Year 8, Weeks 15 -17: Christmas Cheer!

      I don't know about you, but after Thanksgiving things seem to speed up and slow down at the same time! Our homeschool days feel long and even though it's the same work, nothing new or added, it drags on. But then the countdown to Christmas Day gets shorter and I realize that I still have presents to buy and wrap, cookies to bake, fudge and hot cocoa to prepare and I have to figure out what kind of December cake to bake before the New Year arrives! I don't think I've mentioned it but my goal for 2020 was to bake a different cake every month. I chose to do it because Little Toughie was three when we started to eat Paleo and I stopped baking. She missed out on a lot of goodies. While we still eat Paleo-ish, I figured a cake once a month is fine. Plus, we share the larger ones with neighbors, thus giving a treat to our friends while not taking in too much sugar.

     Are you done Christmas shopping yet or are you a last minute shopper? Are you one who likes the adrenaline rush of finding that perfect present right as the clock counts down to 11:59 pm? Well, that's not me. I'm now somewhere in between. I used to be really good at getting my shopping done by the end of August, no later than the end of September. Yeah, I can't do that anymore. For one, I've never been a fan of shopping. The introvert in me doesn't like crowds and if I do shop it's always for something specific, so I don't spend a lot of time "window shopping". Secondly, the stores I would normally shop at have closed! Borders, Toys R Us...what else? I can't even remember, but I've resigned myself to online shopping and gift cards. All of our family live elsewhere anyway, so online shopping just makes even more sense.

     As for our homeschooling I have to admit, we're bored. The kids and I are bored. As their teacher, I am bored. We've spent the past four years reading plenty of books based on the time period in History which we were studying, all the way from Ancient History to Modern. What we're reading now is indeed review. We're condensing those four years into two, studying World History over this year and next in preparation for high school. But the books that Sonlight recommends as their spine, or main history text, is underwhelming. It's supposed to be geared toward 12-14 year olds but compared to what we've used the past three years, this is feels like it's best for 9-11 year olds.

     Perhaps it's for the best that it's that way, for now. Little Toughie is taking that writing class via Circe (she actually said she's going to miss it now that they're on a break) and it's a lot of work. So, maybe it's okay that it's humdrum reading. Maybe. Or maybe this mom is just ready for some time off from homeschooling!

     We're approaching our Christmas break and as I finish writing this there are cookies in the oven, cookies on trays ready to be put in and cookies on cooling racks. Later, they'll be drenched in chocolate and topped with crushed candy canes. My little helpers (my kids and hubby) are ready and willing. Anything for my holiday cookies! We'll be off for three weeks total, with two of those weeks focused on things we missed in November because of NaNoWriMo. Mostly the science experiments! Then we take one week completely off. This is where I start planning the next school year since curriculum starts to go on sale late January and I want to take advantage of it.

     I'll attempt to catch up on some reading as well. I've tried to start a tradition where I wrap a new book for everyone to start reading on Christmas Eve. It's the one present they get to open. I did it twice and then forgot. If you need a reading list to either start the tradition or just to snuggle up and read while sipping some hot cocoa, This Reading Mama has two great lists:

Image by This Reading Mama

Image by This Reading Mama

     I can tell you what traditions have stuck...the ones that have to do with food! Do you have a meal that you only have on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day? Or how about New Year's Eve and New Year's Day? It started out with just cinnamon rolls Christmas morning and something with black-eyed peas on New Year's Day. Then somehow, with the help of the kids, we now have several different standard meals on those days. If I even try to make those meals mid-year I get a resounding, "NO!"

     With that said, I leave you with a very Merry Christmas and a picture of the cookies before they were packaged and passed out for a door-to-door cookie exchange. I also leave you with this, the reason for the season:

For to us a child is born,
    to us a son is given,
    and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
    Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
    Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Isaiah 9:6

Year 8, Week 4: Bible

     Another week in the books!  Literally.  Sonlight is a literature based curriculum so we have A LOT of books.  I don't mind, though.  I love reading!  Sonlight is what we're using for our Bible, History, Science and Geography.  Today, I'm going to focus on our Bible studies.  We always start our day with our Bible readings/study and prayer.  It's an important part of our day; it's THE most important part of our day and I make a point to remind my kids to start their day with God.

