. You’ll have to decide about your tweens and younger children. I have read it to my elementary school aged children and I know others have as well. I have tons of homeschool materials to go along with the book. I also have a reading/Bible study guide for individuals and groups.

Look for the announcement of its debut soon!

Deserts — Australia

Next we learned about warm deserts and I paired it with studying Australia. Here is some of what we did.

Deserts — Here is the biome website I am using.

Australia — My kids each made a lapbook piece about Australia. (From the same lapbook as the Antarctica pieces)

The kids played with this online tutorial and game.

Map worksheet from homeschool creations. You follow the directions and label things on the map. I had my kids label the deserts on their maps as well. (My daughter made her own map instead of using the worksheet, but she followed the worksheet directions for labeling.)

My kids read the first chapter from this Australian folklore book.

All of my kids used this James Cook notebooking page. (You can color it and there are lines for writing about him.)

5 year old and 10 year old

My five year old colored and cut out this boomerang.

He also made his own Australian flag. I put THIS up on the computer for him to look at.

There is an Australian flag lapbook available on the Links blog as well as many books that you could read. Find them on the Geography/Cultures page under Australia. (The continents are in alphabetical order: Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia…)