Great news! Distribution for Equus Rising has expanded, which means you can purchase it just about anywhere books are sold.
If you’d like to stay home, you can now support your local book shop by buying copies through these websites: Many indie stores are also offering curbside pick-up. Just call ahead and ask them to order the book for you. If you enjoy the Equus Rising, please consider leaving a brief, written and starred review on Goodreads and the website where you purchased the book. Reviews greatly help the book’s visibility for future readers. Thank you!
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So you’re suddenly homeschooling? The first thing to do is relax. You’ve got this.
I’m a mom of three and we’re nearing the end of our third year of homeschool. Many friends and family across the country have sent me messages this week asking for homeschooling advice, so I thought I’d compile some ideas and resources that have helped us along the way. All you have to do is a quick search on Pinterest to find thousands of curriculum options and online academic programs. I’m going to push you to think more deeply about this opportunity, though. Homeschooling is partially about academics. But it’s also about building a relationship with your family that looks different from the one you have when you all spend the day apart from each other. (I didn’t use the word “better” to describe that relationship. It’s just different.) Some days it means too much yelling and a lot of guilt. Some days it means accomplishing projects that you’re all super proud of. Some days it means never getting out of your pajamas or getting around to schooling. But it always means togetherness—and togetherness changes your daily dynamics. If you are just starting to homeschool because of the closures due to Covid-19 or for any other reason, I encourage you to think about more than pure academics but also what you hope this togetherness will bring to your family. Below you’ll find some philosophies, project ideas, and resources we’ve stumbled upon or created along the way to help you think creatively about this strange time in which we find ourselves. Working and homeschooling If you haven’t done it before, the thought of working from home while caring for and educating your children may sound overwhelming. But I’ll let you in on something: many, many homeschooling parents work and homeschool simultaneously. Some work part-time, others work full-time. That is to say, people often combine homeschooling with jobs and YOU CAN ABSOLUTELY HANDLE IT. Of course some jobs are much less flexible than others. Some jobs have rigid schedule requirements and immovable deadlines. Those jobs will be tougher to do while educating your kids than more flexible jobs. But it is possible. People in our communities are making it work all the time. Will you feel crazy some days? Possibly to probably yes. But if this is your first foray into working while simultaneously homeschooling, I guarantee you will come out the other side working more efficiently. There is no need to emulate a classroom Please, for the love of your family, back away from the worksheets. Stop yourself from drawing up a minute-by-minute daily schedule. (Why, people? Why?) Refrain from ordering a white board so you can stand up and deliver a formal lecture. Learning is much more efficient and can be much more casual when you’re teaching a few kids versus 20 or 30 in a classroom, so you don’t have to pretend your kitchen is a traditional classroom. Kids are sponges. They learn all the time whether you're stressing about it or not. Homeschool can be anything you want it to be. Imagine the type of education you wish you’d had, then work to make that happen for your kids and for yourself, whether this time of homeschooling lasts two weeks or several months. I’ve read that homeschooling is not just an education for the kids but a reeducation for the home educator. In my experience, this has absolutely been true. I choose to explore subjects with my kids that I’m interested in learning alongside them. (For example, I got so absorbed in a unit study I created for my kids that used the horse as an avenue to study U.S. history that it got completely out of control and morphed into the book I’m publishing in May, Equus Rising: How the Horse Shaped U.S. History.) “Routine, not schedule” I’ll tell you more about Julie Bogart in the resource section below, but in her wonderful homeschooling book, The Brave Learner, she encourages the idea of having a routine rather than a schedule. Schedules are stressful and often pointless. Routines help set expectations but allow for flexibility and spontaneity. Rather than drawing up a rigid schedule of math from 7:30 a.m. to 8:05 a.m. and literature from 8:07 a.m. to 8:37 a.m., consider following a routine or pattern: once everyone is awake and you've had your coffee, convene and take turns reading aloud from a good book. When it feels like time to move on, have everyone write a story. Then give the kids some time to get bored, so they get creative entertaining themselves with Legos and art supplies. Using a routine instead of a schedule means when your child gets obsessed with the story she’s working on, she can