Draw With Your Kids!

If you have kids in your life, you need to bookmark this fabulous resource! My sister-in-law shared it with me and I just love it. There's an artist who makes you tube videos with his kids as he gives them a step-by-step drawing lesson. There are some simple ones, good for younger kids (his youngest is age two), and others for more advanced drawers. Here's the stegosauruses we made on our first lesson (mine, my 3 yo and 6 yo)...

And here's a more recent pictur we made for groundhog day (mine, my 4 yo and 7 yo)...

He has instructional videos for drawing, painting, sculpting, and even origami with kids. The subjects range from animals to star wars to plants to zombies to Frozen characters. I just love it! Thank you Mandy for sharing it with me!! :)

Here is a link to his website, Art for Kids Hub. And here's a link to his you tube channel. Enjoy!!

My Favorite Charlotte Mason Resources

Here's A Peek at Charlotte Mason Education, for those who aren't familiar with it already! There's an abundance of great Charlotte Mason resources available to homeschoolers. Here are my favorites...

Living Books...

• Living book search  - This is a great resource! Use it to find living books by subject and reading level. 
• The Ultimate Living Book List for History Studies! I arranged living books (recommended by Sonlight and Simply Charlotte Mason) chronologically, by level, to supplement our history studies. These could be used with any history study.  

How We Use Victory Drill to Build Reading Speed

Have you ever heard of the Victory Drill Book? I heard about it from another home school mom while we were both stuck waiting in a doctor's office waiting room. It's a basic, no-fluff book you can use in a variety of ways, over and over again for multiple children to strengthen their reading skills. The bulk of the book amounts to a series of word lists, generally grouped by a common phonics or spelling rules, and the lists progress from simple (including at, sat, mat & rat) to advanced (awkwardly, Americanism, extraordinary & Mississippi). Victory Drill may be used to build reading speed and fluency for students in any grade. It can also be used when teaching reading, spelling, or phonics rules. 

Since I taught my son to read without using a traditional phonics program (here's how), we used Victory Drill to reinforce spelling and phonics rules while building his reading speed. After using it for over a year, we've settled into a routine with it. 

Here's how we use it...

Our New Workboxes Made With 12x12 Sterilite Drawers

After having an adorable workbox system for Kindergarten and First Grade, this year I changed it up a bit. The drawers weren't quite big enough to hold all of our stuff, and I've tweaked how we use them as well. Now we use Sterilite drawers, which I can stack for multiple kids. Here they are:

Never Ever Ever Bind Anything at Staples!!!!!

I managed to complete the most wonderful, annoying project this month! It's wonderful because I love it, it was annoying because "professionals" were involved who botched it up so it was a headache to get it finished properly.

I sorted and organized all of our keepsake school papers so I could bind them into books, one book per school year per kid. Nice idea right? Well, it would have been if Staples wasn't involved. I prefer to do my own binding with the Pro-Click, but unfortunately spines are only available up to 5/8" (110 page capacity). I needed about a 2" spine, so I had to have Staples do it for me. Sadly for me they did exactly what I feared, which was to botch my order! They mis-cut pages, had a few of them hanging outside the spine and even left a page out of the middle of my book! Check out their "professional" binding job...

(the pages aren't even IN the binding!)

They also used spines that were entirely too small...

Our Plan for Third Grade + Kindergarten

We've been working to finish this school year in March, so we can have a nice break when baby #4 comes the beginning of April. So far we're on track. I've also been working on getting my plan and supplies ready for next school year  so I can just pick it up and go with it next summer/fall. So, even though it's 7-9 months early, here's my plan for next school year! 

Family Study...

Bible Reading:

We'll stay on pace with their bible class lessons, which is usually reading about a chapter a day. My third grader is also stick figuring through the bible to make his first bible timeline as we go. My kindergartener will begin his timeline when we cycle back to Genesis again.

For My Third Grader...

