Childhood of Famous Americans Book Series -- Alphabetical List

I love it when you can combine more than one subject at a time, and I think it's essential to the successful homeschooling of more than one kid. 

That's what I love about the Childhood of Famous American series of books. It combines Language Arts with history in an engaging way, not like a boring textbook. 

Below is a list of the entire series of books. I hope to print it out and cross them off as we read them as a family. Some are Easy Readers and fast to get through. Some are full books. 

Enjoy!

Time4Learning $12 for up to FIVE KIDS in Same Family Through April 30, 2016

YES YES YES! Okay, so we already made the decision to switch over to Time4Learning instead of virtual school for 2016/2017 and supplement with some Teaching Textbooks for Math.

Anyway, it would be $90 for all 5 of my kids per month. But they give a discount for big families and it was going to be $70 per month, which I was cool with.

Then I logged in today to find some things out just for fun and saw that if you sign up by April 30, your FIRST MONTH IS ONLY $12 for up to five kids!

BAM! SOLD! Why not sign up now and get it going? I can pause the membership over the summer if we want to (I've heard some kids still dig doing it in the summer) and start back up end of August or early September.

I'll be back to let you know how it goes for our family. We only really have two computers and one is mine for work purposes most of the time, so I'm going to have to relinquish it for hours at a time ... which is no big deal because I wasn't using it when homeschooling usually anyway. So my plan is to get two kids going at a time on Time4Learning while the others play or read. Then the next two can go, then the final kiddo. Maybe that "final kiddo" will be Callie, who loves to homeschool at night anyway. Probably do half hour increments or so many lessons or whatever but we'll see how it works best for our family!

Here are some screenshots from the site:

Here's my referral code!

5th Grade Benchmarks (Scope and Sequence)

So I've typed up in Excel all the Fifth Grade benchmarks from the book by Rebecca Rupp called "Home Learning Year by Year". Benchmarks are things a typical school kid "needs to know." But you be the judge of that. 

Obviously, some stuff is important and leads to other things. There are other things on this list that you might just say, "Sure, but we can hit that hard later on." And you would be fine. If you are teaching one child right now, it will be no problem to hit all these points. If you are like me and teaching 4 kids while wrangling a younger one, you might choose to put some things off while focusing harder on others. Maybe you choose to focus more on life skills. You are not doing it wrong at all!

Other grades can be found here at the blog under the Blog Category of Benchmarks, as well as by grade.

Here are the benchmarks for Fifth Grade. As I'm putting them into Excel and uploading them to Google Docs.  I'll be adding the others as fast as my fingers can type!

I suggest buying the book so you can also benefit from all the wonderful resources the author provides, as well as a longer description of each benchmark.

Daily Homeschool Checklist Sheet Second/Third Grade

So I finally have my brain back. Well, the best it can come back after 5 kids sucked my brain cells up. That's a sacrifice I was willing to make, though. Moving on ...

My point here is that I WANT SO BADLY TO GET ORGANIZED in my homeschooling yet I am somehow a Type A Free Spirit. Yep, I am both organized/structured and also a rebellious hippie. I love my planner so I can see what we have done, even though my state doesn't require me to even keep records.

And I love when we take Forget Homeschooling days. There is a tad bit of guilt but as the years go on and I see that my kids are indeed learning and, most importantly, learning how to be kind individuals, it gets easier to take a day off to go to the zoo (nature/science!) or to Kaleidoscope (art there plus history at the Hallmark Visitor's Center!). I tell people we half homeschool/half unschool.

It's also difficult to get anything done in the midst of remodeling and not being able to find half the books, but that is another post!

So here's the Google docs link of Callie's checklist so you can see how I have set it up. She pretty much asked for this since she knows we are starting a new school year and she wants to keep all her stuff straight. I put it in a page protector so she can use a dry erase marker to cross things off. Maybe we'll do something like by Friday she has 5 checks by some stuff and only 2 checks by the history and science. Or maybe she'll want to cross it off each day and I'll log stuff in the planner.

Then there comes that day that I want to chuck the planner across the room and just play with my kids and read to them and have fun with them. It's all in the balance and moderation. I can be a Free Spirited Fun Homeschooling Mom and a Let's Get Some Stuff Done For Real Today Homeschooling Mom, too!

Reading About Child Labor

A while back I was reading about Child Labor to my oldest son. After that, he wasn't resistant to doing chores or mowing the grass! Gotta love history!

The REAL History of European Exploration in the 1400s and 1500s

I'm working on an idea. I want to write some humorous history. I am getting so sick of reading this dry crap to my kids and hoping they will comprehend a little tiny bit of it. Lately I've been pre-reading it and then telling it back in my own words, with commentary. Here's a typical thing I might do for What Your Fifth Grader Needs to Know Geography, World Civilization and American Civilization:

"Okay, so Magellan went around the world, right? Well, it all started when he made his own king (Portugal) mad and had to go crying to the Spanish king to help him get some ships and stuff if the king would let him sail on the Spanish side of where they were allowed to sail. Nowhere in the history book we are reading does it say this word, but Mommy is saying it now: traitor.

And by the way, Da Gama was a PIRATE, not really an explorer. There is a difference. When you burn stuff down and steal for your own gain, you are a pirate. Sheesh, when we get to the part about slaves, will the owners of the slaves be called simply BUSINESSMEN?

Mommy digresses. Sorry. Magellan did not sail all the way around the world because he made some natives mad in the Philippines and they killed him, but his SHIP did survive and made it all the way around the world.

Then there's Zheng He, which I don't remember ever hearing about. This was a Chinese dude who did WAY more than the white guys did. He had 60 huge ships (called junks, tee hee!), 255 smaller ships and over 27,000 crew members. He was like Microsoft to the other guys' mom and pop store. He coulda done more cool stuff than he did but China didn't want outside influence messing with their culture.

Now, let's talk about how great the mommies of these explorers were to instill a sense of adventure in their boys ..."