write for an hour and a half without interruption instead of having to stop after 20 minutes to maintain a ridiculous schedule. You can move on to the next activity when she'd done. We do not homeschool for 7-8 hours a day. I repeat: we do not homeschool for 7-8 hours a day. Homeschool is more efficient than traditional schooling. There’s no waiting around for the teacher to deal with misbehaving kids (except when those kids are your own!). There’s no lining up and walking to different parts of the school. There’s no set recess time. We do what I call “sit-down” learning for a couple hours a day (including things like reading and discussing literature, working through math books, designing science experiments, etc.). Then we do stuff outside. Or the kids entertain themselves with some crazy self-directed project they’ve come up with. Or they just lie around reading Harry Potter. When we first started to homeschool, I read a suggestion that kindergarteners should do about an hour of school a day. With each subsequent grade, you should add about half an hour of schooling. We’ve loosely followed that suggestion, though it’s not all sit-down learning, and some days we get really into a project and work much of the day on it. RESOURCES AND IDEAS Photography This is the perfect time to take a break from traditional subjects and explore photography. Learning to still yourself and observe the world is a valuable skill. (How can someone lead you astray by telling you to ignore what is in front of you if understand how to see it like it is?) Learning to tell a story effectively, whether through images or words, is an important life skill, too. My heart goes out to everyone whose life has been upended by this pandemic, so I’ve decided to offer a free downloadable sample of my intro photography curriculum for kids, Documenting Your World Through Photography: An Introductory Course for Elementary and Middle Schoolers. The sample is packed with activities to keep you busy for two weeks to two months, depending how you pace it. And it’s great for teens and adult learners, too. If you’re not a photographer, now is you change to learn alongside your kids. I’m also putting the full curriculum on sale through the end of March. The paperback version on Amazon is already marked down by 15%. To received 15% off the digital version, please use code: MARCH31 If you end up using this time to learn photography, consider going a step further and helping your kids to create and order a photo book online. Have them write their own captions. It won’t occur to them this is educational activity if you don’t call it school. Read good books + write good stuff Even if your kids are prolific readers, sit down with them and read books to each other out loud. There is so much joy in getting sucked into good literature together. Discuss what you’re reading, too. Choose books written from a variety of perspectives on a variety of topics. Watch the movies together after you finish the books and talk about them. Many “classics” aren’t worthy of that classification. Think more broadly. The book Give Your Child the World: Raising Globally Minded Kids One Book at a Time is an excellent resource, organized by grade level, for selecting K-12 books. Our first year of homeschool, we did an “Around the World” theme by continent or region of a continent. I posted some of these units. You can find them here (scroll down to the bottom of that blog post for the whole list of the ones I got around to posting). Brave Writer, founded by Julie Bogart, is a fantastic resource for literature and language arts, as well as for helping you to figure out how you want to live your unique homeschool existence. Brave Writer offers a lot of free content (such as how to start holding Poetry Tea Time—a favorite in our house), as well as paid products. We use their literature and language arts guides. Julie’s ideas about how to teach kids to write resonate with me as a writer. One of her suggestions is to make weekly time for your kids to freewrite (with or without a prompt from you). Then don’t nit-pick their mechanics! They get enough of that at school, and it can stifle creativity. Just let them write and write and write. Later, you can help them edit one of their pieces, and they can write a final draft. Last year we turned the girls’ freewriting into published books, which was a really fulfilling project for them. One of the books we just published using an online photo book company so my daughter could have a copy for herself and to send to the grandparents. One of the books, Rascal’s Life, we actually published and it’s available for purchase on Amazon. You can read about the process we used hereand here. History I'm encouraged to see many more people are coming to the realization that a traditional history education is woefully narrow and that viewing the past from innumerable lenses enriches our understanding of how we got to where we are today. One of my impetuses for writing Equus Rising: How the Horse Shaped U.S. History was to offer up an additional perspective that made room for the inclusion of not only the energy source that powered the nation for centuries (the horse!), but also human figures often written out of