It is a brave thing to die for one’s fellow-men; it is also brave, and often far harder, to live for them. Livingstone did both. Indeed, the humble Blantyre mill-boy had done the noblest and highest thing that man can do; he had given his whole life to help God’s less happy creatures. And this […]
How We Do: School Schedules with Ambleside Online (part 3)
Click here to find Part 1, and Part 2. While I am eating up all the constructive comments happening over at this post (if you have thoughts to add, please don’t be shy!), I thought I’d switch gears tonight and tidy up a few final thoughts on school schedules. You’ve seen how our schedules appear on paper, and you’ve heard how […]
Sand: thoughts on change and how we grow
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour. – William Blake My heart has been broken a dozen times this evening; broken, restored, broken again. The heavy things of life laid anchor, pulling my self-ship to […]
A Few Thoughts
1. This post at Copperlight Wood. Read it. 2. The Ambleside community. I am continually blown away by their graciousness and generosity. Each time I visit the robust online forum, or read one of the many blogs by Ambleside users, I come away blessed and informed. These women have helped shape not only my homeschooling but also my life […]
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 […]
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 […]
Homeschool: An Update
The past few years the kids and I have followed Ambleside Online’s scheduled homeschool curriculum, with great enjoyment and success. So when we came into this deployment year I weighed a few schooling options, and ultimately decided to stick with Ambleside despite its heavy reading load. After all, we knew the rhythm, we liked the […]