Dear Grandma and Grandpa, I have been having a good week. How has your week been doing? Although, it has been a really hard week with school and today I did not have much to do of school work but we played outside for a long while. We went to the Wildlife Refuge and, […]
How We Do: School Schedules, part 2 (Ambleside Online)
Last Sunday I showed you our weekly school schedules; today I’d like to give you some follow up pictures as well as an explanation of how these schedules work for us. If you look below, you will notice that I divide each child’s schedule into five categories, the headings begin rather self-explanatory. Daily Alone: The majority of these […]
How We Do: First Grade
First Grade is a very gentle year around here. While it might not seem gentle by the intimidating schedule I posted earlier in the week, it is gentle in the sense that it is slow, lovely, rich, and short-winded. I will explain more on this in a later post. For today, I’d like to […]
How We Do: Weekly School Schedules with Ambleside Online (part 1)
I am frequently asked about how we schedule our homeschool week, how we organize to make sure we get all the things done. I’m going to take the next few posts to break this down, beginning today with examples of our weekly paper schedules. In our house we call these schedules: “charts.” I apologize for the poor […]
Homeschool Art: Using Color to Depict Feeling
In our home the making of art is primarily child-led. I set up the environment (papers, canvases, paints and brushes, colored pencils, scissors, glue, oil pastels, string, art instruction books, etc.) and the kids have free access to the supplies whenever they like. Every now and then, however, I pull out an art instruction book […]
Homeschool Finds
As we are taking off from school the rest of June to enjoy David’s post-deployment block leave, I am binging on homeschool books, blogs, articles, forums and websites. Here are a few treasures I’ve stumbled upon: Quotes: “School should be a place where boys or girls lived together in accordance with the best human tradition […]
A Bit of Shakespeare, A Dash of Paul
We were in the midst of Measure For Measure. Each day I’d read just a little bit and then close the book at some pivotal moment to a chorus of “MAMA! Don’t stop! Please read more!” It was fresh on our minds, and across the table we were having rigorous discussions of a nature that […]
School: How We’re Doing It
I wrote this post months ago as a follow up to this homeschool update. While this is no longer a true representation of our day, I want to publish it just to have on record. I am so, so, so thankful that the intense season of life referenced below has come to an end… As I mentioned in a […]
Shakespeare and Children
Ambleside Online suggests a continual Shakespeare rotation, with children reading/working through one play per term beginning in Grade 4. In years 1-3, children are introduced to Shakespeare a little bit more gently, with either Beautiful Stories From Shakespeare by Edith Nesbit, or Tales From Shakespeare by Mary and Charles Lamb. Now Shakespeare is daunting to me. […]
Sabbath Weeks
My friend Katie linked me to this article on “Sabbath Schooling,” a style of scheduling the homeschool year so that every seventh week is a week of rest. We have been schooling this way for nearly three years now, though we’ve never given it a name. More or less, we school for six weeks and […]