our dozen beautiful feet

Preedy Academy kicked off for weeks ago and we've had a great four weeks!  So far, all the long hours of thinking and planning put in over the summer are paying off, and the choices I made for us are working.  Praise God for His guidance and wisdom! Coming back from overseas, our first year we just hunkered down and did the hard work of recovery and healing.  The second year, I felt more able to take on some things like Community Bible Study, beginning a small co-op with some friends.  This year, I feel even more recovered and capable, but need to still be careful not to get over-committed. Here's some pictures from our first few weeks! The kids' schedules are pretty laid back still, but my daily schedule is pretty crazy, I'm always moving, always working with one of them, or preparing food and cleaning up.  By 3:00, I'm so ready for them to put on their yoga or other PE video and fro me to get to workout with no one talking to me! :) Playing m

In my search for a delightful, rigorous grammar program, over the last two years, I kept coming back to look at Michael Clay Thompson's language arts.  This year, I finally spent the time to figure out how the program worked, and decided to give it a try. I didn't want to buy the whole program, first because it's expensive as a whole program. Secondly, I'm very happy with our writing and Latin programs, and didn't want to switch over. But I did feel that his grammar and poetics books could work for us, even apart from the whole program. So I bought Grammar Town and Music of the Hemispheres, the poetics book. I did not know what to expect, but thought, it can't hurt to give it a try. We've been reading it aloud together for a week and a half now, and can I tell you, I have learned so much about poetry!  I had no idea that poets were such artists not just with the meanings of words, but with the sounds an using sounds to evoke feeling.  In the first third

Last year we began working our way through the Memoria Press nature study series.  We had spent a lot of time on mammals already, so we jumped into insects last year. We chose to dive into astronomy this year, because we are studying the middle ages, and historically they correlate well. I love the Memoria Press guides, they provide a great backbone of factual scientific knowledge to learn. But I also want to awaken a sense of wonder in the kids, so I always look for other resources to pull in to do that.  In researching resources for astronomy, I found a book from long ago called Storyland of the Stars, free for download. We began reading it this week, and today, we read about the "music of the spheres," a theory by Pythagoras that was correct, but that he could not prove.  (Not coincidentally, we began reading "The Music of the Hemispheres" by Michael Clay Thompson to learn about sounds in words and poetry this week too!) As we read how he thought the stars

Okay, really just one tip. :) This. I randomly happened upon this book on Rainbow Resource earlier this summer. I'd never heard of it, but was intrigued by the title. I did a little googling and looking at Amazon to see if I could see inside or read any reviews.  There was very little out there. And even though it was $32.95, I decided to take a chance on this, not knowing much about it, because it looked so interesting.  This is a total hidden treasure!  This book lays out suggestions for memory work in the above categories: Latin, Greek, Math, Grammar & Composition, Literature, Religion, Geography, World History, United States & Civics, Natural Sciences, as well as a guide to how and why to memorize things.  Last year, I spent hours scrolling through blogs and suggested memory, wondering what was worth memorizing and what wasn't, how to choose. I was never taught to memorize anything besides a few Bible verses, so this is all totally new to me. I

Better late than never? I've had a lot of mental gymnastics to figure out how this year is going to work. I've got FOUR students this year for the first time.  Yep, Meryn is beginning Kindergarten!!! AAAAA!!! :) So, after much contemplation, here's my plan.  We're going to have five blocks to our day: -Morning Time -Math -Language -Science -Humanities We'll stat each day with Morning Time, and move on to Math.  Everyone will be doing math for a set amount of time.  Same for the other blocks: all doing their own assignments within that subject, mom starting with youngest for instruction and moving up by age.  The older kids will have some independent work to do while they wait on me for any teaching we have for that day. There are three possible outcomes for each block: -You work diligently, and complete your work.  In this case, there is a box of games to play until the next block starts, or books to read, or things to draw, etc.) -You work diligent

It's that time of year again! We have just four short weeks of school left and all thoughts are turned toward next year, what's worked, what hasn't, what to change, what to keep. From my post last year, this is what my plan was.  I'll go through it line by line:  Language : -  Writing and Rhetoric : Book 2, Narrative and Book 3, Narrative II.  Yes.  This.  These books are excellent.  I have been teaching Book 3 in a class setting, and its so much fun to see what each student comes up with for sentence play, rewrites, and just in talking about the stories.  These books are based on the progymnasmata method of writing instruction, and so they introduce students to great writing and stories to fill their minds with good examples to draw on.  Books 1-2 were very gentle introductions, and Book 3 ramps up the challenge quite a bit.  It focuses mostly on stories from the Roman Republic and Roman Empire, and the kids have learned a lot about story parts, outlining, using i

Recently I was blessed to talk to a group of homeschool moms about classical education. It was a huge undertaking for me to condense the last few years of study into a short time.  There have been so so many wonderful blogs, books, lectures that have poured into my heart, and I felt like it would be really helpful for myself and maybe others to make a list of resources that I want to return to again and again to continue shaping me as a homeschooling mother, and even as a person and disciple of Christ. If you've heard me talk about classical education, and you start reading and listening to these resources, you'll realize I'm just repeating these great thinkers and writers. :) So here goes! :) Books: The Liberal Arts Tradition For the Children's Sake Trivium Mastery Start Here by Brandy Vencel Teaching From Rest by Sarah Mackenzie How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare Around the internet: Perrin's Eight Essential Principles of Classical Pedagogy  (Vid