My well-worn Bible

     In the past we've used Long Story Short:  10 Short Devotionals to Draw Your Family to God and Old Story New: Ten-Minute Devotions to Draw Your Family to God.  While both books are family devotionals I decided to use them as our studies because the kids were still young when we started them and they had a lot of great questions to draw them out.  It opened plenty of great conversations as well.  It took us a little over 4 years for us to finish both books; we started Long Story Short in 2016 and made a point to only use it during the school year (we did something else during the summer breaks).  We completed Old Story New toward the end of 2019.  In January 2020 I purchased a devotional suited for each child and decided that our Bible studies would be based on our personal readings from the devotionals; sharing what we read and how it applied to our lives. 

     Now, with the new school year under way, we're using what Sonlight suggests which begins with reading Mark along with a smaller "field guide to the Bible" of sorts.  I say suggests because while it's in the schedule I don't necessarily have to follow it.  Frankly, I may change it up.  Both devotionals above were so thorough in drawing the kids out and helping them make connections that currently they seem a little...bored.  We've done an inductive study of Matthew and our church did the same through the book of Luke over the course the past year and a half.  So, I can see where reading Mark with very little discussion can seem monotonous.

     Recently, I happened upon a short video that touched on the failings of some youth ministries and it convinced me to take this opportunity of homeschooling to also instruct them on how to study their Bible.  Perhaps an exegetical study of Acts?  Or a shorter book since this is their first time doing it?

     I don't want to overwhelm them but I do want them to do more than just read the Bible.  Of course I want them to live it out as well, but they can't do that unless they know it well.  I want them to be equipped. to fully put on the armor of God.  And...I think I just answered my own questions.  I think a study of Ephesians 6:10-18 is what I'm looking for!  It's amazing how God works.  I'm sitting here typing this and when I typed the word equipped, God brought me to that scripture.

     I'll take some time over this holiday weekend to see how I can approach this, but as I sit here finishing up, I'm getting excited at the prospect of digging into the whys and hows of Ephesians 6:10-18.  Woohoo!

     Have a safe holiday weekend!

Year 8, Week 3: Scheduling, Part Two

     I hope my last post on scheduling was clear.  I feel like I was rambling, but then again....I did warn you!  In this post I'm sharing what our day typically looks like.  If you're a parent whose child(ren) is doing distance learning due to the SAH orders, some of this may not apply to you but it might give you a better sense of what homeschooling entails or prepare you for the long haul.

     We start our day between 8:30 and 9.  The kids know their morning chores/routine need to be done by 8:30, thus they're up around 7:30.  Their morning routine includes making their bed, having breakfast, doing the morning dishes, feeding and walking our dog.  Then we start our day:

Bible and prayer	8:30 - 9:00
History	9:00 - 9:45
Break (to walk the dog)	9:45 - 10:00
Grammar/Spelling	10:00 - 10:30
Math	10:30 - 11:00 (This is usually when I get to work out, after I go over their lesson for the day and while they do their assignment.)
Writing	11:00 - 12:30 (This is only once a week because Little Toughie has an online course.  A380 is doing something different  We're usually done before 12 or a bit after.)
Lunch	12:00 - 1:00
Science	1:00 - 1:30
Assigned Reading	Must be done before any screen time
Free Reading	Should be done before dinner

  

     I have specific times, but that's really just a guide.  This is basically Block Scheduling but I have specific times just to make sure we aren't dawdling; it's very easy for us to get caught up in discussions (we do it often) and lose track of time.  Bible, History and Writing are well-known for drawing us into long conversations after I read to them.  It may look like our day is complete by 2 or so but, like most kids, they have activities outside the home roughly three days out of five, sometimes more depending on the time of the year.  If for some reason we don't finish we can go back to it and I know where we left off.

     "Homework" would be anything that they didn't get completed during our day or anything that I asked them to correct.  They also have a chore of the day that I have on our schedule, but much like their Assigned and Free Reading, there's no time.  It just has to be done before any screen time AND before dinner.

     Our Fridays have a lighter schedule to give them time to work on projects or experiments or to catch up on anything that didn't get completed during the week.  At this point, week three, there isn't much to do but I know as the year progresses the work load will increase.  Friday is also the day where I use Looping in our schedule.  We alternate between a geography game, Art, Music Appreciation, writing poetry and mapping skills.  If I find an educational game then I might add that to the schedule or if they want to spend some time doing something of their own choosing (delight directed learning) we can add that in as well.  Something my daughter wants to add this year is FCS (Family and Consumer Science)----Can I just tell you how much cooler that sounds than the "Home Ec. of my days?!)  She's in the midst of preparing for an audition, so I don't know if we'll be able to do that, but that's the benefit of looping.

