our dozen beautiful feet

It seems no matter how much time I spend preparing, once we get started on a school year there will inevitably be some tweaks that are needed. This year, it was in the area of language arts for my younger kids. I'm not entirely surprised by this. I have a plan that I veered from this year.  Typically, I use Cottage Press Primer for 2nd grade, then begin Writing & Rhetoric in 3rd grade. Levi is in a co-op class and the majority of his class was not ready to begin Writing & Rhetoric, and I felt it would be a stretch for him.  So I had to figure out something else for this year to stretch him toward readiness for it next year.  Meryn also just did not seem quite ready to take on Cottage Press Primer 1. Her handwriting needs work. She's just starting All About Spelling Level 2. Her reading is right on beginner 2nd grade level and we need work on that.  So I had to find something to stretch her as well that was not part of my original plan. Since I've been he...

A few years ago, I started doing year-long planning for one subject over the summer. It started with history. I tried to basically plan out our books and projects for the year so I could have the books ready to go, and the project supplies on hand in hopes these things would actually get done. When my oldest kids were 3rd-4th-5th this was a great way to save some time over the course of the year by doing long-range planning in the summer. But as they've grown, I've started expanding this long-range planning to other subjects. Last year, I added science because the older kids wanted to study the human body.  Since I haven't ever loved Apologia and it was the only ready-made curriculum for elementary I could find on anatomy, I decided to put together our down study.  I had a few resources chosen, and I laid out which chapters coincided with each other, and what order we'd do them in, how long we'd give to each body system, etc.  This worked out really well for us l...

Morning Time is quite a buzz-word in homeschool circles these days.  I first heard of it through Cindy Rollins' old blog Ordo Amoris. We've been beginning our days with Morning Time for about four years now in an effort to not skip over the really beautiful and rich parts of our education that usually get shoved to the side in the busy-ness of a normal day.  We started small: Bible reading, memory verse, and a read-aloud together.  But gradually over the four years, we've grown into a robust hour of Morning Time on an average day. Here's how I organize and plan it over the summer so that it actually happens during the year. :)  I begin with this overview chart for the year.  I organize Morning Time into six terms.  We try to do school on a semi-Sabbath schedule: six weeks on, one week off.  The top chart of the page lays out by each term what Bible passages or catechism questions we'll read, what hymn we will learn, and which Shakespe...

Here's what's on tap for next year at Preedy Academy! This is the plan for my older two kids. They do all their studies together with the exception of their math studies. Language: -Writing & Rhetoric Books 7-8: Encomium & Vituperation, Comparison -Latin for Children C: Second half of book -French for Children B -Poetics: A World of Poetry by Michael Clay Thompson -The Art of Argument: Introduction to the Informal Fallacies Logic: -Math-U-See PreAlgebra & Algebra, some select Art of Problem Solving work for fun -Novare Earth Science -A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: Numbers 1-6 Humanities : -20th Century History: The Century by Peter Jennings, biographies -Literature: 20th century literature with Teaching the Classics AND -Memoria Press American Literature: Poetry & Short Stories (selected works) -Memoria Press Geography 3: 4 units of the 8 They will also continue with piano lessons and orchestra at the local school. We...

Three more weeks left in our school year!  Things are beginning to dwindle as some subjects are finished and more are dropping off each week. It's that time of the year where we start feeling a bit more free! I've come to love the end of the school year, not because I'm exhausted and so ready to be done, but because it is so satisfying to reflect on the past year and all that was studied, experienced, read, discussed, made, and enjoyed.  Focusing on filling our souls with truth goodness and beauty has resulted in full hearts and minds at the end of the year. Of course we're all ready for a break, but we're not exhausted, burned-out, and dreading the start of "school" again... This past year, my 5th/6th grade kids had the following subjects: -Math: Art of Problem Solving PreAlgebra and Math-U-See Zeta -Latin for Children Primer C -French for Children Primer A -Writing & Rhetoric Books 6-7 (Commonplace, Encomium & Vituperation) -Grammar Voya...

