Gearing Up For School

Now that I have a break from Summer classes I am working on the finishing touches for our upcoming school year. I have a love / hate relationship with school planning lol. I love the thought of a new school year but sometimes the details can get very "boggy" and I feel like I'm in a rut. It will pass though; it always does. This year I will have a 6th grader and a 9th grader. My eldest son goes to our church school and my eldest daughter graduated last year. We will be doing lots more nature study per requests of Roosie my 11 year old. I will be posting more links on the pages here for neat sites that I find for all subjects so be sure to check them out.

While working in our flower bed last week we found an interesting  tenant under a flower pot; a black widow spider. So that will be the first subject of our nature studies.I found a great info link here BLACK WIDOWS ; its from our local university. I think you will find it very informative especially if you live in Tennessee. Also the ironweed and goldenrod is already beginning to bloom here so we will do a study on that too. Sometimes we follow the Outdoor Hour Challenge using the Handbook of Nature study but we also kind of go rogue with it sometimes and pick our own thing that catches our eye. We use different websites and things for our info too. I found a great book, ABCs of Nature at our library's book sale for a $1 and it has been a great tool.

Click to buy at Amazon

I try to find some free lapbooks or notebooking pages to use with our studies. If I can't find any ,then I make them. I encourage you as a homeschool family to buy either Microsoft Word or Print Shop software. They are both excellent tools for making worksheets.Worksheets I make I will post on my HSLaunch page. If you are not familiar with that site please go check it out. There are some really great printables there.

Do any of you have any different resources you use for nature study? tell me about them. Blessings! ~ Nikki