Classic Education... the Charlotte Mason way

Classical Education is the age-old method that produced many educational "giants"  like Aristotle, Newton, C.S. Lewis, and Thomas Jefferson, among others. You can't pin one precise recipe for Classical Education, since of course the Greeks and Romans didn't all do the exact same thing, or even label their educational method as "Classical," for that matter. But they did have a common goal. It was not the mere development of the intellect, but also that of producing virtue in their pupils and influencing their conduct. Students were taught to think for themselves and become life-long learners. 

Classical Education involves teaching children is based on their stage of cognitive development: Grammar, Dialectic, then Rhetoric. Most educators today would define those stages as something like this: 

1. Grammar - Grade school students absorb lots of facts, laying the foundation for future study
2. Dialectic - Middle school students begin questioning and evaluating the facts, and learn to think through arguments
3. Rhetoric - High school students apply what they've learned by making arguments themselves through speech, writing, etc.

Interestingly enough, what we call "Classical Education" today isn't necessarily so. I recently read a great book showing the connection between Classical Education and the Charlotte Mason approach. I came to realize upon reading it that today's version of Classical Education (whether in schools or home schools) may be an attempt to replicate doing what classical educators did rather than getting to the heart of why they did it. This actually matters a great deal, as it can result in the modern version no longer remaining true to the original purpose. 

Let me explain. 

Classic Education began with Rich Literature, Not Rote Memorization

Why Homeschooling Rocks For Our Family

There have been so many times over the past few years that I've been thankful we homeschool our children. Today I thought I'd share a few of the reasons that homeschooling ROCKS for our family. 

We declare our own holidays.

Making our own schedule is one of my favorite things about home schooling. We generally start our school year during the heat of summer so we can enjoy plenty of time off in the spring and fall. That's also when we take our family vacations so the weather's great and we don't have to deal with lines or crowds. 

Our field trips rock!

While other kids were cooped up in school, we have climbed a mountain, competed in homeschool olympic days, taken water survival lessons, visited the zoo, a horse ranch, an alpaca ranch, the lake, museums, parks, and pumpkin patches, ridden trains, toured the fire station and Auntie Ann's Pretzels, dug for crystals, gone fishing, hunted crawdads and caught butterflies. Sometimes we join other home schoolers for field trips, sometimes we go as a family, and sometimes it's just me and the kids. One time we took a three-family vacation with a couple of our favorite homeschooling friends at the start of the school year and our kids had the run of an entire huge castle all to ourselves. 

Better than Worksheets, Quizzes, Tests!

One of the beauties of home schooling is that we can utilize different methods of education for our children than the school system does. After we realize that home schooling isn't school at home, we open ourselves up to a phenomenal wealth of possibilities. The more I read about education, the more I find myself identifying with the Charlotte Mason Method. There are so many gems within it, and today I want to share one of them with you. It frees you and your child from the mundane grind of endless busywork, worksheets, quizzes, and tests. Best of all, it helps students to truly own their knowledge and keep it, rather than regurgitating it temporarily only to lose it later.

What I'm referring to is narration. 

What exactly is narration? It is the telling back of what the student knows. "As knowledge is not assimilated until it is reproduced, children should 'tell back' after a single reading or hearing: or should write on some part of what they have read" (Vol 6, Preface and p. 155)  

In practice, it goes something like this:

Our Plan for Second Grade

Remember when I told you my big plans for First Grade? Well, I went back and wrote in updates on that post telling what we actually ended up doing, and how things went. You can read it here. 

Today I'm sharing what we'll be studying next year, because

Language Arts: 

This year we are using Presidential Penmanship for writing. It's a neat program because after purchasing ONE CD (a printable file), you've got handwriting/ copywork covered each year from K-12th grade. Pretty cool. I printed and bound the copy work book for 2nd grade. 

Life of Fred. Say What?!

You may have heard that kids regress academically over the summertime. If you haven't, just google it. You can read all about "Summer Learning Loss," how awful it is, and what you can do to battle it. 

With that in mind, I totally intended to play lots of math games this summer to keep my son's brain juices flowing. As you know, I'm a fan of our homeschool math program, Right Start. It's fantastic. But every lesson requires my one-on-one attention. So by the end of the school year, I'm ready for a break. 

