For the month of August, majority of our homeschooling activities focused on so many things about our home country, the Philippines, this being the month of our national language – Filipino. We also did plenty of art, STEM projects (such as Mars Rover and Helicopter prototypes from NASA), data gathering for science through play, and online lessons recommended by Peniel. I realized that doing activities and creative arts had helped my kids fight cabin fever because of the pandemic. We did art and book reading every Friday, with piano lessons afterwards. They also had their first digital piano recital along with their teachers’ other students. Overall, August has been a fun month for all of us.
Below are just some of the highlights of our homeschooling for the month of August:
My kids got to practice how to write in Baybayin and labelled the stuff they painted with Baybayin instead of the usual “alpabetong Pilipino” – the local counterpart of the English alphabet.
If you would like to learn how to write Baybayin, I made a free worksheet that you can download here.
They continued their piano practice and had their first digital piano recital. They do their piano lessons every Tuesday and Friday, with the latter also being our Art Day.
We did plenty of art too! My kids and I enjoyed painting anything under the sun – from starry night sky, to landscapes, flowers, and fruits. We then labelled some of them in Baybayin to ensure that they don’t forget the scripts.
For Filipino and Sibika, we used Wikahon-A for Chabibi and Wikahon-B heavily. For concepts such as tinikling, local food and tourist destinations, we watch videos on Youtube and other video links provided by Peniel. When Ian read about “baro’t saya”, I looked for his “barong” to tell him that he owns a traditional Filipino clothes which he wore on weddings.\
If you would like to know the contents of Adarna’s Wikahon, I wrote about our unboxing here.
Gugu drew map of the Philippines and colored the regional boundaries – this was the base map. He then overlaid it with another Philippine map on parchment paper and identified the zones of Corona Climate Types in the country. We then discussed the importance of knowing these zones and the regions.
For Chabibi, he studied about community maps and learned about the four directions, north, east, south, and west.
For STEM, we used resources from NASA for our science subjects. This month we were able to construct our Mars Rover and Mars Helicopter. They both enjoyed assembling the prototypes of the Mars Rover – we made 3 that failed. The fourth iteration worked and we were so happy, you can clearly hear me exhilarated in the video (right). Our Mars rover could go over rough terrain (piece of carpet) and on smooth terrain (tiled floor).
The third video is Mars Helicopter made out of paper. The patterns for the rover and helicoper may be found in NASA’s website:
For data gathering in Science, I made the kids play frog race using their frog toys that jump when pinched. We then recorded the distance per trial and computed for the total distance and average distance. Gugu won the race but they still both chocolates as prize for their efforts.
I’ve made three collages of photos taken out of our activities for August below to summarize our homeschooling highlights. 🙂
If you loved this article, you might also like to read about online resources we use for homeschooling here:
The Fabulous Scientist 
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