We (finally) started the school year right after Labor Day! This year is 7th grade, and since many of my daughter's friends (both public and homeschooled) had already started and told her 7th grade was pretty awful, I have been determined to show her that we can still have fun! This year, I'm trying to remember to do lots of hands-on things, which gets harder as they age. Sometimes, we let curriculum be the boss. We feel like we have to cover x, y, and z. I'm also making a point of studying what interests her.
So, we kicked off the year with a unit on mushrooms because she's all about them right now. Because she is interested, she has already taught herself quite a lot, and I'm over here just trying to keep up!
Of course, I hit up Pinterest. Back in the olden days of teaching, we used to have to go to the school library and look through old issues of Mailbox Magazine, hoping we would find something to go along with what we were studying! Pinterest is easier. She cut out the parts of a mushroom from felt as we learned their names. There are several names for each thing, and we haven't found many sources that agree with each other. For example, the stem is also a stalk and stipe.
On the first day of school, we made a special snack out of a hard-boiled egg, half a tomato, some mayonnaise, and cilantro. She added some crackers because, let's face it--no one was gonna munch on cilantro.
See her shirt? She also had the perfect earrings for day 1.
We had some brand-new-to-us Ruby Bolete mushrooms pop up in our yard. They are yellow underneath and turn blue/black when touched. She collected these on day 2, and we did some experiments.
We set up one to make a spore print. She had read it works better on black paper, and I had seen white paper used, so we used both. I'll show you the results later!
We also dissected one and looked at it through our handy dandy pocket microscope.
It was a pretty good way to kick off the year. Of course, it wasn't all hands-on fun. More on our school year next post!
I hope you are having a great start to the year, too!
You can do this!
Brenda
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