We seem to follow the same pattern every school year though...We start off strong doing our own thing, tossing (most) of the school-ish looking books, and just living more of a homeschool is lifeschool approach. But then sometime around March, April, or May, I start doubting my methods, and start looking for something better.
This year, Simply Charlotte Mason caught my attention again, and we started using many of the resources from there, most we already had on hand. We really enjoyed it, and while I took a lot away from it, and other books like Karen Andreola's "A Charlotte Mason Companion", it still lacked the enjoyment of what we were doing before. So, while I was on my babymoon over the last few weeks, I decided it was time to start getting back to the basics of what has worked for us, and what we have really enjoyed.
Here we are at the cusp of a new school year. We start every year about mid-July while the weather is still scorching, and we can't spend much time outside, reserving more breaks for the cooler fall and spring weather. Though we really don't focus on grade levels too much here, this year I will be blessed to have an 8th grader, a 6th grader, a 3rd grader, and a preschooler, along with a baby girl in tow.
Most of what I'll be putting down here may sound familiar if you've read my blog long. But it's always nice to sit down and get all your thoughts down about the upcoming year to give you a fresh outlook.
Here are our plans for 2013-2014:
Basically what school for us boils down to are the three R's....Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic. All other subjects fall under those three things.
One of my biggest resources for teaching my kids!
Bible reading and study is the most important subject we can cover every day. If nothing else gets done, my goal is to at the very least, have read our Bibles. Here are the ways we will do this:
-Every child who is a proficient reader will have a personal time of study each morning. My oldest son is going to be reading the book Boyhood and Beyond this year as part of his devotional time, and my oldest daughter will be reading through Beautiful Girlhood. They will also work on personal memorization goals. My non-readers will have a short devotional with mom every day where we can read and talk about the Bible together, so that they may understand it better.
-We will have a time of study together as a family. Every morning at the breakfast table, we will read through the chapter of Proverbs that corresponds with the day of the month, as well as a short devotional, probably something from Keys for Kids, or something else we have around. During our family learning time we will focus in on character study. After dinner we will have a time of reading through our Bibles and discussing various chapters together as I learned from the Maxwells cds. At bedtime, we read a chapter from Psalms. We will cover many memory verses, and my hope is to have at least one whole chapter memorized by the end of the year along with several other key verses. We'll also work daily on learning new hymns.
In addition to Bible reading, we will cover history, science, etc using unit studies. We decided to try covering larger time periods to start off with over single events or people in history, such as our first unit on the Middle ages. We will alternate with a science unit throughout the year. For most of our units we will all work together, but I do plan to have my older two do at least a couple units on their own this year. My oldest specifically will cover a unit on our state history, and on civics. For civics, we plan on using the book Under God. It's an excellent study for kids as an introduction to our government system and giving students the understanding what our duties as citizens of this country are.
Another huge resource! So much information to help teach your children.
-For individual units, the children will read 2-3 books on their unit, and as before report back to me in some way what they've learned.
-Each of my children who are reading, or are still learning to read, have free time literature that they read on their own time.
-We also have a family literature read aloud. Right now we're in the middle of reading through the Chronicles of Narnia together.
-At bedtime, in addition to a chapter from Psalms, we will read a poem (or a few) from a selected poet or poetry book.
-I have a separate read aloud to read with the younger group.
-For my kids learning to read, we us multiple resources including Learning Language Arts through Literature, Bob books, and whatever I find helpful.
Writing is just an extension of our reading:
My kids have learned one thing this last year.....they must write something every. single. day. That's not including copywork or dictation that we do to work on learning to write well. I do not care what they write (within reason, no hate letters to the media or opposing political parties....although....just kidding:) Here's some of the writing they do:
-First there's of course the copywork and dictation. This comes directly from something we're reading. It could be a memory verse, a poem, or a paragraph from a book we're reading. Sometimes we focus in on one copy work for the week to learn dictation from, but as they get older they will sometimes do 2-3, or sometimes only dictations. It just depends on their level. We pick out selected areas to focus in on grammar work that they need to learn through the week as well. This is assigned work daily, and as I said, not considered their daily writing, only their writing practice.
-So in addition to that, they write daily. They start off just writing a sentence or two and move up to eventually writing whole pages daily, or sometimes they can be a bit more creative doing things like advertisements, plays, or speeches. They can also write letters, they can journal, or they can write something to go along with our unit. I will sometimes give them prompts. I love the book Story Starters by Karen Andreola.
-Typing is part of writing too. Especially in this digital age, it's important to have keyboarding skills. I don't allow them to do all their writing on the computer, but do let them do so occasionally.
-Nature study doesn't necessarily fit under writing, but it's one way we put pencil to paper. Studying God's great outdoors is an amazing way for you and your kids to connect with God and learn so much. It teaches so much more than science. It teaches patience and teaches them to have a watchful eye. We try to get out at least once a week to do this. We keep lots of field guides around for whatever we may find.
And then there's math:
Math has been my hardest subject to teach. We had found that Math Mammoth worked the best for us this past year, and if I had my choice we would continue with it. But we came to realize that it was costing us an arm and a leg to print. It wouldn't be so bad if we could print in gray scale, but when we did that, many of the necessary illustrations didn't show up. So we are going to be doing things a little different. Our primary curriculum for math will be Math on the Level. I really love MOTL. It's a great curriculum. It's just hard for me because it's so hands on, and takes a lot of daily preparation. One way I've found to help with that, is I'm going to be using Khan Academy to help teach the more difficult topics, and then review them using our MOTL "five a days". They will cover speed drills a few times a week as well. In addition to that we will do some math reading using books from the library, and Life of Fred.
.jpg)
And that about covers our school year. I'll do some more posts later on, on how I've organized our school "stuff". I'm also going to be discussing some ways I'm working on healing my oldest daughter's dyslexia. And I'm hoping, though not promising, to do a weekly post on our Learning Journal covering things we're doing during the week.
Blessings,
sara
No comments:
Post a Comment