traditional histories: women and people of color. The book could help to broaden your history curriculum for high schoolers or late middle schoolers. It also branches into science, literature, and policy, making for a comprehensive unit study. Science I’m a science nut. I could go on forever about science project ideas and experiments, but they’re really easy to find just searching Pinterest. So I’ll just give you a few ideas that make up a lot of our science studies. Nature study: we spend a lot of time outside identifying the plants and animals we find. Sometimes we just make note of what we locate and look it up later. Sometimes we take a photo of it, then upload the photo to a free app called iNaturalist, which helps us with identification. (It’s awesome.) Nature journaling: we keep nature journals and use them in a variety of ways. Sometimes we go outside and draw what we find as we’re looking at it. Sometimes we just use our outdoor time to find inspiration, then go home and find some pictures of the subject online or in a book and draw or paint it at the kitchen table. Then we write some interesting facts about it. Other times I choose something I’d like us to study and we go from there. Scientific method and science experiments: As a writer who trained as a medical journalist, I’ve learned over the years that, unfortunately, many non-scientist adults (and kids) don’t understand what science actually is. And they don’t even realize it. It keeps me up at night. Let’s make sure our kids are learning that science is more than memorizing classifications or putting two things together to make them fizzle. Look up the scientific method and discuss what it is. Then design an experiment you can do at home with the supplies you have. My 2nd and 3rd graders have gotten into doing behavioral experiments on our hedgehog. After designing the studies, we collect and analyze the data, make charts and graphs, then write up faux journal articles. One of our studies, for example, was “Instantaneous Sampling of a Hedgehog’s State Behaviors.” Another was “A Hedgehog Case Study: Distance She Can Push a Paper Towel Roll.” They were a blast! Of course, these studies need to be ethical and not harmful to the pet. Lots of treats should be involved. Just search for some ideas on how to design a basic behavioral study. Make sure to talk your kids through each step of the study, so they understand that science is about observing, measuring, and testing the world around them. The process of science itself is not political. Religious beliefs are not science. They are beliefs. Science is about building evidence to develop a better understanding of how things work. Math If your school has not assigned specific math curriculum for your kids, I’ve got an idea for you. A high school math teacher told me that a huge challenge for many kids entering high school these days is that they never had to memorize their basic math facts in elementary school. That means many high school kids can’t tell you off the tops of their heads what 8 + 7 is or what 4 x 8 is, which makes higher-level math more difficult. This math teacher has told me, when I get stressed about teaching math to my kids, that what they really need to know is their basic math facts. Drilling math facts doesn’t always happen in traditional schools any more. So if you don’t have a set curriculum to work through these weeks or months, what if you saved some time each day for flashcards? You can make them yourself or order them online. Or print out some free “time tests” and make a game out of it for your kids? (I always hated time tests, but it turns out they work.) Send your kids back to school with their math facts in check. You can also bake with your kids to practice their fractions. (You don’t have to tell them that’s the goal, though.) Double a recipe and help them think through how much of each ingredient you need. Just make sure you double everything in the recipe. Only remembering to double half the ingredients is my downfall. Social Distancing Finally, the medical journalist in me needs to take a moment to promote social distancing. Even if you’re not in a high-risk group for complications from Covid-19, it’s essential that you participate in social distancing to “flatten the curve” of disease spread so cases don’t spike to a number that overwhelms our health care system. (We don’t have actually have “a” health care system. We have a messy combination of systems.) It doesn’t matter if you’re young and healthy; your life could be endangered if our health care system became overwhelmed. It would mean that if you got in a car accident or had a medical emergency unrelated to Covid-19, there may not be medical professionals or equipment, such as a ventilator, available to keep you alive. This worst-case scenario isn’t theoretical; it's happening in other countries as we speak. Whether you choose to act selflessly for the good of others or selfishly for your own good, you’ve got to participate in social distancing. We can't overwhelm the system, and the only way not to do so (since we have failed to contain the virus from spreading through the community) is by social distancing. Right now. Today. That means no playgrounds. That means