   For all of this I use Homeschool Planet.  I'm not getting paid or anything like that to share this.  I'm really just sharing what I use and what I like about it.  First, it's very user friendly.  I've been using it for the past four years.  I had a free trial and was immediately able to use it without even watching the tutorials.  I can easily mark off what's been completed.  I can change an assignment, drag and drop a particular part of our day, print reports and more.  I can view the schedule of just one kid or both.  I can give each child their own log in.  One of the things I do every year is print out and keep our school year attendance (as required by our state) and then a copy of our weekly schedule (just one week and I usually pick one later in the year once I know we've found our groove).  Since I can also add Resources, I print out that list too, so that I know what books we've read and used.  Later I'll also be able to print out high school transcripts for college purposes!

Courtesy of Homeschool Planet

     Next week, I'll share our week along with a bit of each subject we're studying this year.  This week was pretty quiet; we've added a couple of things into our schedule so it's starting to get busy.  I forgot to order their grammar books so what I thought was the last of the homeschool books deliveries was incorrect!  That will be the last of them when they get here.  That's all for now.  Have a great weekend!

       

Year 8, Day 1: ???

     

     The reboot of this blog may be a bit unorganized until I find the layout and style that will work best for me.  I don't even have a great title for these Year 8 posts as evident by the lackluster title of this one!  For now, I'll just share how our week went.

     Every school year I spend some time praying about what scripture should lead our year.  This year the words joy and willingness came to mind.  After doing some research and reading, I found Romans 15:13:

     We surprised the kids with donuts from a well-known local shop along with breakfast from Chick-Fil-A.  Not the healthiest meal or my kind of start to any day (I don't like donuts so I didn't have any), but it's not like they eat like that all the time.

     

     Our first week was pretty easy, of course.  I always make sure to ease into our schedule, so our focus this week was Bible, history, science, geography and math along with their reading requirements.  Next week, writing is added and then the week after that spelling is added.  It seems like a lot, even looking at the calendar, but it doesn't take all day and they're not overwhelmed.

     Midweek, I switched things around a bit and did our poetry reading in the morning while they were having breakfast.  I've been trying to implement a morning time routine for the past three years but I haven't been able to find something that sticks.  I read to them in the evening, when The Principal is home.  Little Toughie likes her free reading time later in the day while A380 isn't a fan at all.  We would do art, but then they would stay on that FOREVER.  Music and/or art appreciation is a possibility.  We always start our school day with our Bible reading/study and prayer but I've been trying to add something else.  I don't know.  It's been three years.  Perhaps I should just let it go.

     Besides, I'm now trying to figure out if I want to stick to a particular format for these posts.  I want to share every week, but I don't know if I want to stick to "What We Read" and "What We Tried" every week, which doesn't necessarily limit me to our homeschooling.  Or perhaps something similar to our dinner time sharing:  Pow (the low of our day), Wow (the highlight of our day) and Yowzah (how we saw God at work during our day).  I came up with Yowzah because it reminds me of Yahweh!  We learned this dinner conversation starter a couple of years or so ago while having dinner with one of our lead pastors and her family.  Everyone shares their day; the high, low and how they saw God at work.  We LOVED the idea and started implementing it.  Maybe I'll use a format similar to that.

    That's pretty much it.  Nothing else.  Just ramping up bit by bit!

We're Back and It's Box Day! (Sort of)

Hey there!  Thank you for taking a few minutes to read my nonsense. Well, not nonsense...perhaps musings on homeschooling or the ramblings of a mom who's had a long week and needs an outlet other than exercise to release said ramblings.  Regardless, I'm going to try to get back to writing weekly.  Over the years I haven't been able to keep up with it because our school days started to fill with more than I could handle and I had to choose between keeping this updated or honestly, losing my Bible study time.  And I know there's no way I could homeschool without spending quality time with the Father.  So, there you have it.

Now, in this current season things have slowed a bit.  Plus there's a couple of other reasons.  One, my Little Toughie is starting what would be considered middle school and I would like to get back on track with documenting what we're doing.  The tracking will also help us plan out her high school years 😬.  Plus, for A380, this is a transition year where I get to focus more on the skills necessary for his success and I'll get to document that.  The second part, and only some of my immediate family know this, is that I'm writing a book.  I already have the ending of it outlined and partially written, but to hone my writing skills I have to write!

