These past four weeks have been so much fun! I love the great things we're learning, I love our projects, and especially I love my five fantastic students!
Going to the home school convention this summer was a huge inspiration to me. A few things I learned there have made a significant difference in our efforts this year.
First of all, I was inspired to change our annual schedule into quinmesters, with a break of a few weeks between each; the breaks are timed for the perfect fall and spring weather so we can get outside and play when it's gorgeous. Knowing we have a break coming up in just a few weeks helps us stay motivated to do our best, and I'm sure we'll feel refreshed after some fun in the sun.
Another huge change this year has been my commitment to stay personally focused on home school during the morning hours. No laundry, no Facebook, and no phone calls during this time. When the kids are all engaged and don't need me, I use that time to prepare lessons, study home school masters, or record the kids' progress. It feels wonderful to give home school 100% in the morning so that I can do errands and chores in the afternoon without feeling guilty. Also, budgeting time for personal study of home schooling principles keeps me inspired and full of vision.
Lastly, we have picked up some amazing supplies this year, thanks to My Tech High. The Math U See curriculum is fantastic. I love the playful yet concrete nature of the lessons, and the kids seem to be picking up the concepts more readily than before. It's especially fun to watch Paul's progress as a fresh kindergartner with no preconceived negativity about math. The Brave Writer program has been a godsend. We sit down every day to fun new projects and ideas, and we all really enjoy that time together. It is such a relief not to be bogged down in boring texts and the same old exercises every day--such a relief not to feel the burden of inventing curriculum myself. I have started using copywork as a part of our daily routine, and it's a wonderful tool not only for the mechanics of writing, but a fun way to introduce great quotes and pearls of wisdom.
I know it's early in the game to be saying this, but I can with great confidence declare that this will be our best year yet!
3 comments:
I'm so impressed with your system this year! It sounds fantastic. And I'm glad you've gotten some good tools from My Tech High. I bet that'll make a big difference :)
Sounds like things are going great! What's the program with the projects? I'd like to know more about that.
Thanks, Georgia and Mom! Mom, the Brave Writer program puts out a manual called Partnership Writing, where you sit down together every day and work on copywork and special projects. For copywork I write out a quote or scripture in cursive, and they copy it as best they can. Then we talk about the mechanics of the sentence and the script itself. That's the first five or ten minutes of each lesson. After that we work on our monthly project. Last month we did codes and ciphers; this month we're putting together life timelines for each of the kids. Seems the trick is to do something so fun that they don't notice they're writing! Even copywork, which sounds tedious, is really fun. We have been picking up great quotes in our other studies, so we're always on the lookout for cool nuggets we want to write down. Since they do copywork in their nice school journals, they'll have these to refer back to forever. Even Ezra, our hugely reluctant writer, has been having fun and making a lot of progress already. I love it!
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