Archive for the ‘Homeschooling’ Category

Art Gallery: A Library of Creativity

Tuesday, September 8th, 2020

art-gallery-creativity

If a picture is worth a thousand words, an art gallery is like a library of intricate creativity. It makes an intriguing field trip for your kids to be exposed to greatness. Most art galleries in large cities have rotating exhibits that feature famous works of art from well-known and loved painters and sculptors of all time. Recently my family went to a Norman Rockwell exhibit, where row upon row of Life Magazine covers were displayed, capturing the essence of many decades of history.

My kids pointed out intricate details in the sketches. They noticed humorous and emotional scenes of various kinds. We saw presidents from the past 70 years or more, all with the themes of the day behind them, depicting wars, mundane life (hanging clothes to dry on the line), and the mischief of children.

I have taken my children to many different exhibits over the years. Two of our favorite artist displays were a collection of paintings of Rembrandt and the inventions of Leonardo Da Vinci.

When my children were very small, I had a large packet of postcards of famous works of art, so my children were already familiar with the artists before we went to the exhibits. This made the exhibits even more meaningful to our kids. I highly recommend taking your family to a local art museum so that you, too, can experience some of the most creative minds of all time.

advantages-of-art-galleries

I would like to leave you with a poem I recently wrote about an art gallery:

Art Gallery

The eyes of a portrait
Peer out from a canvas
Hanging larger than life
In a hall where people pass

Suspended in time
People from long ago
In elaborate costumes
In row upon row

Framed in splendor
Trapped in stone
Each masterpiece
Cries out to be known

Looking closer
Details can be seen
Inside the masterpieces
That look like a dream

Leaving the gallery
No longer night
Back to reality
Blinking in light

————————————————————————————————————-

More posts about classical art:

  1. Da Vinci
  2. Rembrandt
  3. Monet
  4. Van Gogh
  5. Picasso
  6. O’Keeffe

Mixing-with-the-Masters-600

Best of the School Year | Homeschool High School

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2020

best-of-the-school-year

Today I will be sharing with you the “best of the school year,” including some of our favorite activities, field trips, and curriculum that we used for homeschooling high school this year. This will include unique and interesting field trips for geography and astronomy, and some fun psychology skits. Even through the quarantine, I will show you some activities that we did to tie our homeschooling to current events.

Best of the School Year | Homeschooling High School

Watch the following video to hear about some of the most memorable highlights for our 2020 homeschool year:

The math curriculum we are using is Teaching Textbooks because there is no teaching or grading required by the parent, since all of it is done on the computer. This was especially helpful for higher math.

If you want to see all of the curriculum books we used for all the other subjects this year, I wrote a blog post earlier this year to show what we would be using:

high-school-homeschool-geography

We made up our own geography, which I show you in the video. We made a scrapbook for each country of the world, coloring a map, writing a paragraph about the country from a video about that country, and gluing down a flag of each country. We went on a field trip to Canada, and while we were there, my daughter spent a day immersed in the culture of North and South Korea:

high-school-homeschool-astronomy

High school astronomy was also incredibly fascinating. We attended a star party put on by the local Astronomy Society. During that time, we identified many constellations, the rings of Saturn, and the moons of Jupiter. We attended a workshop put on by a NASA representative, where we saw a real space suit, Shuttle EVA suit glove, small rocket steering thruster, a Martian meteorite, etc. We looked through a special telescope during the day to look for solar flares and sunspots, and we went to a planetarium. If you would like to see the entire set of books we used this year, here it is:

high-school-psychology

Probably my favorite subject to teach this year was psychology. We used 7 Sisters homeschool curriculum, and we brought it to life in this set of videos and blog posts:

Near the end of the school year (in April and May), while in quarantine, we did a lot of gardening:

We also cooked and baked many delicious foods for home economics. Here is a British cake my daughter made:

British-cake

We went on many walks, too, in order to get out of the house and get some exercise for PE. Here is a goofy walk that my daughter and I went on:

This school year is one of my favorite years of homeschooling. Yes, it can still be fun to homeschool high school!

back-to-homeschool-giveaway

ENTER THE GIVEAWAY:
$200 to spend on homeschooling curriculum at Rainbow Resource!

I’ve teamed up with a group of homeschool bloggers that would like to bless a few homeschool families this year.  We will be giving THREE families $200 to spend at Rainbow Resource Center to buy curriculum, resources, and supplies for their homeschools.

To enter for your chance to win, simply use the Rafflecopter form below.  Now I know this is quite a few entries, but each of these bloggers has generously chipped in their own money to make this giveaway possible, so I hope you will take the time to do all of the entries.  And hey, the more entries you do, the better your odds are of winning!

Giveaway ends July 31, 2020 at 11:59pm ET.  Must be at least 18 years of age.  Must be a resident of U.S. or Canada to enter.  Selected winners will have 48 hours to respond to email notification to claim their prizes or another winner will be drawn.  By entering this giveaway, you agree to be added to the email lists of the participating bloggers (see the Terms & Conditions on the Rafflecopter form for the complete list).

a Rafflecopter giveaway

High School Psychology Series

Friday, April 17th, 2020

high-school-psychology-series

What a fun time we’ve had learning high school psychology! We’ve done so many hands-on activities, including: making a vegetable brain, a play doh brain, and a play doh neuron; placing foods on a tongue map; doing a perception activity involving snapping pictures of being chased by a car; drawing a large colorful chart of our basic needs; moving stuffed animals to re-enact various concepts; and performing many fascinating skits–sometimes involving costumes and props, and in one instance, a live cat.

