Homeschooling- mid year update

I'm only homeschooling 2 now and Colin, at 17 and in his final year of homeschooling, is very independent at this point, so this update is mainly just about Tristan.

Things are looking good in our homeschool, very optimistic that we'll hit summer break on the early side this year.

For history we planned on doing Ancient history for a start and we did complete that a little before Christmas break. Now we've moved on to the Middle ages, which will go a little quicker since Tristan recently had a whole year of Middle ages study in junior high. This year we're using a combination of Diana Waring materials and Story of the World. It's car schooling at it's best, listen and discuss during the otherwise wasted time getting back and forth to co-op, research further as needed when back home. Since we won't take as long with Middle Ages as we did with Ancients I think we'll get through Early Modern Times before summer break too.

                                              

For math Tristan continues on with Math U See. He is on track to finish algebra well before summer.

We use a combination of materials for language arts. Vocabulary cartoons are a fun and easy way to learn new words. Spelling You See has been a convenient spelling curriculum for us for the past couple years. Jump In is the writing curriculum we decided on for this year.

 Jump In may be for reluctant and eager writers but it's not a favorite for Tristan. I offered for him to try something else but he decided to press on since he was already about a quarter way through the curriculum. This is not his favorite subject at all.

Tristan's formal biology study is done for this year. We broke it up into human body, he did last year with older brothers,  Botany, which we focused on over the summer and Zoology which Tristan studied by taking my zoology class at co-op (and just living his life here in the wildhomeschool house!). In my co-op class we did lapbooking and also a novel study. We used Jr. High and High School level lapbooks. It went very well. Below are pictures of Tristan's completed lapbooks.

First we studied Veterinary science and completed a lapbook.

The last lapbook we did was a novel study on The Tarantula in my Purse and 172 Other Wild Pets.

Unable to find what I needed for sale I finally created the lapbook myself and was quite pleased with it.

                                           The middle lapbook we completed was on birds.

Through the semester Tristan and the other students also completed zoology coloring book pages, these are meant for high school and college level not young kids. They dissected owl pellets, did several labs including finding and comparing the true nutritional content of several dogs foods and also a lab on how the gizzard works in birds.

Finally we wrapped up the class with final animal projects. Tristan chose to do his project on tigers.

Tristan and his Tiger project.

It's nice that Tristan has completed his biology studies since he'll be busy this semester learning lines for and practicing two plays. He's doing both plays through his drama class at co-op. The high school play is based on A Midsummer Night's Dream and is called A Super Groovy Night's Dream. It's Shakespeare (sorta) in the 60's! Tristan is also taking a part in the Junior High play since the Junior high class is smaller and they needed a few extra actors. That play is called Becoming Shakespeare and is about the early life (young adult) of Will Shakespeare.

Things are looking good mid year here at our wild homeschool. Summer break will be here before we know it!