Moving along...It took some time for us to plan what middle school would look like for our tween.  We had completed all four history cycles (and then some) as per The Well Trained Mind and I knew come high school our focus would move to studying current ideologies/events or 20th Century History or Church History or perhaps the History of Science but I didn't know how to fill the gap until then.  Thankfully, we decided to go back to Sonlight, which is what I used my first year homeschooling Little Toughie in Kindergarten.  Basically, we'll be doing all four cycles again but condensed into two years and it's heavily literature based.  As a bibliophile I love that there's a lot of reading.  But then again, there's A LOT of reading.  See:

For Box Day I'd typically lay out EVERYTHING and take a picture of it like in this post, but with The Principal working from home and the dog zooming around, it just wasn't feasible.  These are just some of the books. 😲  These are the ones I was able to get through and add as resources to my digital planner so that I could set up their schedule, mostly the history books.  We still have our Bible study books, additional science materials and various other books for spelling, writing and vocabulary.  I'm running out of shelves y'all.  I think we need to build an additional room!

We start on Monday, August 10 and I hope to post every Friday (or Saturday).  We'll see how it goes.

Kindergarten, Week 36; FINITO!

     We are done!  I don't even know where to begin to write, which is why although our official last day of school was May 1, it is a week later that I am beginning to summarize our last week.  Plus, in the middle of writing this my daughter stopped me to work on telling time.  (The learning never stops!)

     Our last week brought us to Revelations in the Bible.  What a fantastic way to end our school year; with the image of God's Kingdom yet to come!  I constantly see God at work in my daughter and am thankful that He has plans for her that will bring glory to Him.

     We also finished The Hundred Dresses.  I don't know if I was emotional because everything was coming to a close, or if the ending of the book really touched me, but I teared up!  My Little Toughie had to console me as I explained the significance of the ending.  It's a book I definitely recommend reading to little ones and keeping around for them to read to themselves later on.

     As a way of acknowledging the end of our school year (Although I will continue to do a little homeschooling during this 2 month hiatus; she wants to start again in July.) we had a little celebration luncheon.  We were in attendance along with my step-daughter, her fiancee and kids.  There, The Principal handed her certificates of completion by Sonlight.  She also recited "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer from memory.  It's a beautiful poem!  It was a wonderful gathering and a great way to end her school year.

     So, what did she learn this year?  Between Classical Conversations and Sonlight my Little Toughie learned:

• 24 history sentences covering topics from Charlemagne to the present
• 161 events and people in chronological order
• 44 presidents
• Over 100 locations around Europe and Asia, including mountain ranges and rivers
• 24 science facts, even the laws of thermodynamics (at 6 years old...what?!)
• English grammar facts, including memorizing a list of pronouns from objective to indefinite
• Multiplication tables up to 15x15 and laws of addition and multiplication
• Latin Verb endings of the first conjugation

     She also:

• Read the Bible from Old to New Testament
• Read biographies of 30 different missionaries who spread the Gospel throughout the world
• Did 12 science experiments
• Learned about the orchestra
• Studied 6 Great Artists and completed corresponding projects
• Read over 40 books to herself
• Listened to me read (I don't know how many) books aloud
• Completed over 400 math worksheets
• Did 25 oral presentation, one of which was the poem "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer, which she memorized and recited.

     Those were just the things I could pull from our resources and could remember.  There were many discussions that came forth from our homeschool days; deep conversations that could only happen because I homeschool her and we can take as much time we need.  These were lessons that weren't planned but were taught and I know God had His hand on those particular moments.

     Which leads me to what I learned this first homeschool year.  I learned that a homeschool day doesn't always go as planned, but it's okay.  That could be anyone's day, but I was able to work through it with my daughter and teach her how to handle the curve balls life can sometimes throw.

     I got to spend real quality time with my daughter during what we termed her Kindergarten year.  I'm blessed to be able to do that.  We are blessed to be able to do that.  Not many parents are, and I thank God every day for blessing us with the provisions to make it happen.

     I learned what kind of books my daughter likes and am glad that because our reading list varied, her taste in books does as well.  I learned her favorite subjects (all of them for now).  I learned to not worry so much about whether or not she would "get it" because in the end, she did.  Homeschooling allows me to take it at her pace, not anyone else's.  It allows me to teach her a love of learning and that it can be fun at any age.

     I learned to prioritize better, in all aspects of my life.  Not that I was ever bad at that but I was able to narrow down what I deemed important to our family and our relationship with Jesus.  I let everything else go.

     I learned how to create my own curriculum, which I will share with you when our school year begins!

     Ultimately, what was pressed upon my heart during this first year of homeschooling is that God is at work and has plans for my kids.  Great and wonderful plans!  Academics aside, I've been entrusted with raising lovers of Christ; future apostles to spread His Word and shine His light; to be living testimonies of how much God loves us.

     There is no greater lesson.