Homeschooling Work Samples | October 2016

If you haven’t noticed already we are a family who home schools. We don’t do it full time, but we do take it very seriously. And my challenge everyday is to make learning seriously fun!

Pinky is what her charter school calls a 3-day friend because she’s only at school 3 days a week. As a 3-day friend she has to complete work samples, and I have to fill out forms to show that there is in fact learning going on at home.

I get a lot of people asking me about how I homeschool so I thought I’d start sharing the work samples we turn in to the school for review.

Each month I submit a learning log that includes a list of bullet points for the following subjects – language arts, math, science, social studies and P.E. Every other month I have to submit work samples that include one example of work for each subject with a description of what kind of learning occurred. Samples can’t be larger than a standard file folder for storing purposes, so we have to get creative.

We usually have a handful of samples to choose from, however I try to work with Pinky to decide which ones to submit.

Here’s what we turned in this month.

Language Arts

Pinky is working on creating an invitation. We used this experience to review question words. We broke down the important elements of an invitation using who, what, when, where why and how.

She talked about how the “what” describes what the event is about, “when” is when the event is happening, “where” is where the event will be at, “why” is why you should come or care about the event, “who” is who is invited and “how” is how they will get there.

She also discussed the importance of what order to place the 5 w’s and h and how people might make decisions about coming to an event using the information on the invitation.

Here’s an image of what she submitted for the work sample.

Math

Pinky has been very interested in learning about money. We played a game called Making Cents to help practice counting money. The game includes rolling dice, moving spaces on a board, reading cards and of course counting money.

This was a fun and interactive way for her to learn about how to count money and it also provided ideas for different ways to make money. Here’s a good book for teaching kids about money.

Pinky pasted this photo on journal paper and in her own words wrote, “What i lrnd is haw mach i got frm the bandk.”
Translation: What I learned is how much I got from the bank.

Science

In light of Halloween Pinky decided to learn about the skeletal system. She watched an animated video where kids were discussing the different bones in the human body. She then created her own skeleton using Q-tips that were cut in a variety of sizes, and then labeled the different bones on the body. After she was done we held a discussion about bones and she told me what she learned in her own words.

Later Pinky presented her knew knowledge to Daddy when he came home from work. She learned that, “your bones protect your body, your rib cage protects your heart, you things are the strongest things, it’s called your femur, you have 206 bones in your body, and the smallest bone in your body is your ear.”

She also took used the photo below in her journal and wrote, “What i lrnd about the skeleton is our bowns ar hord.”
Translation: What I learned about the skeleton is our bones are hard.

Even little brother got in on the action! Can you tell he had a fascination with the glue.

We used a combination of two tutorials found on Pinterest to create these skeleton models. You can find them here and here.

Social Studies

Pinky has been learning about how we measure time in hours, days, months, years and seasons. She learned the days of the week by reading the days out loud, writing the days down and through singing a days of the week song. In addition, we looked at the calendar and crossed off days, we also counted how many days until a special event.

In this sample, Pinky uses a grid to learn the months. Each box represented one month. In each box she drew a photo that she associated with that month. For example, her birthday is in January so she drew a photo of herself and a pink balloon.

By assigning each month with something that was special to her, she was able to remember them in her own way.

Learning the months of the year by association. Pinky loves art so she drew pictures of things that reminded her about what happens in each month, including holidays, birthdays and even weather conditions. She had a lot of fun with this. #homeschool #monthsoftheyear #kidsart #lovetolearn

A photo posted by Angela Quisumbing (@the_pinky_project) on Sep 27, 2016 at 10:19am PDT

I hope this helps gives you some insight to how we homeschool. More importantly, I hope it gives you some inspiration for recording the learning that happens in your home.

What projects are you working on with your kids?