Still Schooling

For the first time in our homeschool career we're using a prepared curriculum for Social Studies/Language and Science. The first unit is on Explorers and Ocean and Wind Currents.

We have studied exploration before but ... the older they get the more in depth we are able to go. This time we are focusing on the motivations of specific explorers. Why did they want to go where noone had gone before?

It's not often I crack out the craft supplies but we did paint up some mini globes this week. They were supposed to be used to cut into, demonstrating the hemispheres. But after working so diligently to accurately represent the placement, shape and size of the continents they didn't want to ruin them.

So we ended up having to make a third 'dummy' earth to cut into hemispheres.

It was suggested that we try the Dragon Speech program. The idea being that you speak and the computer translates it into text. It takes some practice to regulate your cadence and enunciation to the program and to learn the commands for capitalization and punctuation but it's quite effective.

We had several humourous errors.

For example, "When you left did you have a big ship?", became, "When you left did you have a big sh*t?" Whoops!