Thinking (Some More) About Scheduling Our Days

I've been working on our schedule some more, and reflecting on Charlotte Mason's motto- Education is an Atmosphere, a Discipline, a Life. Trying to reconcile the truth in this motto with the rushed, jam packed, crazy thing that seems to be our life can be quite a challenge. How can I allow my kids the time they need to play house, make forts, catch frogs, see the animals in the clouds, make mud pies and just be a kid when we have 8 appointments or classes each week, in addition to taekwondo and church and grocery shopping, SCHOOL, and everything else?

I found the answer to be my educational philosophy. An educational philosophy is the goal, the form, the method, and the process we use to teach our kids. You may not agree with all the educational philosophy of Charlotte Mason, but I think its a great starting point for looking at how we can light that educational fire on our kids. One of Charlotte Mason's principals is that children need time to be kids and think and experiment and fiddle with things in order for it to make it their own

When planning our days I try to start with the most important things. For my family this would be relationship first as it is the foundation of everything else that will follow. My younger kids are adopted and we are still working on attachment and connection. It is especially important for us that for the relationship piece of the puzzle everything be gentle and pleasant, then habits, Bible, reading instruction, writing instruction, math instruction and exposure to great literature are my priorities.

Once they can read, write and do basic math, they have all the tools they need to learn anything they want, at any time. Great literature will provide the ideas needed to fuel the fire of their minds.

Another quote I try to always keep in mind when planning our days-

Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire.  ~ William Butler Yeats

How Does Home Education Measure Up?

     Source: TopMastersInEducation.com

Gardening

We started easing into school today, and did Bible, reading instruction, and some copy work. Everyone had fun and wanted to do MORE, so I knew it was time to stop for the day. :-)

We went outside and worked in the yard for a while before it got too hot, and gave our beautiful, newly planted Mandeville plant some water.I can't wait til it gets big enough for us to see those lovely red and white blooms from our bedroom window!
 
This afternoon I am trying to decide if we should take the Laguna Trolley into down to see the Sawdust Festival before it closes Sept. 1. I know the kiddies would love it, but I'm tired. We'll see what happens!

It's that time of year again....

School planning is in high gear!
We are starting kindergarten for my daughter and JrK for my son, and while it will be a very gentle year, I will also have to be much more consistent than I have so far so that we can make the kind of progress my daughter has been requesting. She really is eager to be a big kid and learn!

Here is what we are planning for now.

• 7AM- 9AM  wake up, breakfast, morning chores, take a walk
• 9AM- 10AM read aloud Bible (10-15 min), Scripture Memory Work (5 min), Copywork (5 min working up to 10 or 15 min by the end of the year), and Reading Instruction (5 min working up to 10 or 15 min by the end of the year).  If we need to do errands, appointments etc they would go here *after* the school lessons
• 10AM- 12:30PM outdoor play, (yard, park, etc) lunch
• 12:30PM- 1:30 Math (5 min working up to 10 or 15 min by the end of the year), Nature or literature read aloud 15min.
• 1:30PM- 2:30 or 3PM Quiet Time- free play or quiet reading/resting in bedrooms
•  3:00PM- 3:30PM Spanish
• 3:30PM- Free play indoors or out.

For Bible we are reading through and discussing The Jesus Storybook Bible.
For Scripture Memory we will be doing the verses assigned from  Sunday School- in September this will be the Great Commission

 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” ~Matt 18:18-20

 For Copywork we will be doing the Delightful Handwriting program which starts with single letters and moves into words and short sentences from the reading program we are using, which will be Delightful Reading. Both these programs are from SimplyCharlotteMason.com.

Math will be MathUSee Primer, moving into MUS Alpha as soon as she finishes Primer. www.mathUsee.com

For Nature reading we will be reading aloud Books by Thornton W Burgess such as The Adventures of Danny Meadow Mouse and The Bee People by Margaret Warner Morley. I got these as part of a downloadable bundle from Yesterdaysclassics.com and they are also available from Amazon.com

For literature we will be reading aloud fairy tales such as the original The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Anderson or Aunt Jo's Scrapbag by Louisa May Alcott.

Spanish will be  Salsa Spanish.

Wednesday morning will be Bible study class.

The difference between K and JrK is that if my little guy doesn't want to participate he  doesn't have to, and I have other activities like for him during reading and math instruction.

I am so excited to get started, now I just have to decide on a date to start!

Useful Links

http://livingcminca.blogspot.com/

Great Home Ed Websites

I wanted to share some web sites I have found helpful- stuff I have recently found as well as some tried and true favorites.

Learn In Freedom by Karl Bunday I really can't say enough about this site. Way back in the olden days when I was home schooling the first time around and I was first got online, I met Karl Bunday at a home ed site. He was a revolutionary thinker back then, and there is still a lot of golden nuggets all over his pages.

DonnaYoung.org Printables and Resources
So much stuff at this site!Everything from handwriting pages to print out to pictures of presidents to calendars and more.

Salsa
How to teach Spanish when you don't speak it yourself (Or have forgotten what you once knew)? Salsa is Georgia Public Broadcasting's award-winning Spanish language series for children.

