Author: Marjorie Carlson

We haven’t posted in forever! We’re still alive! Covid sucks!

We carved jack o’lanterns today: Justin did comedy & tragedy masks, and Zoe and I did the Sheikah and Yiga symbols from Legend of Zelda.

For a broader overview of our pandemic homeschooling, see here.

What’s the brain made of?

• We read the section on neurons in their human body book, and then made a neuron out of beads based on the instructions on Neuroscience for Kids.
• I wanted to show them a video on parts of the brain and what they specialize in. This one was too advanced, so I made a worksheet to  help them focus on the main points (e.g., “The part of your brain that’s busy when you play sports is called the ____________.”) I’d pick a simpler video if I did it again. I wasn’t calibrating well for a 5th grader.

What are cells?

• Magic Schoolbus 4:6 (it’s on Netflix)
• Coloring pages from biologycorner.com. I’m not gonna lie, I don’t know what endoplasmic reticulum is. Zoe read us the descriptions and we each colored our own.
  I still don’t really know what endoplasmic reticulum is, but Z has a firmer grasp on the fact that a cell is alive and all living things are cells or made of cells.
• This one’s cheating, but I bought a cheap microscope on Amazon and we’ve been looking at cells under it. I hope to get a lot more use out of this over the next few weeks — gather water from the local stream, swab our cheeks, grow brine shrimp, etc. We’ll see. There are some cool ideas here.

Viruses & bacteria

I haven’t done this yet, but the cellular biology stuff is laying the groundwork for talking about what viruses & bacteria and then vaccination stuff.

Microbes coloring pages from the American Museum of Natural History

Videos I’m contemplating include:

• Viruses and Bacteria, by Else-Vet
• What is a microbe, by OceanLeadership
• How do germs spread, by TedEx

Simulations of epidemics, vaccination and herd immunity:

• Herd immunity simulator
• Prettier but less interactive
• Less pretty but more interactive

How we conquered smallpox Ted Ed lesson

Dogs Decoded

This looks up Z’s alley. I like the idea of watching educational TV and doing a worksheet.

Masque of the Red Death???

Is having Z read Masque of the Red Death during a pandemic a terrible idea??? I haven’t decided yet. If we do, I have an annotated version with advanced vocab defined, and I have printed a floor plan for Z to color. I even printed windows and lamps to add to it, lol.

Random topics

We’ve watched a bunch of YouTube videos related to things Zoe is interested in, for example this guy making an A-frame hut. Is that even science? I dunno. It’s cool, though!

Other cool-looking resources

Z loves learning languages on Duolingo.

You can learn anything on Khan Academy (and it’s easy to find grade-appropriate stuff, e.g. fifth grade math). Z loves these.

TedEd has few topics and the videos don’t always seem super well leveled, but there’s some fun stuff there.

CrashCourse, meanwhile, is meant more for high schoolers, but I think parts of it may be useful. I might use his stuff on the immune system.

ReadWriteThink has lesson plans and printouts and such for language arts stuff.

Study.com lets you sort online classes by grade level but it looks like you have to pay.

BrainPOP has some really cool-looking stuff, but it’s also pay-only.

There’s a lot on Teachers Pay Teachers, of varying value. Sometimes I use it as a starting point for searches, but then end up finding other stuff elsewhere.

I’m installing more educational stuff on Z’s tablet, e.g., an app with a daily drawing prompt and an app called Quandary that lets kids research and make difficult decisions for a community of people colonizing a new planet.

Things I’m still on the lookout for

Self-study stuff for music — like Yousician but free?

Something to dig into for history or social studies. Z absolutely adores history of the entire world i guess and I’m hoping that can be a jumping-off point. I’ve found some good stuff for learning about Celts and Vikings before, but I’m holding off on researching more till I know what Z wants to study.

We’ve been homeschooling our fifth grader for the last week due to the pandemic. Here’s a report on what we’ve done, in case it’s useful to others. The links will link to the resources if free, or to info about free trials — lots of online learning companies are making resources free during the pandemic.

We’ve been refining a daily schedule based on three general categories of learning:

1. Online learning systems that the school was already using — Dreambox for math and Lexia for literacy. (I can also recommend the self-paced courses at code.org, which teach programming to any age group.
   These are self-paced and gamified so that kids can and (at least in my case) will do them by themselves. So I try to intersperse these among the topics that are more labor-intensive for us grown-ups.
2. Continuing in-class work. Conveniently, Z’s teacher has been posting all their assignments online all year through Sharepoint and OneNote. So, we’ve had Z continue working on the larger assignments that were already in progress. In our case, that’s an informational essay about dogs, and a science project about the water cycle. (Parenthetically, this is how I learned they’re using Amplify Science, and I freaking love it, but it’s not a free online resource.)Hopefully we’ll be done with those projects by Monday, and then we can switch to having Z come up with project ideas. I’d like them to pick a part of history to learn about, for example. They’ve also shown interest in doing either a diorama or a Minecraft mockup of a Roman villa.
3. THE FUN PART: special topics based on our and Z’s interests!We’re lucky to have four adults at home, all of whom are erstwhile teachers! So we brainstormed a list of topics we’d be willing to teach, either regularly or as one-offs. They range from very academic (Latin, brain anatomy, number theory) to pretty informal (photo editing, ukulele, cookie baking). For these topics, we’ve used a mix of resources we had around the house, educational videos, and worksheets I’ve found online. See some examples here.
   Some of my friends have been nervous about homeschooling, but no matter who you are and what your background is, I’m sure there are things you can share with your kid about your job, your hobby, your neighborhood, etc.It doesn’t even have to be academic. My sister printed a map of their neighborhood and had my nephew map out how he’d get to the store to buy dog food. I’m totally stealing that idea! And I know some parents who are focusing on social/emotional learning over the break. (And an education professor went viral today saying she and her kids will spend the break watching Netflix and eating cookies!)

Here’s a side-by-side of our schedule on day 1 (made by Z) vs. today (made by me):

You can see I’m less ambitious, and also only write the schedule in erasable pen, lol. And in both cases, only about half of the subjects actually happened.

It took a lot of food on. Every. Stair.And even so, he reconsidered and went back to the beginning once or twice.