(Nota bene: this is not a scholarly article. I'm a homeschooling mom. These are the ramblings of my mind as I'm processing the things I'm reading, listening to, and being changed by. Please forgive me for not citing sources or attributing quotes properly. I'm summarizing. If you think I'm getting it wrong, please comment and let me know!) There has been much and lively debate about whether Charlotte Mason deserves to be considered part of the larger classical tradition of education.  Having first discovered the classical tradition, and through that being introduced to the ideas of Charlotte Mason, I have always been curious about the differences and similarities between the two. Last year I chose Charlotte to be my educational mentor for the year and set a goal to read as many of her volumes as possible in one year. I made it through four: Home Education, School Education, Formation of Character, and Towards a Philosophy of Education. I found myself nodding in ag...

Check out my guest post on the Schole Groups blog here ! About five years ago, as my oldest child was entering the third grade, I was at a loss to teach him how to write. I didn’t know anything about writing, and it seemed like such a difficult, subjective thing to teach and evaluate. I had been dabbling in what I thought was classical education and enjoying it, so I started researching how to teach writing classically. I stumbled upon the idea of the progymnasmata, and realized I had a lot to learn. This began a deep dive into classical education that led me eventually to Classical Academic Press, the Scholé Sisters, and the Circe Institute. Since I still had two very little ones at the time, learning and study was slow going for a few years without much real progress. Fast forward three years. I began to feel like it was time to really do some more study on classical ed and what it looks like beyond the grammar years. But how could I do that while also homeschooling my kids, be...

If you have not had the opportunity to go to one of the Great Homeschool Conventions, I can't encourage you enough to start planning right now to go to one near you next year! This was my second trip to the GHC in Fort Worth, TX. I went last year and was so encouraged and blessed by the trip. I just took in as much as I could from the "mentors" I had been following online and learning from. I got to listen to Dr. Christopher Perrin, Sarah Mackenzie, and Andrew kern, among other excellent speakers.  I was eager to go back again this year! While I was anticipating my trip this year, I thought of some specific things I wanted to research or get answers to. Over the past year, I've done a lot of comparative analysis of many of the most popular Great Books programs out there, trying to wrap my head around what it means to teach/read the Great Books and how to do it in high school. (The spreadsheets I've made of book lists make my head spin...)  I went really ...

Since this is our first year as a family to observe Lent together, I'd like to keep a diary of sorts with pictures of the things we've done and remember our first experience through this season. For the family, I opted to follow Rich & Rooted Passover. It's organized with three study days a week, a day of Prayer, a day of Alms (either giving money or acts of service), a day of feasting, and a day of worship. We began on Ash Wednesday with our own little ceremony. We talked about the purpose of Lent being a time to remember that we are made from the dust, and we will return to dust. Thinking of the end of our life encourages us to contemplate what it means to live fully and well today.  We spent some time talking about what it means to live well and to live fully, a life more abundant, and what things might keep us from living that way, things that hold us back.  We all wrote those things down on a sheet of paper and burned them in a small bowl.  After that, we se...

When our kids were small, we began the tradition of observing Advent as a family. Neither Paul nor I grew up observing Advent or Lent, or celebrated things like Ash Wednesday. But a mentor friend of mine had given me a set of Jesse Tree ornaments, and a devotional guide for the Advent season to go along with it, and we began to do this every year for our children. As we've returned to the US and found ourselves most at home in a Presbyterian church, we have been introduced to the celebrations of Lent and Ash Wednesday.  These were very unknown things to us a year ago, and I will always remember vividly my first Ash Wednesday service last year!  This year, I wanted to be much more intentional to embrace this season of anticipation. I'm learning a lot about and hope to grow through it these next six weeks, as well as lead my kids to some self-flection. Here are some resources we'll be using to help us navigate this season as newbies: I found this article that is a grea...