Living Math
I want to build a bridge. I'd like to close the gap between math and history, science, literature and humanity created by the isolated way we traditionally approach math education.

Little House on the Prairie Pa's Fiddle Project
The goal of The Pa's Fiddle Project is simple but ambitious: to re-connect generations of readers with the rich musical legacy written into the Little House books.

First Week of School 2012

We had a great  first week of school. I had planned things to go very slow, taking our time and starting at the most simple of simple things, but my girly had another idea. She wants to write and read so badly that she was making leaps ahead of where I had planned to start. Since I wouldn't want to frustrate her, I am changing to meet her where she is so we can catch that joy and excitement of learning! We are doing lots of things to help small motor strength and endurance. Play dough, Light Bright, and coloring all can help small motor development. Lil Princess was so proud of her rainbow alligator letter A. Lil Dumpling was more traditional with  a green alligator but also had a lot of fun. I got the Animal Alphabet from http://www.education.com/ Today we used plastic C clips to sort colors and make chains and learn about patterns. After that we used play dough to make letter A. I just use a plastic page protector on a piece of construction paper where I had written the letter A for them to press the play dough along the lines. They love it and it doesn't stick at all. Best of all? School only took about 30 minutes a day!

Nature Study

I'm so excited to start nature study! I got each of my little ones a magnifying glass, and put it in a bag with a couple simple field guides and a pair of oversize plastic tweezers. I left it in the basket by the door, so next time we go out to the park or even to take out the trash  I can just pick it up and we are all ready to learn and enjoy. I can't wait!

Living Math

I've heard about Living Books for years, but today I found a website that has me really excited!  Living Math is a website from a home educating Mom and has what looks like fabulous ideas about teaching math in real life, and about teaching "math history" reviews of math curricula and all sorts of goodies. Just passing along a little treasure. ;-)

Starting PreK

Last night I was chatting with an acquaintance and the subject of school came up. He asked "what will school look like?" for my 4.5 and 3.5 yos. Happily, I had an answer. I told him we would do some beginning handwriting and beginning reading as Lil Princess is very interested in those things. Lil dumpling not so much yet, but I suspect it won't be long. Lots of trips to the library for books books and more books, field trips, the zoo, the park, the museum and gardens and more books, of course.

 We will use Handwriting Without Tears for learning to print. What I love about this program is how it gives you so many tools for developing the small motor skills. Lil Princess struggles with small motor challenges, so we will have fun making letters from play dough, with a chalkboard, and coloring until she is ready. For beginning reading we will use a combination of basic phonics and sight words. Lil Princess is already trying to sound out words so I suspect she will take off quickly. We will read through the story Bible this year, and begin memorizing Bible verses. We will begin exposure to Spanish, with videos books from the library. Of course we continue speech and occupational therapy as needed- for now we have 3 appointments a week.

The most important things we will do this year is establish habits. Habits of obedience, doing you best job, not complaining, curiosity, and kindness will make all the years to come go much more smoothly!

School Update

My kiddos are little, so our learning is done very gently. To help pass the time when we are going to the many therapy and doctor appointments we have each week we sometimes view DVDs while driving. Recently we started using http://www.littlepim.com/ so drive time is now learning time! My kidlets are learning Spanish and I am refreshing mine, which had pretty much rusted out. This morning Lil Dumpling counted to 10 in Spanish! Not bad for a speech delayed 3yo who only gets to 5 in English. ;-) Lil Princess made it to 20.

My main focus has been on getting outdoors more. It hasn't been easy since it has been so hot, but we had a lovely picnic in the park last week. To try to help them start observing more I asked them to find a bug and was disappointed when neither was able to find one. I think next park trip I will be more prepared to help them find one and see what we can see.

Last night we went down to the harbor and the kidlets rode their trikes all over the place. Surprisingly there was minimal danger to other pedestrians and Lil Princess only crashed her trike once when she was looking at a dog and a railing jumped out at her. Lil Dumpling did amazingly well considering he wasn't able to pedal last week and this week I was having to chase to keep up with him.

We also went to the beach recently- everyone had a wonderful time and I hope to go back this week. I managed to get everyone sunscreened except myself, but the peeling is almost gone now so I am ready for the next try.









 For *my* educational work, I continued working on my Education Planner notebook, and researching our options for this year. I ordered the Handwriting Without Tears PreK program, joined a local home ed group, and wrote out a schedule to try to keep myself on track when we officially "start" school in September. Still working on the schedule as I was hoping to get a ladies Bible study in there one day, and a few other things. Not sure how to fit it yet, but will get there soon.

Another Fresh Start

So, I am going to attempt to start blogging about our various adventures with home education, home decorating, parenting (foster, adoption, bio, adult kids, special needs, etc.), trying to eat healthy and anything else that strikes me as worthy of being enshrined for time immemorial on the internet. We'll see how much fun we can have with it. ;-)

Lately the things on the top of our to do list have been fixing up our house and planning for school.

The house renovation started when we realized we needed to move everyone's bedrooms around because the little kids were getting too old to keep sharing rooms and has morphed into new floors, painting every room, new curtains, etc for the whole house. It needed it, trust me, but whew.... what a way to spend the summer! I'll be posting pics and updates on that soon.

