Julie Bogart

My post was from the website and it looks terrible so here it is again:

--

________Bogart

Program for 2003-2004

In the last 18 mos., we embarked on a program of unschooling. C has
always been a willing student, eager to do whatever asked of her.
Still, we decided that she thrives when allowed to follow her
particular fascinations (of which she has many).

In the school year of 2003-2004, C spent her time in the following ways:

TV Viewing
C is keenly interested in the construction of the situation-comedy. She
can be heard throughout the house imitating her favorite characters and
actors. She has been known to tell me what makes one show effective and
what makes another trite or predictable. She is able to identify
stereotypical characters, caricature and bad dialog. She also has
developed an unbelievable vocabulary that I can only attribute to TV.
She�s really clever with irony and puns. One of my favorite comments of
hers: �All the Disney villains are so predictable.� She went on to
elucidate the qualities that make a Disney villain. Go C!

Bird Watching
C loved watching birds with us this year. She has learned to identify
most backyard birds and helped with recording which ones visited the
feeder. She also helped us stock the feeder with seed.

Reading and Language Arts
C is learning to read. She is still working on the phonics of reading
and has made lots of progress, though she still isn�t reading fluently.
We�ve used some workbooks (Explode the Code) because she likes to
write in them, but mostly learn phonetics using techniques shown to me
by a reading specialist. She loves to write and has filled oodles of
notebooks with letters and �writing� that is her own. She�s working
through the Frog and Toad series right now reading a little bit each
week.

I�ve read aloud to her from the Girls of Many Lands books (from
American Girl) and we�ve enjoyed creating question and answer games for
those. She easily narrates the contents when asked about the stories.

One of my favorite moments came when she set up her five dolls on a
specially designed, tiered stand. She put the English doll in the
middle and at first had the Indian (India) doll next to her. C
exclaimed: �Wait. I can�t put the India doll next to England. They hate
each other.� She began to remind me of the conflicts between India and
England that we had read about in the book. Then she had to decide who
could be next to England since China and France also had histories with
the British that included war.

She enjoys a wide variety of literature and we read aloud every day.

She also participated in our language games that produced limericks and
scrounged poetry. She loves to read and learn poems.

I read the last three Harry Potter books aloud to the kids during our
read aloud times in addition to reading poetry. And we make nearly
weekly library visits.

In co-op, she studied the Beatrix Potter books and created several
projects that detailed BP�s work. She easily narrated to me what she
learned and what she enjoyed. She also took �Let�s Read and Write.�

Math
For math, we took an eclectic approach. C did do some of the Miquon
math books I have for her and Jon bought her two traditional math books
from the supermarket. But C finds the abstract concepts harder to grasp
that way so we use them only intermittently (she likes writing in
�official books� but they often hinder more than help). More often, we
used math books like: [I]Family Math[/I], [I]The I Hate Mathematics
Book[/I] and other resources from the library. We also used the
Internet for creative math ideas.

Several games helped to reinforce math concepts:
Monopoly
Poison
Dots
Yahtzee
Lentil Measuring
Managing her money
Counting games

C is also endlessly fascinated with patterns. Currently she has an
entire collection of cut outs from magazines that she pins to a
bulletin board in endless arrangements based on their similarities and
differences. She might put all the long skinny models in one corner and
all the short square ones in another. Then she matches the �bling
bling� (jewelry) to go with them based on color or shape or size.

She constantly organizes the house, her room and her belongings into
arrangements based on her need to see patterns.

Greek
Amazingly, though C can�t yet read English fluently, she is fascinated
by ancient Greek and has learned the alphabet. We�ve worked on both
lower case and upper case letters as well as knowing how to pronounce
the names of the letters. She has her own Greek notebook and keeps a
list of our names written in Greek. We sometimes spend several days in
a row working on Greek and then take some time off. She�s always
interested in doing more.

Sports
C played soccer in both fall and spring. And she took gym during co-op.
She swims at the YMCA and she danced this summer in a ballet five-week
workshop as well. One thing I like about C and sports is that she is
highly motivated to practice at home. We play soccer in the backyard
and she loves to dance in the living room using books from the library
to guide her.

History/Geography
The American Girl books from India, China, and Turkey were our primary
resources for history this year. We learned about the Indian revolt
against Britain (1939), the Opium War in Canton (1857), and we studied
life in a harem in Turkey (1720).

C turned her knowledge into a card game making questions and answers
for the details of the books. She played with the dolls as well as
identified the places mentioned in the books on the globe.

We watched �Bend It Like Beckham� many, many times too. That movie
combined her love of Britain, soccer and India.

She participated in our geography work from �Map the World by Heart.�
She learned about longitude and latitude as well as flags. She tasted
Chinese food for the first time this year as well.

We read several chapters from Story of the World and took time to read
stories from 1001 Arabian nights. The kids loved these. We did several
of the projects that are a part of SOTW including a Roman banner,
Chinese lanterns and clay pots. We also looked at maps.

Art
C loves art so we watched the Sister Wendy video series again. We
visited the art museum many times and she took art at the co-op. She�s
prolific with design type drawings preferring them to portraits and
people.

Films/TV
�Pride and Prejudice�
�Lord of the Rings: Return of the King� (and a repeat of the whole
trilogy including hours and hours and hours of behind the scenes
material about film making, script writing etc.)
�Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban�
�Newsies� (musical about the history of newspapers in the late 1800s in
NYC)
�Tornadoes� � History of tornadoes
�Sinbad� � she loves mythology so we had fun with this since it related
to our reading of the 1001 Arabian Nights.





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]