Our Style

I’d say we lean more toward a Charlotte Mason inspired education. It is a gentle and peaceful approach that helps us in our unhurried way of life.  Charlotte Mason was big on short lessons, rather than lessons that are drawn out boring! She was a lady in the 18th century who believed that living books and real life experiences were the best forms of education.  She believed that education involved parenting, character, training, and discipleship. She thought it was important to give children a variety of subjects, a feast of subjects to awaken curiosity in the child. I love thinking through five simple things to strive to implement in my homeschool.

1. Use living books: Books that engage the children,  not a boring textbook filled with just facts.
2. Develop good habits: train up the child in the way he should go.
3. Copy Work as a way to practice many things like spelling, grammar, handwriting.  Five minutes a day can do wonders.
4. Narration: Getting kids to tell back what they have learned so it sticks in their mind.  They are more likely to remember if they can narrate something back.
5. Getting out in nature to explore Gods creation and jotting down things they learn as they identify different plants and wildlife.

We have gradually implemented changes to our homeschool approach. I will say I’m not a purest and don’t mind that we don’t do everything to the “T” the way Charlotte Mason did back in the day.  I’ve tried different curriculum over the years, I’ve grown and learned more and feel excited for this year!

PLAN

I’m so excited to have our school year planned out. I love having a plan and getting all my school stuff together well in advance. This helps me not to have to scramble around at the last minute! I feel more at ease having a plan, even though I know how things often get changed up in the year as we go along!

We will start our school day off with waking up, doing chores, eating breakfast. Then, we will begin the “school day” all together. For “Morning Time” as we call it, we gather at the table and we will go through our Bible time, prayer time, and this is also the time we will do an artist study & Hymn study using

Brighter Day Press Morning Time  

We will use the Artist and Hymn study from Brighter Day Press. We have determined to use the plan that SonLight has for our Bible program this year.  I love the Bible that is listed in this Morning Time but I am excited to try something different this year.

HISTORY

This Year we will be using SonLight Introduction into World History. “In this overview of World History, my kids will get to explore significant events and stories as they travel the globe on a yearlong adventure into the past. They’ll encounter an amazing variety of peoples and cultures and gain an understanding of how the rise and fall of civilizations over time has helped to create the world we live in today”.  I’m glad to have something that gives me a plan which is laid out in a easy to follow teacher guide where we can creatively use our notebooks.

With our core History we will travel back to the mysterious times of the Jewish prophets and patriarchs.

• Journey thousands of miles on foot with the Crusaders to take back Jerusalem.
• Battle against ignorance, disease, famine and injustice to bring the gospel to people who have never heard the name of Jesus.
• Watch mighty knights as they fight for honor and glory in a joust.
• Fly with Orville and Wilber Wright in the first airplane to sustain flight.
• Witness the rise of great empires, ancient and modern: Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome, China, the United States and Russia.

READING

I love that we will together be reading a bunch of books all through the year. Sonlight gives a well laid out book list.  We pan to use that for our family.  However, we have other choices we will get to read as well!  We will be doing the following:

• Enjoying classical fairy tales and learn valuable life lessons in The Aesop for Children
• See a boy overcome incredible odds to pursue his dream of becoming a master painter.
• Travel on a hot-air balloon and land on an island where a volcano is about to explode!
• AND LOTS MORE

Luke will have a few more things added to this (since he will be my 8th grader and this is geared for younger aged kids).  However, I love doing FAMILY STYLE learning and want to continue that.

We will actually be reading more than the books listed here. These are the books that go along with our Sunlight Literature package. I get prompting questions to help guide me to bring up vocabulary and other discussion starters. This is very helpful, I enjoy having a guide.

BOOK OF CENTURIES/TIMELINE

I’m excited to HOPEFULLY start using our TIMELINE! This year we have some stickers that will go with our different events to paste into our Timeline. We can’t wait to see how this fills out over the years!  Each of our children will get to hold on to this throughout their many school years. Hopefully it’s something we can keep up with! I’ve have struggled managing geography over our homeschool years so far, but with this Sunlight History plan, they provide maps that the kids will put in their notebooks.  My kids will get to pin point places that are discussed and find and label them on their maps.  Having it stored in their notebooks will make looking back on all the places we have visited easy to find!

ART

A couple times a week I really want to add in some kind of drawing and art.  We will watercolor some and this year I’m going to have us all use a sketch book and go through some simple art lessons.  The lessons are really short and look easy for all of us to do! It should be fun. I plan to do it along with them.

Independent Work

The kids will have a few independent things to work on as well. I have written out a list of independent subjects for each of my children in my bullet journal, so I can see what’s expected of them. They don’t do every single thing on this list every single day. It is life…. it doesn’t work like that! For the most part I really try to get them to do a math lesson daily as well as some reading. This year I’m adding a short Bible study lesson from NOT CONSUMED for Luke and Titus. Titus is already loving his!

LANGUAGE ARTS

This year we will be using Living Verse Language Arts.  I love that it is a complete Language Arts program using poetry.  Language arts are BRIEFLY taught and then the kids will apply the lessons on different levels using Charlotte Mason methods. The plan is to study one poem over 8 days.  Each day they will interact with the poem in a unique way. Every month the kids will learn all about a new poet and study his or her poems. They will learn to use the poems, the structure of the poems, vocabulary. They will discover the types of poems written, reflection, interpretation,  and copy the poems to practice handwriting. The kids will even create their own poems. I chose this because it is beautiful and such a simple fun way to teach kids Language arts. The Bible is one of the primary way God will communicate with us. The Bible is full of poetic language designed to touch our hearts! It will be a fun way to work through Language Arts together. Stay tuned another post all about this Language Arts coming soon. Gideon will also work through his  Dyslexia Games.  

READING

They all will read independently, or listen to a book on their YoTo player  and follow along , a practice cursive page, and a math lesson. We use Teaching Textbooks for Math starting in 2nd grade. It’s been really helpful for our family. Brian is great at helping them when they don’t understand something for Math.

SCIENCE

For Science this coming year we plan to keep moving along in the Burgess Animal Book and storybook science and note-booking things we learn. We also hope to do more nature study and some science unit studies throughout the year.  While I write this post, it sounds like we have a jammed packed year, but really its not! We finish school before lunch everyday and the kids have a nice quiet time in the afternoon and have lots of time for play and doing their own things!