no playdates. That means stay home to stay safe. In my first post of this series, I wrote about the writing, workshopping/editing, and formatting process we've used to help my kids create books to print in hard copy for themselves. In this post, I'm sharing how we took Cricket's book, "Rascal's Life," to another level by independently publishing it. (Side note: if you want to make an 8-year-old's day, please consider purchasing Rascal's Life for your kids. Cricket, who thought it much more authorly to go by her real name, Caroline, will receive $2.20 in royalties per copy. She says she will likely spend the money on the real-life Rascal. No surprise there.) If you're just joining me, I suggest you first read the previous post in this series. Once you're caught up, come back here and read about the publishing process. The great news is that as long as you have access to Word to format your document, you can publish a book. Independent publishing (also known as self-publishing) is a fantastic and empowering way to put work out there, for both adults and kids. Many successful authors now prefer independent publishing over traditional publishing houses, because publishers offer substantially less assistance and marketing support than they used to. I published my intro photo course for kids this way and will likely go the same route with the nonfiction book I'm writing, so I can maintain complete creative control and put the book out on my own timeline. Independent publishing may also be the most viable option for the publication of most writing by kids. Since there are many platforms for independent publishing today, I sought the advice of a highly successful indy author in deciding which to use. He recommended what is now Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), the platform he's used to publish several books. Amazon recently bought this platform, so you can sell your work directly on Amazon (with Prime shipping, no less). There are no upfront fees to use the service. Your royalties are a percentage of the price you set, minus the printing cost, depending on which distribution option you choose. You can publish paperbacks and Kindle books. KDP prints books on-demand when someone places an order, and you can unpublish your book at any time. This process appeals to me for my kids' books, because if they turn 20 and decide they no longer want to sell the work they published as 8-year-olds, they can simply unpublish the books and no new copies will be printed. I won't get into specific details of preparing your manuscript, because KDP has numerous tutorials available. Use them. But I want you to see that the process is manageable. Here's the general process:
Independent publishing takes some elbow grease, but it's accessible and doable. Your kids can put their work out into the world, and so can you. Share your publishing successes with me! In my next post of this series, I'll share how we celebrate a newly published book in our family. This post reflects my own personal views and experiences and is NOT sponsored by KDP.
We just wrapped up one of our favorite activities of the homeschool year: a book-writing workshop. Can you imagine the joy and pride in the girls' eyes when their printed books arrived in the mailbox?
I've gotten a lot of questions about how we put the books together, so I thought I'd share our process. In this post, I'll describe the writing, editing, design, and printing methods we used for the books we wanted to print hard copies of but did not plan to actually publish. In the next post of this series, I detail how we went about independently publishing Cricket's book, which is now available on Amazon. Pulling together a book is no small task for the child or the parent/educator/editor, whether you plan to publish it or not, but it's so worth the work. Why? Three reasons: 1) a book is a literal, physical, understandable representation that you can achieve an overwhelming goal by breaking it into manageable pieces and dedicating hard work to it; 2) a book shows kids their ideas and work have value; 3) telling kids they have to study grammar, spelling, mechanics, and literature in case they need them for their careers when they're 40 means nothing, but a finished book product shows them that with those elements, they're capable of producing meaningful work now. Last year, Cricket wrote and illustrated a picture book. This year, Nora wrote and illustrated a short chapter book, and Cricket wrote and photographed a short chapter book. Our process happens in three phases: freewriting and re-writing, workshopping, and formatting.
Freewriting (and re-writing)
Workshopping
Once they completed a draft of the story (I put no time limit on them—a project like this is done when it's done), we began to work through the editing process together. I've done this part in two different ways.
Formatting
For the books we wanted to print to have copies for ourselves but not to actually publish, I used an online photo printer, Snapfish, and put them together as hardcover photo albums. There are plenty of inexpensive photo printer companies, but I liked that Snapfish allowed us to choose from several different sizes and gave us control over the page design.
