Our Summer Studies Plan
Jun 7th, 2006 by lvbirders
I couldn’t get a clear picture on how I wanted our summer studies to look like until I read this amazing post by Faith over at Dumb OX Academy. The woman is brilliant!!! Suddenly ideas started popping into my brain on how I could adapt her “On the Fridge” studies to my own family and so our family’s summer studies plan was created and named “Weekly Enrichment Wall for Life-Long Learners”.
The tag on our blog is Life-long Learners as this is how I have always considered each and every member of our family including mom and dad. The wall part came about because we have had a “Happy Birthday Wall” in the past as part of our studies where we posted things commemorating people or events on a wall in our front room. Natural enough to turn this wall into another use, hence the “Weekly Wall”. We have included some of Faith’s great ideas and added a few of our own.
This is our first week’s “Weekly Wall of Enrichment…” in which the whole family has gotten involved and helped create or learn along with:
June 5-11, 2006
Latin - Ora et Labora (pray and work)
French - L’Arbre de la Famille (Family Tree)- contributed by oldest daughter who is 23 and took French I this past year in college and is now teaching her mother and youngest brother during the summer.
German - Wir mussen jeden Abend unsere Hausaufgaben machen. (We must do our homework every night.) - contributed by my son who is 21 and has been teaching himself German for the last year or so.
Quote - “Know thyself” - Socrates German philosopher 469 BC-399 BC birthday celebrated June 5
Root Word - Star Latin=stell derivatives: stellar
Greek=astr;aster derivatives: astrology, astronomy, astronaut, asterisk, asteroid
Grammar Rule - 8 parts of speech; noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection
Spelling Rule - Put i before e except after c or when it sounds like a as in neighbor and weigh
(I also found a site that had it in cartoon form here)
Word of the Week - itinerant Adj 1)passing from place to place;wandering 2)a person who travels from place to place (from back entries of Dictionary.com)
Poet - Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-200) Birthday June 7 First black writer to receive a Pulitzer Prize
The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till
after the murder,
after the burial
Emmett’e mother is a pretty-faced thing;
the tine of pulled taffy.
She sits in a red room,
drinking black coffee.
She kisses her killed boy.
And she is sorry.
Chaos in windy grays
through a red prairie.
Composer - Robert Schumann (1810-1856) German birthday June 8
Artist - Diego Velasquez (1599-1660) Spanish painter baptized June 6
painting - The Surrender of Breda (painted 1634-35)
History - The Murder of Emmett Till August, 1955 beginning of civil rights movement
This tied into the history we are learning in connection with our read aloud The Watsons Go To Birmingham - 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis.
Current Event - Planets Mars and Saturn close together - Nasa
Math - Decimal Chart - Rules on addition, subraction, multilication, division of decimals
source Saxon 76 text
Science - Saturn and its Rings in honor of Giovanni Cassini (1625-1712) French mathematician/astronomer birthday June 8
We have had alot of fun as a family putting this together and learning about things this week so far. Seems like this will be just the right way for this family of life-long leaners to keep their brains working over the summer. Can’t wait for next week!
Oh, my gosh this is brilliant!!!!!It is beyond brilliant—it is stellar (pun intended!)!!! I am SO going to have to find a way to do this!!! Hey, wouldn’t this work all school year, too!?! Just rotating things according to how frequently you study them-like I know youndo a composer a month, so that would stay up all month, while quotesa and science topics would rotate weekly???
I need to go read Faith’s post now… I am so excitied!!!
See how excited I was. I mispelled about half the words in that comment!LOL!
Theres,
You are too funny. Hope you were able to check our Faith’s great post. We are having a great tme with this and yes it is similar to what we do during the year.
Barb, thank you for sharing this idea! Like Theresa, I am blown away. Definitely finding a space for a weekly wall of enrichment at our house! :)
Dawn
Thanks so much. As always I have a great time reading your own blog. I’ll look forward to seeing your family’s fridge or wall studies :))
I love this concept! Methinks you will have to deal with a lot of us adapting it at our own homes. This is terrific!
Angela,
Adapt away :) It’s alot of fun and not too much work on my part. I love learning all this stuff even if no one else would lol
THIS may be the best idea I have seen in a blue moon! We have been simplifying but I really dont want to forget about the memory work or artists study etc. You just gelled all my thoughts for me. Thanks!
What an awesome idea! Thank you for sharing and I just might “borrow” the idea for the upcoming year. ;)
[…] I have also had a few questions concerning “the Wall”. An explanation of how it came about can be found here at Our Summer Studies Plan and a more detailed explanation can be found here at An Explanation of Our Weekly Wall. […]
[…] If your interested, you can read more about”the wall” here. More explanation can be found here also. […]
[…] concentrated studies and then become more realxed during the summer months. Last year our “Weekly Wall of Enrichment” was a big hit with everyone in the family. This year we are using “The General Study […]