Individual school projects

(For those of you who are tired of the endless homeschool planning posts, feel free to skip this one. I promise I'll be back to posting other things once I get all of this out of my head.)

When I have children start to enter middle school, I begin the process of teaching them to take charge of their own learning. We start small, usually with some single learning project. One year P. made dozens of lap books about individual animals. Another year, B. worked through a book all about bridges which gave both information and directions for making each type of bridge. D. did a huge project on dinosaurs. I help a bit, finding resources, making suggestions, keeping tabs on them so they keep moving forward, and through doing this process a couple of times, they figure out how to learn about a topic by themselves. 

There's nothing different this year, except I am going to be doing this with four children (five if you count H.) Usually, I just have to mention that I will want them to think of a topic and they are off with ideas. This was true of several of the five, but certainly not all of them. For some, this type of open-ended question involving their interests was positively panic inducing. I'll admit this caught me by surprise, although it shouldn't have. The question of what are you interested in has been triggering to a certain child for quite a while now. I'm still pondering why this is. So I left the topic for a while, figuring we had plenty of time to sort things out, but really needed the emotion to level out a bit. 

Today, while I was putting away (away... as in finishing up!) some books, I was glancing at our bookshelves and noticing that we have some cool books that don't always get looked at. I decided that I was going to pull a bunch of these books out and display them on the table. The topics were very diverse as were the types of things that would be required to learn about them. I figured that surely, out of 22 categories, everyone could find something that would make them happy. And, it is often easier to pick one thing out of several than to come up with an idea from your own head. Here is what I ended up with.

Each child got to take a look at what I had laid out and chose their topic. K. is going to work on the same bridges book that B. used. I think this is a great match for him, and I am kind of excited to see the bridges that he builds. Y. is going to learn about birds. This interest was piqued with all the bird drawing books she has been looking at to help G. with her novel. L. didn't want to chose one of the topics I had put on the table, but wanted to stick with her original idea from when I first mentioned if of WWII. I think we may be refining that a little bit. G. chose to work on indigenous people of North America (from my bit of research, this seems to be the preferred term at the moment... yes, we will be adding in terminology into her study). H. is going to work on butterflies. This might take a little more work for me as I will have to be pretty explicit about each step of the process. She is such an artist, we will probably be doing a lot of illustrating and labeling.

I am so close to being done with it all. Both unit studies have been planned out and slotted into the calendar; my list of supplies is made; my list of books and movies to request and when I need them is made; the order of the chapter books we will be reading has been created; I've bought various notebooks that we will need to document our learning; and I've stacked up all the library books to return. What I still need to do is to write actual lesson plans for the co-op classes (topics and general outlines are already done... but this could take a while); make some new activity boxes for R.; make a photo scavenger hunt for the Mom and Tot horse classes I'm teaching; and order a few more materials including the math books everyone will be using. I'm not there yet, but the bulk of the heavy thinking is done I think.