Odds and ends
The formatting for Cricket's published book happened a little differently, and I explain that process in my next post. When the books arrive, we make a big deal out of them! A shiny, new, complete project is a big deal, whether it's technically published or not. (And legally, if I remember correctly from graduate school, if at least three people read something, it can be considered published regardless of any formalities.) We also throw a "Book Release" tea party, which is a blast and I'll tell you about in another post. I can't encourage you enough to build a book-writing workshop of some sort into your curriculum. Sure, I may be biased; I'm a writer after all. But regardless of their interests and skills, all kids need to learn to communicate effectively and break overwhelming projects into bite-size portions to succeed. Plus your heart will explode when you see how proud they are of their finished products.
Learn about my intro photography curriculum
Documenting Your World Through Photography: An Introductory Course for Elementary and Middle Schoolers Book lists: Around the world East Africa (Part I) East Africa (Part II) and Central Africa North Africa (Egypt) Southern Africa West Africa The Arctic Antarctica
Point-and-shoot cameras seem like a relic of the past now that most of us carry smart phones, don't they? I imagined my kids would learn photography using my phone, then move on to a basic DSLR in a few years if they really caught the photo bug. But they had other ideas.
After a few months of sharing my phone to take photos as they slowly started to work their way through my intro photography course for kids, they wanted more independence and asked for their own cameras. I heard them. And I'll do just about anything to encourage them to live creatively and independently. The point-and-shoot camera still serves a purpose after all!
The girls had proven their genuine interest in photography, so we decided to get them each a basic point-and-shoot for Christmas. They're only 6 and 8, so we didn't want to buy something expensive they'd drop in a mud puddle or leave behind at the museum.
You can spend as little as $40 or more than $300 on a point-and-shoot camera. I bought two different cameras in the $40-50 range and promptly returned them. They were terrible. And by that, I mean it was impossible to take a photo in focus on these cameras. I thought maybe the blurry photos were a result of the girls' unsteady hands until I tried the cameras myself. Despite 30 years as a photographer, I couldn't take a focused photo on either of these cameras to save my life. On my third purchase attempt, I finally found a decent camera for $80: the Nikon COOLPIX A10. (If you buy this basic camera package, you'll also need this type of memory card, AA batteries, and a cable to connect it to the computer. Or you can purchase it in a bundle like this, though you still may need to buy the cable separately.) The shutter release of the A10 allows you to press halfway down to focus before continuing to press all the way down to take a shot, which is essential in taking a sharp photo. Here are some pros and cons of the camera: Pros: It's 16.1 megapixels and takes beautiful, sharply focused photos; it's inexpensive, small, and light. Cons: The zoom is not great—avoid using it; the basic camera package did not come with batteries, cable cord, or memory card; it uses batteries quickly (bring extra AA batteries in your camera bag).
Despite the zoom, I've been really impressed with the overall quality of photos the girls have taking using the A10.
Below is a photo (with light edits) by Cricket, age 8.
Below is a photo (with light edits) by Nora, age 6.
There are plenty of other mid-range point-and-shoot cameras to choose from, but here are three tips to help you find a functional one:
1) You need to be able to press the shutter release button halfway down to focus, then all the way down to take a photo. On the first two super cheap cameras I purchased, there was no halfway-to-focus situation. There was just no way to control the focus at all. If you buy a camera for your kids that doesn't allow them to control the focus, you're guaranteeing failure and disappointment. Read about the focus in the camera's description and/or the reviews before purchasing. Test out the shutter release when it arrives and return it if it doesn't allow you to focus by pressing halfway down. 2) Most cameras these days are 10-20+ megapixels. Anywhere in that range is just fine, especially for a beginner. My first DSLR was maybe 10 megapixels, and I was able to enlarge photos beautifully. 3) Make sure to purchase all the necessary pieces either individually or as a package: camera, memory card, batteries (and charger if needed), and cable to connect to the computer. Once you've bought a point-and-shoot camera, here are two tips for using it: 1) Regardless of which camera you buy, TURN OFF THE FLASH. A built-in flash is the worst! Turn it off and leave it off. Forever. 2) On lower- and mid-level point-and-shoot cameras (and mobile phone cameras), DON'T USE THE ZOOM. The zooms are often poor quality. It's generally better to crop an image tightly on the computer afterward than zoom in with a cheap lens.
