our dozen beautiful feet

For the greater part of my adult life, I always knew when my next flight was.  The summer before my senior year of college I took my first trip overseas to Izmir, Turkey.  From the anticipation of that trip in 2000 until the summer of 2014, I was in a state of perpetual anticipating of the next flight. Those years of jet-setting every few months saw my life morph from a single college girl to a married working woman to a seasoned missionary and homeschooling mother of four. As a mother, I always thought the announcement at the beginning of every airplane ride was pretty unrealistic. What mother really puts the oxygen mask on herself first while her kid is sitting there struggling for breath? I always tried to picture myself doing that, and it always seemed wrong. I really do understand how badly things could go if mom passes out, but I never could wrap my head around that mental picture of just taking care of myself first. But. When it comes to educating our kids, I thi...

This year has been so full, so busy, and I'm really ready for it to be wrapped up. :) I taught four classes. I took a class. I started a part-time job in January from home. My autoimmune health has been all over the place. I've loved our studies, but I way over-planned. (What's new?!?) We ended up totally dropping both Memoria Press programs, as well as the Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe.  My older two kids started doing two hours a day at the local middle school which left them with less time at home each day. We had to pull back and focus on the main things. And I learned a lot from this. Like: -orchestra, drama, choir are REALLY worth our time and not getting in the way of the curriculum, they are a majorly important part of the curriculum -more books and academics is not necessary for a quality education or a happy life -it's okay to do some of a program and not all of it, to scale things to what we need -it's ok to leave plenty of whi...

Last spring,  I went to the Great Homeschool Convention in Fort Worth, TX with a big question. For a couple of years, I had been studying the liberal arts on my own. I'd read pretty widely and thought I understood the first three arts, the trivium.  As I began to try to understand the quadrivium, I had read The Liberal Arts Tradition by Clark and Jain, as well as Beauty for Truth's Sake by Stratford Caldecott. I still didn't even begin to understand what the quadrivium was about. I went to the conference ready to ask people for their thoughts on how to teach the quadrivium. I left pretty unsatisfied. I got varying answers from "teach sol-fa for music" to "let them take a drafting class" to "teach them what home means."  I knew I would not make any progress at this point without a guide.   A few weeks later, I heard that a new class was being offered by the CiRCE Institute. It would be The Atrium with Andrew Kern on the seven liber...

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...