September 2020 Homeschooling Highlights

Since school year started, things have been hectic at home. Aside from homeschooling, I have been painting in watercolor a lot now, my Young Living essential oil business has been taking off, and I’m also managing a publisher’s social media accounts. Things this week have been slow though so I had time to write this. I haven’t gone out due to a minor accident last Sunday where I injured my right ankle. Still, I’m grateful for the rest I need to take and the internet for online shopping to get household essentials and food.

Summarized below is our homeschooling highlights for September. The reason why I post my kids’ activities and milestones here is simply for back-up, and also to give my readerships some ideas on what we do as homeschoolers. Our homeschool provider also requires portfolio at the end of the year per student so this is sort of our online portfolio and diary entry for all the activities we did (or at least the highlights) for the school year.

HOMESCHOOLING HIGHLIGHTS

Our kids continued their piano lessons with their Teacher Cel. After their first digital recital last August, they have been studying new pieces – “Boogie No. 1” for Ian, and “The Entertainer” for Nereus. They will soon study classic Christmas pieces as well.

Here’s a video of Nereus during his first digital recital, playing Arabesque by Friedrich Burgmüller.

We have also done this year differently when it comes to art. Last year, we’d only do art as extra, and only about once or twice in a month. This year, we have Art and Book Day every Friday where the kids will do art in the morning, and book reading / study in the afternoon. Sometimes we combine both by having them read books and summarize the story through art works. For our art, we use watercolor, gouache, crayons, and upcycled materials.

We have also started creating Christmas cards for our loved ones using our art materials. For each card, I’ve asked the kids to also write short messages. We even recycled materials to make a simple Christmas tree!

For art and science fusion, we upcycled the jar caps from the jars we used for our Kratky hydroponics garden into refrigerator and door magnets. What we did was draw circles that will fit inside the jar caps on watercolor paper. We then painted beach scene using watercolor paint and then glued the painting inside the caps. Finally, we glued magnetic sheets on the top of the cap, let dry, and voila, magnet!

STEM

For Science, our main highlight is the assembly of our first terrariums. The pandemic has almost everyone I know into gardening. We decided to plant in soil as well while also keeping our Kratky hydroponics system. So far, we’ve added cactus and succulents in our tiny garden, as well as gumamela, pothos, alocacia, and purple shamrock plants. My son, Nereus, has also been involved in planting the lettuce, kalamansi, and pechay seeds in our upcycled PET bottles. He has been measuring the growth rate of our lettuce (in hydroponics) in terms of length/height and number of leaves.

Also in September, my kids have learned now to create Powerpoint presentation by using important features of the app and creating presentations on some of the lessons we had such as protection of environment and planets. Ian, in particular, enjoyed making his own PowerPoint presentation about planets. In doing so, he also learned how to Google for pictures and insert them in the slides.

Peniel, our homeschool provider, has also provided the kids access to the school’s portal so we could download the lessons, links to websites for the lessons, and exams. Ian only spends limited time in front of the PC so for most of our lessons, we used Wikahon and his kuya’s old books. We only allow him to use the tablet or PC when there are certain concepts that need to be shown through videos. We use Epic for their story reading, science lessons, and Math as well. I have also taken advantage of Adarna’s online sale last month in order to get more story books for the kids to be used for the Filipino and Book Study Friday.

Finally, it was also in the last week of September that the kids had their first quarter exams. I made their exams for them based on the lessons we’ve covered so far since we have not been religiously following our homeschool provider’s syllabus.