I may receive a small commission from the Amazon affiliated link on this page at no additional cost to you.
I'm kicking off the year in a big way: my photography course for kids has been published in paperback and is now available for purchase on Amazon!
The course can be incorporated into homeschools, co-ops, classrooms, and families looking to supplement traditional education. It can work with any school schedule, whether traditional, year-round, or piecemeal as you have time. You can learn more about the curriculum here. I decided to offer a paperback version to make the course that much easier to implement. The 121-page paperback is 8x10 inches, making it easily portable for field trips and travel. The content is the same as the digital download, but you no longer have to take the time and money to print it. Plus shipping is free. To celebrate the paperback publication, I'm discounting both versions of the curriculum right now. (More power to you if you've gone paperless.) You can head to my curriculum page to order the digital download, or straight to Amazon to purchase the paperback. If you order the paperback and enjoy the course with your kids, I would love for you to consider writing a review on Amazon. More positive reviews will make the course more searchable and help get it into the hands of more students. I'm going to try to post more of my girls' photography over on my Instagram feed throughout the spring and summer and talk about how we're working our way through the lessons. I hope you'll start sharing work over there from this course with the tag #documentyourworld . Happy snapping!
Lately I've been frustrated trying to find a photography course for my elementary-aged kids that doesn't underestimate their abilities or introduce concepts at a high-school or college level. So this summer I sat down and wrote the intro photography course I wish I could have taken as a kid when I got my first camera at age 7.
I'm thrilled to share this course with you now. It's called: "Documenting Your World Through Photography: An Introductory Course for Elementary and Middle Schoolers." You can purchase the 85-page downloadable PDF here. (Use code SNAP15 to get 15% off through 8/15/18.) But first let me explain why this class should be an important feature of your curriculum.
HOW DOES PHOTOGRAPHY BENEFIT THE DEVELOPING MIND?
As a photographer and writer, I believe there is something profound in bearing witness to the joy and pain in others’ lives, to the beautiful and mundane in this world. To quiet your body and mind, to observe what is in front of you, to learn how to find the thread of a story, to document it from a unique perspective, to transform it into something extraordinary—these are some of the most essential life skills we can teach our children. Why? Because effective storytelling is what propels us through life. It doesn’t matter what particular careers we pursue; college essays, job applications, grant proposals, social media marketing—they all force us to weave engaging stories to convince our audience to feel a certain way. Storytelling matters. While I hope your children grow to enjoy photography as an artistic expression, I’ll tell you right now: they don’t need to become professional photographers to benefit greatly from learning how to look closely, to document life, and to communicate more effectively. The basic photography skills your children will gain from working through this course are the building blocks of an artist, but they are also transferrable to other forms of storytelling the world will expect your children to master along the way. Your children don’t have to wait to learn photography fundamentals until they can handle a high school or college photography course that requires thousands of dollars of equipment and the ability to understand the relationships between shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Meet them at their level and help them get started with this course. They can start building their foundational skills now. Now for some details about the course. COURSE INFORMATION Students will first familiarize themselves with the camera they'll be using, then learn some basics about light, composition, and perspective before moving on to experiment with a few genres of photography. Next they'll learn about storytelling through photography. They'll wrap up the course by creating their own photo series. You do NOT need a fancy DSLR camera to take this course; you just need a mobile phone camera or a basic point-and-shoot. You do NOT need photography experience to teach this course. (And even if you are a professional photographer, the course will help you break down concepts into digestible bits for your kids in ways you may not have considered.) Course details:
Ready to get started? You can purchase the course here. (Use code SNAP15 to get 15% off through 8/15/18.) Questions? Jot me an email.