School planning- another whew! I know from the last go-round that I feel much better if I have a rough road map for where I want to go educationally. It helps keep down the panic that can set in when there appears to be more chaos that constructive learning happening. Lil Princess is starting PreK this year, so of course I needed to plan at least the next 14 years. I recently found some things that make that easier than you'd think, so I will be sharing those soon too. ;-)

Thanks for visiting.

Fresh Start

Its really best to start reading this blog from the end and work your way back to the beginning. Somehow, it all makes more sense. I didn't end up getting to describe much of the second half of the trip, mostly due to exhaustion. Also, some of the picture links are broken now... sorry. I may try to fix it later when I have time. HAHA yeah right.

State Tourism Sites
Lancaster County, PA
Oklahoma City National Memorial
The Hermitage
Appomattox~ Site of Lee's Surrender
Mount Vernon
Smithsonian Natural History Museum
Ford Theater
Spy Museum
Chancelorville

Drive to Niagara Falls (Mass and NY Turnpikes) Also Known as The Day Andy Erupted.

Ok, this is gross. If you have a weak stomach just skip this day. Trust me!

We spent the day driving on the Massachusetts and New York turnpikes. Long….. and very dull. I kept telling the boys we needed to try to synchronize our bladders so we didn’t have to stop at EVERY rest stop to use the facilities, but no such luck. Along the turnpikes they have very nice rest areas. Since they are toll roads they have areas with small stores, fast food and gas where you can do your business and not have to pay tolls getting off and on.

We eventually stopped for lunch at a McDonalds, and sat down to eat. He hadn’t mentioned it earlier, but Mr15 was apparently not feeling very well. Perhaps he was a bit car sick? I have no idea. BUT, after a few hungry bites and chugging half his red soda, I noticed that he was holding his hand over his mouth, his cheeks were puffed out, and *something* was running down his arms into his lap. I asked him if he was OK, was he choking? No, he wasn’t choking. He opened his mouth to answer and vomited all over the table on everyone’s lunch!!!!! Hubby and the other two boys all jumped up from the table and ran away heaving. So, poor Mr15 and I sat there. Of course I jumped up and tried to contain the mess, and move the food that hadn’t been hit yet. Someone gave me some napkins and I asked the person at the closest food counter to call for a mop and disinfectant.

We had to haul things down from the roof rack to get clothes out for Mr15, and he had to try to clean up in the public bathroom. I felt really bad, but once I determined that he was OK and I stopped having my own stomach churning, I stood around laughing for about 10 minutes. The other people in the McDonalds must have thought I was totally insane. They just might be right!

7/16/05 Interesting Hotel… seeing the falls

7/14/05 Boston Bus Tour

7/13/05 7/13/05 Phantom of the Opera, drive to Boston

7/12/05 New York...Mind Blowng

We took a very interesting bus tour of NYC. We took a bus in from our hotel and then had to find our way back out to our hotel afterward. Let’s just say I found the city very overwhelming! Probably my favorite thing was the Staten Island Ferry. It was a great ride, and we had a very good view of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. I realized how much I miss home and the ocean. I would have liked to gone to both of these islands, but time simply wouldn’t permit. After the tour we walked to the Empire State Building. The view is fantastic! We could have spent all night up there, and the boys did indeed manage to ditch us by walking around the circle top faster than we did. HAHA We were very late getting back to our hotel because we spend so much time enjoying the view.

The streets of NY are absolutely overwhelming. Mind Blowing is an understatement. They are crowded, dirty, hot, smelly and loud. Very loud. Times Square has almost as many lights as Las Vegas. I’m glad I went, but I think I don’t want to go back to New York, it was very stressful to just walk down the street.

Empire State Building

7/11/05 Hotel in Jersey, just outside New York

We took a day to sleep in, do laundry, catching up on journals and blogs, and generally laze around the pool. Thank goodness! We sure needed it! The boys are all restless, but tomorrow we go take a bite out of the Big Apple! The next day we plan to go see Phantom of the Opera on Broadway! Wooo Hooo!!!

I’m going to be placing posts into the blog and filling them in over the next couple days as I have time to think and upload pictures.

7/10/05 Philadelphia

• Christ Church
• Christ Church I really really liked Christ Church. There is still a congregation that meets, and where much of what we saw was history preserved, Christ Church is history in use. One unique feature is that many of the people who attended the church in revolutionary times are buried there. Only they don’t have the usual grave yard, the people are buried on the grounds and walkways around the church, so that to walk around you must actually step on the graves. In our culture that’s a bad thing, very disrespectful of the dead. However this was an old custom that was brought over and it was considered an honor to be buried in the church in that way. If your grave was within the church building or grounds it wouldn’t be lost, but if you were in a pasture or some other place the site might be easily lost. It was intended that you walk on their graves, it was symbolic of how as Christians we walk with and those Christians who came before us, and we have their Godly example to help us. It made me think of Hebrews Chapter 12:1 and the “great cloud of witnesses” Hebrews 12

• Liberty Bell
• Independence Hall
• Congress and Supreme Court Buildings
• Betsy Ross’ House