November Homeschooling Highlights

As you all know, I post my kids’ homeschooling highlights here as part of building their portfolio, so I would remember what we did during their first year in this journey. I have been so inspired by this month by my mentor, Martine De Luna, that I’m actually considering unschooling my kids for next year. This year, we plan to comply with our homeschool provider by combining traditional method of teaching, a little bit Charlotte Mason and my own upgrades (if I may say so). Below is a list of some of the things my kids and I did together for this month:

My kids continued their piano practice. My eldest, Gugu, has definitely improved his piece, Arabesque, and has been practicing to perfect Minuet in G and La Cucaracha. Whereas, Chabibi is practicing the pieces, Happy Birthday, Greensleeves, and finishing “A Dozen A Day” music book.

thefabulousscientist_homeschooling — Gugu while learning a highly technical piece for practice.

2. We joined an exclusive bazaar for Lopez Group of Companies’ HR Summit where my small business, Oilista Manila, was exclusively invited. I’ve included my sons for this event to expose them on how bazaar works, how to network with people, and how to sell. Gugu has helped me with flyering and selling items while explaining the benefits of the essential oils infused in the massage oils, balms, and other wellness products. He was shy but I had to tell him that it’s part of entrepreneurship to talk to people a lot. I know it’s gonna take him a while. Meanwhile these are some of the photos of our meeting with the HRs and the bazaar.

Highlights of the HR Summit bazaar at Rockwell Business Center.

Gugu helped in preparing giveaways for the bazaar.

3. For Science, I taught Gugu about gravity and other types of force, phase change in matter, motions, kinetic and potential energy, light, and did a few activities. For phase change in matter, we made balms to demonstrate how a solid matter can turn into liquid then back to solid due to temperature change, photos below:

thefabulousscientist_homeschooling, thefabulousscientist_oilistamanila — Gugu and Chabibi helped me in preparing these balms while also teaching them about phase changes in matter.

Balm making session with kids to demonstrate how temperature changes can turn solid matter to liquid and vice versa. These pictures were taken from a video hence, the poor resolution.

Also for Science, we made a “Universe in a Jar”, basically a jar filled with hot water, transparent glue, and lots of glitters to demonstrate how gravity affects the movement of particles and also light dispersion. It was actually a fun and relaxing experiment, the jar has become our “meditation jar” as well, when we want to just relax especially after a particularly hard math problem. 😉

Our “Universe in a Jar” demonstrates light dispersion, gravity, and so many things while also a nice meditation jar when a particularly hard math problem is stressing us out. Haha

Also for Science combined with MAPEH, Chabibi has learned about taking care of pet animals and has even drawn street cats in one of our art sessions:

Ian also studied about common plants in the Philippines particularly about Rafflesia using a book about it, given to me by my previous company as gift.

Ian is naming parts of a plant using a Science book on plants we bought at Chapters and Pages while a book on Rafflesia was on standby for him to read after.

Gugu was tasked to make a photo collage of pictures showing forces and motion from magazine cut-outs.

One of his favorites books is this one, Extreme Earth, which is a colorful book about huge natural disasters that happened on earth in history.

4. For History/Sibika, Ian has started reading Tahanan’s “A Lolong Time Ago” which is a series of stories that discuss the origin of the earth, the Philippines, and prehistoric events. It was very timely too because we learned that the remains of 67,000 years old Homo Luzonensis is currently on display at the UP Archaeology so we paid him a visit. We also met Leni, the department’s pet cat and even bought the book, The Archaeology of Central Philippines, for our bed time reading (mine mostly!).

Home Luzonensis, a 67,000 years old human remains, currently the oldest found in the country, came from Callao Cave, Cagayan, is now on display at the Department of Archaeology, UP Diliman.

5. For Math, Nereus reviewed about Fractions and Decimals before moving on to Percentage and Base Rate lessons. Ian continued on to Pictographs as part of his Subtraction lesson.

6. For English, they continued on to their lessons from books. 🙂

6. Other stuff we did is conduct a “Disaster Preparedness” workshop along with a small group of essential oil enthusiasts through Oilista Manila’s partnership with Team Rescue 8. In the workshop, it was discussed the essentials that should be in a Go Bag and the top 10 essential oils to include in First Aid kit.

At Disaster Preparedness workshop, the participants which includes my kids, learned about essentials to go with Go Bag and essential oils that should be in their First Aid kits.

7. Ian finished Wikahon Pre-A while Nereus almost done with Wikahon Mini-A for their Filipino lessons. They are also using their Filipino books from their Homeschool Provider.

8. My kids also had their 2nd Quarter Exam this month. They both passed with flying colors. 🙂