We just finished South America last week. This was our third unit and I feel like I FINALLY have found our groove with Gather Round in this season of our homeschool. 🎉 Due to learning disabilities, I have to use other curriculum with my children for now to meet their needs, but from the moment I first introduced Gather Round with them (Space unit in January 2020), they have been hooked! I have even tried to stop doing Gather Round until we CAN do it in full, but when I have done that, they have literally protested about not having Gather Round in their lives. So, I’ve had to be very creative in how I implement GR so that I don’t overwhelm my children since we need to use other curriculum as well as GR to meet their academic needs at this time. For anyone interested, stay tuned. This is how I do Gather Round with my 11 & 9yo. 1. They each work at a level below the recommendation for their age/grade. My 11yo does Early Elementary and my 9yo does Early Reader. They have both made such strides this year that I believe they are on the verge of moving to the next level soon (especially my 11yo). 2. I don’t print the entire notebooks for them. We omit LA (although my oldest is beginning to incorporate GR writing projects into her school day) for now because, like I said above, they each have learning challenges we are working on and need to use other curriculum at this time to meet those needs. For S America, I printed two pages for most lessons (the notebooking page plus the animal page). 3. We did many of the notebook pages orally! I would cast the page on to the tv and teach the lesson. Then, whatever the assignment was for that page, we would do it orally together. (Physically writing is a challenge for both for different reasons so this helped overcome some of that for them.) 4. We did not feel pressure to read every word in the teacher’s guide. We read what we were interested in and skipped the rest. 5. We took two days for one lesson. We spent about an hour on GR daily. A typical day looked like this: Lesson 1, Day 1: -Read lesson from teacher’s guide about the culture & food. -Kids work on notebooking page as I read. -Look up videos of interest from things learned in that lesson. (My oldest loved learning about the dances for each culture/country.) Lesson 1, Day 2: -Read lesson from teacher’s guide about famous landmark, ecosystem and animal. While I read they worked on sketching/tracing the animal & answered the questions about the animal once I was finished reading. -Watch a few videos about the animal & landmark. -Do a notebook page orally. 6. Casting the teacher’s guide to the tv really helped hold their attention during reading the lesson. My oldest likes to follow along as I read and they both enjoyed seeing all the pictures blown up big on the tv screen. 7. I keep things simple for my sake and theirs! We added a few books from our home library that went with the unit. Our Read Aloud was The One and Only Ivan (highly recommend). I did invest in a couple reference books that can be used with multiple units and for researching as my oldest moves to Upper Elementary soon. 8. Instead of binding their notebooks, I put their page(s) on a clipboard for the day. My oldest really loved only seeing what she needed for that day. My 9yo has requested a bound notebook for our next unit. (I bind with a ProClick.) After the pages were completed I put them in the little compartment of the clipboard so I have record of their work and pages I can pull for their end-of-the-year portfolio. We throughly enjoyed S America! GR truly is the joy and spice of our day! ❤️ We look forward to starting Human Body Monday!

Posted by Elaine S at 2020-11-07 15:05:24 UTC