AK Homeschool Adventure
Week 1
Colleen was scheduled to spend from December 27th to January 7th back East with her grandmother. Had she been returning to Chapman, she would have missed the first week of school after the end of Christmas vacation and I was concerned about not falling behind in her schooling right off the bat. Before we were formally registered with Connections Home School I printed off the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District’s curriculum standards and ransacked my bookcases for old college textbooks. I threw together a system of reading, note-taking, discussion and projects that would cover the appropriate materials and put off worrying about grading until after I’d had a sit-down with our Connections advisor.
I wrote the following in a spiral bound notebook and purchased a quantity of composition books in which she was to do the majority of her work.
Social Studies
Read pgs 2-21 in Nanda & Warm’s Cultural Anthropology. Read the accompanying CD-ROM photo essay. Take notes as you read.
In your notebook answer the following questions in paragraph form. Use your best grammar, handwriting, etc.
1. What is cultural relativism? Where are some good things AND some bad things about it?
2. Who are the Nacerima (pgs 16 & 17)? They are a real culture. How are they alike our own culture? How are they different?
3. Design an anthropologist’s toolkit. Make a museum quality visual with labels explaining each item and why you chose to incorporate it. Your toolkit can look however you want but there must be at least 10 items in it.
Language Arts
Painless Spelling pgs vii-xv
Painless Grammar pgs vii-22
Painless Writing pgs vii-26
Read and complete the “Brain Ticklers” in the above sections in your notebook.
Creative Writing
In Natalie Goldberg’s Wild Mind, read the Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2. In your notebook do a ten minute free write on the prompt “I remember.”
Science
Read Chapter 1 in the Biology textbook. In your notebook complete the chapter review on pages 13 & 14 then choose from among the following activities:
1. Using the view from our living room, draw a “web of interactions” (pg 10) with at least 10 features. Label and describe the function of each.
2. Be a photon of energy from the sun. In your notebook describe your journey into the Earth’s biosphere. The Earth recycles energy fairly well so you should be able to write at least a page before you disappear into entropy.
3. Design and create an organism that would be uniquely suited to our household’s ecosystem. Label and explain all of its specialized features and how they are good adaptations to our house.
Math
Study Chapter 1 on the CD-ROM “Pre-Algebra.” Take Quiz.
Literature
Read Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” In your notebook, answer the following questions:
1. Give three examples from the text where the author uses descriptive language to make the reader feel good about Omelas.
2. What does “The Child” represent?
3. Would you choose to stay in Omelas?
Choose one of your answers and write a five paragraph essay using quotes from the text to back up your opinion.
Life Skills
Complete the “Who am I?-Learning about me” section online at Alaska Career Information System Jr. Take the Career Cluster Inventory and write down the top four results in your folder.
Vocabulary and Spelling:
In your Language Arts notebook, look up the following words and terms and be prepared to spell and define them correctly in a test:
Anthropology
Culture
Cultural relativism
Prehistoric
Artifact
Ethnocentrism
Racialism
Emic
Etic
Ecosystem
Community
Population
Organism
Hypothesis
Theory
Controlled experiment
Colleen’s week went by very quickly. I felt a little bad about having her work an extra week during the holidays but I reminded myself that it would be movies, malls and cousins galore while her classmates were back to the old grind. She worked from Sunday to Wednesday on her readings and notebook work. On Wednesday we went over her work, especially her science and social studies as she was using college texts that were somewhat challenging for her.
Wednesday to Friday she had a grand time working on her Anthropologist’s toolkit (she’d decided on a forensic anthropologist looking for Paleolithic human remains) and her “Yepi” a small creature that had evolved to clean up messes and take care of babies in our closet. I was thrilled with her accomplishments and enthusiasm although I was a little disturbed when she asked me how comfortable I felt with another species breastfeeding my infant.
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