A new term, a new study.
Here we are at the start of a new term already! Normally, we school through the summer so we can take a longer break in the fall. However, this year, due to my sister’s wedding and some travels we took a long summer break. We are four weeks into our new school year and we are loving it so far! I can’t believe that my son is in fifth grade already and my daughter is in second. Time sure does fly when you’re having fun, and homeschooling is a lot of fun for us. We are so excited to dive into our space and solar system study!
Our last space and solar system study.
When I’m planning our next area of focus, I always spend some time talking with my children about what they would like to study. Typically, we let Ambleside nature study dictate what we focus on, but sometimes we lean into an area of our own choosing. This fall, we decided to do a space and solar system study. We have done this once before, but it was when we first decided to homeschool and my children were tiny tots. I’ll never forget the chubby fingers working on painting planetary models, or pancakes at 5 AM to watch a rocket launch live on social media. We had such a great time, but, they were so little that they don’t remember much of it. Their memories of our trip to Space Center Houston are a bit fuzzy too. In fact, my daughter slept in my arms through our entire tour of the Saturn V Rocket.
Though, I have to say, I’m still quite proud of the matching space leggings I made for my daughter and I for our field trip. I think I’ll have to make some new ones for our next visit!
Space study resources.
I’ve put together a list of all of the resources I am using to add to our space and solar system study. Luckily, this is our second time studying space and I still have all of the books we used the first time. Most of the books I have were from used book sales, library book sales, gifted, plus a few that I purchased new. Everything in this list is in our school room, and we’ve used all of it. I also added a few of the books that I am reading personally this term. Most recently, I read Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and I could not put it down. I stayed up until 2 AM to finish it, it was that good. It’s fiction, but the best kind that is oozing with physics and science and I loved every minute of it. Tap the link below to see the list! (Affiliate links).
One last thing.
Generally, I do like to make my own studies to parallel what we are studying with Ambleside Online, however, sometimes it’s nice to have a bit of a backbone to work with that I didn’t have to come up with. For our space and solar system study we are using a unit from Gather Round. We are headed into our fifth week of the study, and it’s been wonderful so far. There are twenty lessons and we are doing two per week so that we can use our supplemental activities while still having time to fit in our core curriculum. I can’t wait to share a review once we are done.
No, this isn’t a sponsored space study.
My children decided the wanted to study the solar system again so I was looking for something to help guide our study that wouldn’t require much preparation. We have used Gather Round as a supplement in the past (Oceans, Human Anatomy and Botany) and it’s worked well for us. Stay tuned, because I have some fun field trips up my sleeve for this unit study! Thanks for reading and be sure to check out the links below, including my FREE pdf with my top five homeschool tips. Thanks! ~Nichole