We have thoroughly enjoyed using the psychology curriculum from 7 Sisters that you can find here: {affiliate link} Introduction to Psychology from a Christian Perspective.

Hands-on Psychology Activities

I thought I would make it easier for you by creating an index or table of contents for all these fun psychology activities you can do:

Psychology Bloopers

We also have some psychology blooper videos, if you need some merriment in your life:

Since homeschool parents need to buy curriculum for their high school students anyway, and psychology is one of your standard half-credit high school electives (it’s a one-semester course), you might as well purchase the curriculum here: {affiliate link} Introduction to Psychology from a Christian Perspective.

Sleep & Dreams: Goofy Skits

Friday, March 13th, 2020

sleep-and-dreams

In this next psychology episode, my daughter and I will explain all the most important aspects of sleep and dreams. Everyone needs a good 8 hours of sleep per night. When you undersleep or oversleep, you will experience drowsiness during the day. We explain why this happens in the following video:

What happens when sleep is interrupted?

In the video, Fuzz and Pavlov’s dog are roommates, and they have different sleep schedules. When Pavlov’s dog hears a bell and eats, he interrupts the sleep of Fuzz, who is sound asleep. Fuzz tries to get back to sleep, but the bell rings again, and he wakes up. This happens over and over again.

When someone is continuously interrupted in their sleep, they are never able to get into the more restorative deeper sleep, so the person will feel groggy the next day. Deep sleep and REM sleep are the stages of sleep that help our bodies to recuperate during the night.

What are the stages of sleep?

We need a 90-minute cycle of sleep to feel fully rested, and we go through these 90-minute cycles throughout the night. These are the stages of sleep:

  • Stage 1: Light Sleep (about 5 minutes) This is the lightest form of sleep, where you can hear people talking, but your heartbeat and breathing starts slowing down.
  • Stage 2: Intermediate Sleep (about 25 minutes) You can still wake up easily from this sleep because you are not in deep sleep yet. Your muscles relax, your temperature drops, and your eye movements stop.
  • Stage 3: Deep Sleep (from 30 minutes to an hour) This is one of the stages where it is difficult to wake up. Your brain waves are slower, as well as your heartbeat and breathing. You can’t feel refreshed if you never have deep sleep.
  • REM Sleep (from 10 minutes to an hour) Your eyes move rapidly (REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement) from side to side during the dream stage of sleep, which is also restorative. Brain activity is similar to wakefulness, but you have temporary muscle paralysis to prevent you from acting out your dreams.

sleep-cycles

Why is oversleeping bad?

In the video, Pavlov’s dog had been sleeping the entire day. Why? Well, our bodies produce melatonin when we sleep, so the more we sleep, the more melatonin our body produces, causing us to become more and more sleepy. This is why oversleeping is actually unhealthy. I’ve also noticed that my muscles feel sore when I oversleep. The stiffness is due to the fact that a body needs to move to feel healthy.

Do our dreams ever mean anything?

Most dreams mean nothing—our brain is just processing random things that have happened in our lives. But according to Scripture, God sometimes communicates to us through dreams. (We are told that dreams from God will increase in the last days. Joel 2:28, Acts 2:17). Dreams from God are often symbolic, like the statue in the book of Daniel representing four kingdoms, and the skinny cows in the book of Genesis that represented seven years of famine for Egypt.

Recently I had a set of three symbolic dreams, all in the same night. All three had the same message:

A Dream in Three Scenes

Scene 1: I look up into the night sky and see the magnificence of God in the Milky Way galaxy, but nobody is looking up. I’m in a courtyard full of people, surrounded by light pollution, and nobody even bothers to look up because when they glance up, they can’t see anything because their eyes aren’t adjusted. They don’t understand they need to GAZE up for a long time and step away from the light pollution in order to see the magnificence of God.

Scene 2: I’m hungry. I’m in a busy London restaurant area, and strangers are wanting to chat about frivolous things. I’m so hungry I might faint. I order food at a counter, and I’m given a plate with too little food on it (one bite of meat, one of vegetable, and one of potatoes), and I am not given utensils. I search and search for basic utensils, but no one cares, not even the people who work there. I realize my food must be cold by then, and I look around and can’t find my food. People keep trying to chat about frivolous things.

Scene 3: I’m crossing a busy London street, and suddenly two of my kids are with me. I know that when I set my foot in the crosswalk, the speeding cars will stop for me, and they did. But I hear a loud cry from behind me. It sounds like my son is on the other side of the street, and I can’t see him because of all the traffic. By this time my daughter is too far ahead for me to take her hand, and she thinks I’m right behind her, so she keeps walking across, but I turn around because all I can hear is the cry of my son. I realize he’s much younger than I thought. I’m standing there with dangerous fast-moving traffic, separated from both my kids, and my son’s screams have stopped and I panic and wake up in a shock.

These dreams are one and the same: The things that matter most get lost in the midst of worthless things that distract our attention.

If you are enjoying our psychology series, why not teach your own high school students psychology with the {affiliate link} psychology course we are using by 7 Sisters Homeschool? We like its no-nonsense approach, and the fact that you can get through the material at your own pace, with no fluff bogging you down.

Have you ever had a symbolic dream that helped you to understand something about your life? If so, please comment below.

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