This summer we met Fred. 

A friend of mine lent me the first book in the Life of Fred elementary math book series. I think I told my son to do a lesson in it a grand total of two times before he finished the entire book on his own. He LOVES it. Fred has changed my life. (Ok, perhaps I'm being a little dramatic, but I am really happy to have found Fred!)

The Ultimate Book List!!!

I love Charlotte Mason style “living books”, and think they are a great way to teach history! My favorite two sources for finding these fabulous books are Sonlight and Simply Charlotte Mason.

I’ve taken the time to go through the SCM (Simply Charlotte Mason) book lists and SL (Sonlight) book lists, and organize them chronologically and by age to easily go along with our Mystery of History study. Anyone who's looked at either list knows what a massive undertaking this is. But looking for the books as we went didn't really work for me, not to mention that I found myself looking more than once at the same thing which is really not an efficient use of my time. So I bit the bullet and went through them both in their entirety... once... and made a master list.

This list is for:

• Anyone wanting to supplement Mystery of History with Sonlight
• Anyone wanting to supplement Mystery of History with Simply Charlotte Mason
• Anyone who plans to use any combination of MOH, SL, or SCM over the years and wants to avoid buying duplicate books. 
• Anyone interested in finding carefully-chosen quality literature book suggestions organized by time period and reading level. This may be to supplement ANY history curriculum. 

Let's Learn About Ancient Egypt!

Here are a few of our favorite books, activities, and online resources for learning about Ancient Egypt...

Online Resources

Explore Ancient Egypt! You've got to visit this site!! We took a virtual tour through the Great Pyramid, walked around the Sphinx, and visited other tombs and temples with 360 degree tours. It was excellent!! Thank you PBS!

Discover the world of Ancient Egypt playing our games! Explore the Egyptian landscape, join an exploration expedition through Egyptian tombs, dress like an Egyptian queen or craftsman, translate hieroglyphics, and run a temple store! My son loved these games from National Museums Scotland!!!

Our Favorite Books

Hands-On History: Ancient Egypt

I lead the hands-on History portion of our Co-Op, so I thought I'd share the projects we did this year. This was our first year in Ancient History, and most of our projects this year related to our study of Ancient Egypt. Here's what we did...

We talked about how ancient people wove fabrics, and then the kids got to weave with a  loom. To do this, I propped a dowel rod between two chairs and tied strings to it, weighted at the bottom by washers. Then the kids wove it as you see here...

(I found this project idea here.)

They made mummies by wrapping little duct tape people with strips of linen, and gluing them in place with "resin." (I labeled our Elmer's glue as "resin" and no one was allowed to call it glue. They had to say "please pass the resin" not "please pass the glue" when they needed it.) Inside of the wrappings they also added "amulets" (rhinestones). For the sarcophaguses, we used this free printable pattern.

My New & Improved Home Education Planner (With Downloadable Cover Art)

As we're wrapping up this school year and I plan for the next one, one step is making my planner to track our school days. You may remember My DIY-Planner from last year. It worked out really well for me so I used much of the same format when printing one for this coming school year, BUT I got a major upgrade for the cover! I love the artwork, complete with a couple Charlotte Mason quotes.

Isn't it lovely? The artist is Ally, a fellow home school mom in the Simply Charlotte Mason Facebook group. She shared it with the group saying that she thought a few other ladies might like to use it, and was kind enough to give me permission to post it on my site as a free download as well. I just love it! Thank you so much for sharing Ally!!!

To view or download Ally's Home Education 

Planner Cover, click the links below...

Learning to Read: What Worked for Us

Learning to read is a messy process, and there isn't one clear-cut way to do it.  I've shared many of my favorite reading resources here, and today I'm going to share with you what exactly worked for us.

Pre-Reading:

I did NOT push formal reading lessons on my kids early-on. If you're not sure why on earth I chose to wait then please read this. Instead, we strongly encourage a LOVE of reading by reading aloud, a lot.