I may receive a small commission from the Amazon affiliated link on this page at no additional cost to you.
Well my goal of posting our Around the World book lists shortly after we finished each unit fell by the wayside pretty quickly. I'm going to try to zip through them without much commentary and get as many posted as I can over the next few weeks before we start our new school year. We made it through all the continents during the 2017-2018 school year, so just send me a line if you're looking for a specific book list before I've posted it.
Antarctica
Activities Identified and labeled Antarctica maps. Wrote stories about penguins. Visited penguins, sharks and other creatures at the Greensboro Science Center. Wrote and illustrated penguin fact sheets. Snow day fun (actually multiple snow days of fun): sledding, snow forts and snowballs. Studied explorers and their trials, successes and mishaps. Learn about my intro photography curriculum Documenting Your World Through Photography: An Introductory Course for Elementary and Middle Schoolers More Around the World book lists East Africa (Part I) East Africa (Part II) and Central Africa North Africa (Egypt) Southern Africa West Africa The Arctic Antarctica I may receive a small commission from the Amazon affiliated link on this page at no additional cost to you.
We might be past our last blast of winter, but I know many of you are still in the thick of it. I bet your kids will enjoy these wonderful books we recently read about the Arctic. I choose January to study the Arctic and Antarctica (which I'll post next), because it's probably our best shot of getting any snow down here in North Carolina.
Luckily for us, we did have two beautiful snow storms during this unit. What does a snow day look like in our homeschool? Plenty of sledding, hot chocolate, reading and art projects. It's not much different from our usual, casual approach to learning. The books below were a perfect addition to our cozy winter. The Arctic
Activities Identified and labeled the Arctic region on maps. Studied resident and migrant animals, migration, and adaptations to the extreme climate. Lots of snow play, sledding, snowball fights and building snow forts. Learned about snowflake formation, icebergs, ice caps and glaciers. Read about building an igloo. Wrote stories about Arctic animals. Made clay igloos, polar bears and arctic foxes. Studied "What Makes Night and Day" (and why nights and days have different lengths in the Arctic than where we live). Made sun and earth models out of clay to demonstrate rotating and revolving. Read about what why we have different seasons, and how those seasons vary from our own in the Arctic. Field trip: NC Zoo to visit the polar bears and arctic foxes. Learn about my intro photography curriculum Documenting Your World Through Photography: An Introductory Course for Elementary and Middle Schoolers
More Around the World Book Lists
East Africa (Part I) East Africa (Part II) and Central Africa North Africa (Egypt) Southern Africa West Africa The Arctic Antarctica I may receive a small commission from the Amazon affiliated link on this page at no additional cost to you.
We finished up our study of the African continent just before the holidays with a week-long focus on Egypt. I suspect you'll enjoy reading the books we found. Our favorites were the top two on the list.
North Africa (Egypt)
Activities Located and labeled Egypt on map. Read about contemporary Egypt and the Nile. Wrote stories set in Egypt. Studied Nile crocodiles and painted pictures of them. Studied ancient Egypt and read letter from Isabelle (Letters from Afar) about her exploration of Egypt and the Great Pyramids. Compared and contrasted “The Egyptian Cindarella” and Disney’s “Cinderella” using a Venn diagram. Spent a day studying, drawing and writing about caracals (wild cats) at the Carolina Tiger Rescue. Learn about my intro photography curriculum Documenting Your World Through Photography: An Introductory Course for Elementary and Middle Schoolers
More Around the World Book Lists
East Africa (Part I) East Africa (Part II) and Central Africa North Africa (Egypt) Southern Africa West Africa The Arctic Antarctica I may receive a small commission from the Amazon affiliated link on this page at no additional cost to you. |
My new book is out! Click to learn more about it.Hello thereI'm Julia Soplop, writer and photographer. I believe there is something profound in bearing witness to moments of joy and pain in others’ lives. My husband, three girls and I live outside of Chapel Hill, NC. You can read more about me here.
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