• March 30, 2008 - My Thoughts on Winter Promise
Since we began using and blogging Winter Promise, I've gotten a lot of questions via comments and email about this fairly new curriculum. I decided to go ahead and compile my thoughts onto a lens: Winter Promise versus Sonlight. I share my own observations about how these two excellent curricula are both different and similar. I'm not an "expert" curricula reviewer, but I'm a mom who has used both, so I felt it may help others for me to post my opinions. And (teeheehee) I can forward people to that webpage rather than retyping my answers over and over.
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• March 16, 2008 - Jamestown 3D Model and Neat Connections
• March 7, 2008 - What to do With Crafts?
Yes, we do a lot of crafts! And you may be wondering how we handle all these projects in our small apartment. We have no closets, no attic, and very little space altogether.
So what can we do with 3-D projects like this? Well, to be honest, they get thrown away! But not before documenting them with photos. Then the photos are uploaded to Flickr where they can be kept safe forever. And we also blog them for a record. And as if that were not enough, I sometimes print out photos and add them to our notebook.
For example the WP notebook page for the Pueblo Indians was mostly text, with just a plain graphic. Not much for Sprite to do. And not at all engaging. So I printed out the photos of her 3-D project and let her select the most important paragraphs from the notebooking page. She designed this layout and came up with a much more engaging notebook page.
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• March 5, 2008 - Winter Promise Crafts
• March 5, 2008 - Lapbooking and Notebooking Combination
Some of the crafts in Winter Promise American Story 1 can be easily adapted into notebooking pages. This Zuni Pot is a great example. It was originally a pot page and a minibook. We put them together for a much more interesting lapbook styled notebook page.


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• February 24, 2008 - A Peek into our Latest with Winter Promise
Winter Promise is working well for us! I am very satisfied with my purchase. (And that's a good thing since I bought two years' worth of WP!) Here is Sprite engrossed in Pocahontas and the Strangers.
Here are two images of our timeline notebook. It's also a notebook timeline! What I mean is that it's a timeline in a notebook. And also, mixed among the timeline pages are notebooking pages. These two are examples of what comes with the American Story 1 program. They are very different from what I have considered notebooking pages. Usually Sprite does the writing. But these are very simple -- mostly drawing or coloring instead of writing. Of course, we'll still do some "regular" style notebooking with Sprite doing the writing.
See Columbus carrying a cross onto the New World?
This book Southwest Indians is so fun! And so easy for me! I simply photocopy the project pages, we color, cut, and assemble. Voila! The crafts are really meaningful, that is, they teach something.

We've been adapting some of the projects to put into the notebook. For example, this is a 3-D diorama. We flattened it and glued it onto cardstock.

Homeschooling went amazingly well this past week. What a blessing. There was no complaining, just patient work. It's still a holiday here (for Chinese New Year), so each afternoon or evening Sprite has had opportunity to play with local friends. My guess is that the time with her friends was a good motivator to do her work well (and quickly).
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