Dinosaured out! An Update on Our Afterschooling Adventure

It’s probably time for me to give an update on our afterschooling adventure. If you’ve been reading my posts on this subject you know we started back in August with a plan to afterschool to supplement what we felt were weaknesses in elementary subjects particularly world history and, to some extent, science.

Using an 8 week model we set forth to do the following:

July 15 – September 15

Science: Rocks

History: The Paleozoic period

September 15- November 15

Science: Weather

History: The Mesozoic period

November 15 – January 15

History: The Cenozoic period

Science: Volcanoes and Earthquake

The first 8 week period went great. We finished reading the books, we did some experiments and projects in each subject and the kids extended the learning with their own ideas.

The second 8 weeks were a little rocky. We switched history (or in this case prehistory) books halfway through deciding to use the Barrons Prehistoric World series of books.

We managed to cover the water cycle and make a weather station for science but, much of what we wanted to cover was a little much for the parents to actually understand let alone the children. And I was a little lame preparing science experiments.

During the third 8 week session everything…um…sort of fell apart.

First, my son was petrified by both volcanoes and earthquakes (even though a few weeks early he was enthused) and refused to study them. Then Crystal bogged down with holidays, birthdays and such never quite got around to writing up the planning grid for history for that session. (We decided to write up objectives, resources and activities for each 8 week session in advance. I wrote mine up for this session but….due to the “fear factor’ never followed it.)

We decided we’re trying to do too much…duh!

So, for this session we’re winging it. My son seems to have gotten over his volcano fear so we’ll gingerly start doing a bit on that subject. I have a great science experiment for it!

We’ll also read as much of the two history books that cover this period as we can. Crystal says both she and her boys are “dinosaured out!”. We are a bit too!

So, we’ll regroup. Starting in January we plan to start following The Well Trained Mind’s History curriculum, which consists of reading perhaps 10 pages of The Story of The World each 8 week period rather than a whole book or two. For science I’m considering using the Kingfisher Encyclopedia of animals and doing a few pages each session.

We’ll meet and brainstorm and try again. Don’t they say you should learn from your mistakes?

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