Gentle Introduction:

Stick Figuring Through The Bible

Today I'm sharing with you one of my favorite finds for parents of young children. It's called "Stick Figuring Through the Bible," from Grapevine Studies, and it's a great way for children to begin making a bible timeline of their own. This is not just for home schoolers! It's for any parent or bible class teacher who is reading through the bible (or a bible story book) with their kids.

It's amazingly simple and a great way for children to begin visualizing the story of the bible as a whole. Here is a peek at the first few pages of my son's timeline...

The Most Fabulous Timeline Notebook, EVER!!!

Timelines are great when learning world history! There are several ways to make one... some people have them pasted onto a huge wall... my sister-law has her kids make note cards that are put into a baseball card album... and others make note cards and file them in order. I like having a timeline notebook. We started out with Charlotte Mason's Basic Book of Centuries, which is free. But we recently upgraded to the Record of Time timeline notebook, which is absolutely lovely!! 

And my sister-in-law gave me a copy of the History Through the Ages Collection CD which is just fabulous. It's a collection of impressively-drawn black-and-white images to print and paste into your timeline notebook. You can use the image alone, or the image with text (including date and a short description). You can print them large (for use on a wall) or small (for use on index cards, flash cards, or pasted into a timeline notebook). I LOVE IT! Here's a peek inside our timeline notebook...

Visualize World Geography Review

Over the school last year, we've been using Visualize World Geography, which is really unique program that utilizes pictography to help you mentally map and memorize all the countries in the world. You know how you can always find Italy because it looks like a boot? Well, this program has pictographs for every country in the world, and you learn them by watching a video for about 10 minutes per lesson. The official site has more info, video samples and testimonials for you to get a better grasp of the program. We saw it at our home school convention and loved it. Kindergarteners have used it. College students have used it. It is for anyone of any age who wants to memorize every country's location. Older students may take the entire course (learning every country in the world) in a year, but since we are using it at elementary level we only did the 20 lessons over Africa this year, with review days in-between. Another year we'll use it to learn countries in the Middle East. It's flexible like that. I will warn you that it is not cheap. But... we will be using this for all our kids over the course of many years.

So after using it this year, here's my take on it...

The good:

• The kids like it!
• It works! 
• It's doable.
• You can use it with all your kids together, regardless of age.

The not-as-good:

• The DVD's are not professionally made. The actors are high schoolers and the video quality is, well, not exactly fabulous. 
• I think it is considerably over-priced, considering the video quality. If the videos were professional then their price point may be more appropriate.  You're basically paying for the concept of it more than the actual execution. 

The way we've used it so far is learning the countries in one continent, over the course of a year. To turn it into a social studies course, I added in the appropriate chapters (about whichever country we were learning) from Material World and What the World Eats by Peter Menzel. (I highly recommend using these two books along with ANY geography program! Read more about them in this post!) The combination of Visualize and the two Peter Menzel books made for a really great Geography and Social Studies course.

My only beef with this program is the price but since we've already purchased it then that is behind us. I'm glad we purchased this program because my kids are learning to locate the countries. Just from casually joining in when he feels like it, my three year old can locate more countries now than I could locate in college! That says a lot. My kids aren't old enough to be horrified by the video quality (or lack thereof), but they ARE learning their countries happily and painlessly and that is worth a LOT!

My Favorite Resources for Learning About Africa

We are studying Africa this year, and loving it! Here are a few of my favorite resources... 

 
Wonderful Books

A really neat book recommended from SCM (Simply Charlotte Mason) is Material World by Peter Menzel. It's a unique project from a talented photographer who traveled the world to put a face on the human condition from all around the planet. He features a statistically average family from a variety of countries all over the world, and includes large portraits of their family, home life, and all their material possessions. (See in the photo below the entirety of this family's earthly possessions.) It's eye-opening to see just how much and how little people have from different parts of the world, and interesting to get a glance into their daily life. We'll be using this book for the African families it features this year, and families from other countries in our geography studies in the years to come.