Year-End Review in Pictures – 2nd Grade

I had no idea how hard it would be to maintain weekly homeschool update posts. If you were enjoying them, I’m so glad….and so sorry. I just can’t keep up with them and everything else I want to really share here. So, I am shooting for quarterly updates for next year. I don’t want to leave you hanging at Week 12 (my last blog update), though. We DID finish our school year 😉 . To bring you up to speed, I decided to just do a pictorial directory of sorts to showcase the second semester of our 2018-19 (Second Grade). I’ll do another post to wrap-up our Preschool fun.

Pictured below are highlights from the weeks I didn’t get a chance to post about. I have labeled each picture with a letter and will give some brief info so that you know which resource the activity came from or how it worked for us. (Remember, my purpose in blogging by week was to show you the hands-on projects in Heart of Dakota because I had trouble getting a feel for it myself going in.) Let me know in the comments if you really like this format and maybe I will do my upcoming quarterly updates like this! And by the way, I’m a rather newbie to the blog world and it looks like I can’t get the pictures to go in the order I want. The most recent pics (the end of the school year) are at the top. Sorry if it’s hard to follow!

A – One of our favorite projects in Our Star Spangled Story by Notgrass History.
B thru F – We finished our planned science early and so I picked up a fun e-book of kitchen science experiments. We made ice cream and butter! Yum!
G – He did it! 40 books in second grade 🙂
H – After talking about community/colonial towns in Notgrass History, the kids made their own modern-day town!
I – I had my son do the end of lesson activities at the beginning of his Notgrass lessons to build interest….and it really worked! Between that change and getting a book that just fits his learning style, history readings aren’t hard to get through!
J and K – Our last unit in REAL Science Odyssey covered outer space. We did an experiment to understand how craters of varying sizes formed and made a planet mobile (from Dollar Tree!). Both were super fun and well-received.
L and M – These were mama original activities when things started to the attention started to drift in our Heart of Dakota and BJU Press English studies. I took the topic covered and found a way to engage my son. Years ago, I never would have had the confidence to do this. So these pictures make me smile big!
N – Our Jupiter model made my son’s list for favorite memories of the school year! He loved making this with milk, dish soap food coloring….and something else 😉 .
O – If you’ve followed my weekly posts this year, you know transitioning to chapter books at story time has been a struggle. I found several from JourneyForth Books that really seemed to spark my son’s interest. This book here was our first go at reading a short chapter book. In the back of the book, there were a couple activities, including how to make an origami swan! I was able to successfully add in other chapter books from JourneyForth in the final months of our school year. Yay!!! It was a great transition to set us up for Charlotte’s Web and The Boxcar Children this summer.
P and Q – More mama originals to prevent completely losing my son’s interest in history. I was surprised how fast my son solved the magic square, but he still enjoyed it. We got the house and village templates from an Evan Moor history pockets book.
R – I’m sharing this mainly to give you a glimpse of what REALLY happened this year. I spent most of our day finding things to occupy my sweet little 3-year old. This endeavor accounts for most of my energy expenditure on any given day 😉 .
S – Just after Christmas break, I started to implement little warm-ups to start our school day. I found the best way to do this was using various sets of flashcards. My son LOVED these simple morning activities and it really helped to start the day with a positive tone. The set shown here was from Target dollar spot.
T thru V, BB – My son got this cookbook from Thinking Tree as a Christmas gift. It contains more than just recipes. The activities that follow the instructions range from puzzles to drawing to free writing to surveys. I loved that I could still call this a Fun Friday activity but have a bit more to it.
W thru Y – These were supplemental things I heard about from other YouTubers! Yay for community! There is an entire series of books on the different parts of speech. I highly recommend it. If I would have switched to Notgrass History earlier in the year, I probably would not have picked up the picture books about the Pilgrim children. The content and pictures in Our Star Spangled Story were every bit as fun and informative. The puzzle/game is called Silly Sentences by DK.
Z – We enjoyed making dirt during our study of earth science this year! I had to shake that jar for far too long, though. 🙂
AA – My kids really did enjoy My Story from Master Books. Even though my final review of it wasn’t completely positive, because they loved it, the experience overall was good.
CC – This sums up our feelings about switching history. This was taken after our first lesson with Notgrass.
DD – Did anyone’s kiddo just not grasp where to put the decimal point when writing money? Or perhaps he didn’t understand that one hundred cents is the same as one dollar. That was us….until mama did this.