My Plan, Stan

I am on FIRE with my homeschool this year!!!! I am so excited about the direction that it is going, but bummed that it took me this long to get here. When I started homeschooling, I just did it on what I remembered from my childhood and being kinda of a punk, I thought I knew it all and I could recreate the wheel. Boy, did I waste so much time being a child about it, when I could be sitting at the feet of the masters. If I have an idea and you have an idea and we share our ideas with each other, then we have two ideas each. Being in community with other homeschoolers and being humble enough to ask questions and learn from others, can be the biggest boost for your home. But, on the upside, I spent those early years doing alot of research (still love doing that) and I love helping new homeschoolers or homeschoolers looking for change and all of my research and experience helps with that.  AH! So excited!!! So, I wanted to share what I am doing and how we are doing it.......again, as always with things like this, I want to give a caveat. This works for US.....take it or leave it, try it and see, if it doesn't work then find something else. To set this up, I have 5 children (12, almost 10, 6.5, 4.5 and almost 2), we are involved in many extracurriculars, I run my own business and I am knee deep in my homeschool group with setting up events and such, plus an array of many different things. With that all being said, I am not sitting around eating bon-bons :) So here we go.....

Morning Time

Morning Time has been crucial in my homeschool, I was doing it before I had a name for it and some guidance on how to do it. Basically, morning time is when we all get together and do certain subjects at the same time. It is always the first thing we do before any other schoolwork and we usually start around 11am (more like midmorning time). Here is the order of what we do:

1. Prayers: I call the kids to sit around me by playing this and then we pray an Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be and the St. Michael Prayer.

2. Poetry: We then recite poetry or work on a poetry selection. So far we have learned "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll and "The Eagle" by Alfred Lord Tennyson, we have finished these and we will be going onto Elizabeth Foss's poetry selections.

3. Memory Work: We have been using Catholic Schoolhouse memory work material and my kids really love it.

4. Scripture Study: We are reading through Matthew 7 and hopefully memorizing it and unpacking the meaning of the text (this is the fun part for me)

5. Religion: We are reading "My Path to Heaven" by Geoffrey Bliss S.J and once we are done we will be reading a saint biography. Religion is basically me reading out loud from a book of faith.

6. History: Currently reading "Norse Myths" by D'Aulaire, it is part of the book list from Connecting with History   and we will just be going down the list of books and choose whatever we can get at the library.

7. Alternate subjects: All of the above are things that we do everyday, but we then add 2 extra subjects to tack on the end. We do a read aloud as an audio book in the car, so it's on instead of the radio most outings and for the next couple of weeks we are alternating between music appreciation and Shakespeare.  After we are done hearing and learning about Baroque music and A Midsummer Night's Dream, we will go onto science (light and sound) and art appreciation (Fra Angelico) and after that I have a whole slew of subjects to pair up (geography, nature study, life skills/handicrafts, logic, foreign languages etc.) and then we will come back to Shakespeare, music, art and science.

All that takes about an hour and then we usually break for lunch and then when we come back we go into binder work......

Binder Work

Each child has a binder in which I write each of their subjects that they need to do independent from each other. I just put lined paper, write the date at the top and list each subject (math, language arts and practice instruments are the only things on there), with a little box on the end so they can check it off when done. Here is the breakdown of what each kid does:

6/7th Grade   

Math- 2 chapters of Life of Fred (she started at Apples at the beginning of the year and now is at Kidneys)

15 min of piano and flute practice

Writing prompts (I take the prompts and we work on them until the are a really good page or so)

She reads on her own so I don't assign this, since I know it will get done.

4th Grade  

Math- 2 chapters of Life of Fred (she started at Apples and is currently in Farming)

30 min of oboe (the girl needs more practice)

Daily Grams- 2 pages and often she does more

Read one chapter

Wordly Wise- finish one lesson

1st Grade  

Math- 2 chapters of Life of Fred (she's in Cats but she also has a workbook of first grade math from B&N)

Reading- we go back in forth from AAR (All About Reading 1), Explode the Code 1.5 and Starfall online

Writing- she just finished a handwriting book and is doing Spelling You See A

Pre-K  

So, I really wasn't ready to school Pre-K, I try to wait until they are 6 to do school, but my son was insistent that he should have a binder. So for him I just find little workbooks and tear out pages for him and have him work for as long as his attention span permits. He also has older siblings who read to him before bed, so I know he is taken care of there.

And that's all she wrote guys.....that's it! That is our homeschool day! It's so much fun and I love learning alongside of them and see them make connections. Have any questions? Don't hesitate to ask, I LOVE questions!