The boys and I have started our 2016-2017 homeschool year a bit earlier than most schools, I believe, in our area. One of the things I did in preparation for this school year was to check out what other homeschool moms were sharing on their Youtube channels. Youtube is such a helpful tool and I’ve been very fortunate to pick up some new ideas for our homeschooling year.
I’m sharing my affiliate links in this post.
One of the ideas that I picked up from Youtuber LilHomeschoolMama was to create a current events notebook and to pick a country once a week to study. Now, the way we are doing this notebook is a bit different from the way she did hers. I’m going to show you my current events / geography notebook below which I am doing along with my boys. They both are doing their own as well.
Our Current Events Notebook
I decided to a “color key” for mine and I’m encouraging my boys to do the same. On Mondays (today was our second Monday back to homeschool) we will do current events picking out one thing on the following stages:
- International
- Nation
- State
- Local
- “This day in history”.
- We also record the date and weather.
We are getting our “news” from tv and the internet, but you can also use newspapers. We are getting our “on this day in history” from history.com (I’ll share a direct link at the end of this post under “resources”). In the same notebook we are doing our geography/country studies!
Geography Interactive Notebook
While we didn’t start the country study on our first Monday, we did do it today. Since the 2016 Summer Olympics is going on we noted it in our current events list and made it our country of the week.
As you’ll see below we are interacting with our notebook by illustrating in it and glueing in extras like the worksheet on mapping Brazil. We used a free printable for Brazil from HomeschoolCreations.net. I’ll share the link at the end of this post in my “resource list”.
The main book we are using right now for the country study aspect is this Children’s Atlas of God’s World put out by Master Books. You can learn a little more about it at this link where I shared about it in the past.
Free resources:
- Free printable maps and timeline resources.
- Free printable for the Brazil flag.
- Free printable for Brazil worksheet with map.
- “This Day in History” from history.com
I plan to update you more on our 2016-2017 homeschool changes and hopefully they will encourage you in your homeschooling. You might get some new ideas!
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