Emily’s Hot Tips for Oak Meadow Grade 2

• Go ahead and get both a big wall map and a globe. They are equally important to an understanding of geography.
• If you don’t like to be outside or if nature makes you feel creepy, Oak Meadow Grade 2 is not for you. An enormous chunk of the Science coursework involves the out-of-doors. It’s a good idea to find some local nature spaces ahead of starting school, you’re going to visit them a lot.
• Start saving those Ranger Ricks and All Animals now. You’ll need them for collages. Your library may have old issues of animal-filled magazines in their freebie stack. The Best Friends Animal Society publication was also a great critter picture resource.
• Your local public library will be hugely helpful. I’m sure this is true for any curriculum. There are many opportunities and suggestions for enrichment so making friends with your librarian (and getting library card upgraded to ‘educator’) is a really good thing. If your library system has an on-line catalog that allows you to place items on hold, you’re ahead of the game.
• My one ‘I wish I had done that differently’ is not giving Social Studies its own Main Lesson Book. The recommendation is that Social Studies and Language Arts be combined while Math and Science each get their own book. Between the enormous volume of work associated with Language Arts and my personal dislike of having Ellie’s writing and illustration juxtaposed with the occasional map of ancient Mali, the combined Main Lesson Book has been a little bit of an angst-maker. By the time I figured out how much this would bug me, it was too late. This is obviously a personal preference and your mileage may vary.
• Speaking of Main Lesson Books, I switched from the beautiful (and expensive) Waldorf-style books to hard-backed, artist’s sketch books after four lessons. Language Arts had already filled up one book and I did the price tag and storage difficulty math. One decided advantage of the traditional Main Lesson Books is that they are slim, allowing wrists and arms to rest easily on the table. This is a great thing for beginning writers, but Ellie did fine with the thicker sketchbooks. Again, it’s a personal preference.
• Don’t be afraid to use your little plastic animal collection. For everything.
• Several of the Lessons could have been tied into Girl Scout Brownie Skill-Building Badges if I had been paying attention (First Aid, Hiking, Painting, and Bugs come to mind). Keep your eye out if you have a Girl Scout.

Things That I Paid Money To Have That I didn’t Really NEED Need
But Ultimately Made Everything Nicer

• Amazon Prime
• White board – We use it everyday. It saved paper, helped with gross motor skills, and was all around great. Much less messy than a chalk board and extra nice if you or your child (or both) have a skin condition like eczema (chalk dust can wreck your skin).
• Project Trays – Oak Meadow prefers a wet paper watercolor technique, so these are great for that. They are also wonderful for storing clay projects to let them dry, collage bits, nature table stuff that likes to shed, you get the idea. Ours came from here.
• Command Clips!! They hold all the things! Including things you want to hang from the ceiling! I like our curtain wire set-up from IKEA a lot, but I probably would have been OK with a couple rows of command clips.
• If you are considering a Walt Disney World vacation, this is the year. The Animal Kingdom is the ultimate Oak Meadow Grade 2 field trip – everything we studied in science this year as well as a good bit of Social Studies was reinforced on this trip. Also roller coasters.

Ellie’s Suggestions

• Having cats is great because they can come to school with you and you can observe them for Science.
• Having a white board is really cool.
• Get good colored pencils! It’s nice to draw with really really good ones. (she used my Prismacolor collection)
• Take all the chances to go outside.
• Fred
• Oak Meadow (which I think means that she enjoyed the coursework)