Ready or not, here it comes! The new school year is upon us and I want to welcome you to a new year with the Atlantic Home School Assistance Program.
I am sure all of you are knee deep in planning and setting goals for the new year. I know it can be overwhelming, but taking the time to do some long range planning pays off in the long run. Let me know if I can be of any assistance to you in that process.
The theme I have picked for enrichment this year is "Hooray for Holidays!" I am looking forward to planning lessons with your children which revolve around this theme. However, my overall "Big Idea" for the year will be to have students use higher order thinking (HOT) in their learning. We will be busy organizing, interpreting, analyzing, synthesizing and evaluating information instead of merely retrieving and reproducing knowledge. Holidays and celebrations will be our means to the end of thinking deeply.
So, I suppose you already know that September is National Piano Month, National Chicken Month and also National Honey Month! (just to name a few) Of course September 2 is a day you will all want to celebrate - National Blueberry Popsicle Day. You might have your children make plans for Make Your Bed Day on September 11, or National Punctuation Day on September 24. I personally think we should all celebrate on September 19; Talk Like a Pirate Day. A couple of other obscure holidays I found in September are National Chocolate Milk Shake Day on the 12th and Elephant Appreciation Day on the 22nd. (if you would like to see the many other celebrations in September, check out this link)
We are going to start the year out by creating our own original holidays. We will also take a look at Johnny Appleseed whose birthday is September 26 and have some fun with the poetry of Shel Silverstein, whose birthday is September 25. We may also read some books by Tiki and Ronde Barber about my favorite September sport....drumroll please....FOOTBALL!
Ready or not...it's fall!
