Davidson Homeschool 2014-2015

Forward: OKAY. I wrote this post a long time ago...and never posted it. Obviously, moving gets the best of me. I just can't deal. So read this with the frame of mind that these things have all already happened. It was LAST school year, and now it's summer. :) Which means I'll be posting about the new school year VERY soon!! (sheesh)

Little Atticus began Kindergarten this past fall. Can y'all believe that?! He's officially a homeschooler now. Watch out, world!!

And Gabriel is in first grade this year. 

Just these two littles would be enough to keep me very, very busy, but that's not all!!

Saylor is a 4th-grader...

and my Noah is doing the whole 6th grade thing.

Well, I say that, but oftentimes with homeschoolers, there's no such thing as grade levels. We just work on what we work on and prefer not to be labeled.

New house still in early, just-moved-in stages

As far as curriculum choices go, things look and feel significantly simpler than they have in the past for me, as I began transitioning about a year and a half or so ago to a Charlotte Mason approach to homeschooling. What that means for our day is that we do most of our schooling all together. We are currently reading through Book One of The Story of the World series, though it is written for the classically-trained child (NOT the same as Charlotte Mason, by the way). But it has been interesting, so for now we will continue to work our way through that book. But I am considering returning to My Father's World again at some point. Just not sure. There are so many decisions to make--constantly! And that's just history. :)

Language arts is a bit of a hodgepodge, I'm afraid. I still believe in the Shurley Method for diagramming sentences and learning to structure writing, but I find that it is completely impractical to have each child in a different level of Shurley. Who has the time?! So I have left off with Shurley with the intention of coming back to it occasionally for review and/or introduction of concepts, especially for the little boys. We will see. In the meantime, I have truly enjoyed Emma Serl's Primary Language Lessons for my big kids to review old concepts. I'm planning to move them on up to the Intermediate version eventually and then begin the Primary one with my little boys who are currently working through Language Lessons for Little Children. I also have Ruth Beechick's Language and Thinking for Young Children as a backup resource.

Math, as always, has me all flustered. Even though it was my SPECIALTY as a classroom teacher, with homeschool curriculum, I just haven't found anything that's actually any good. (!!!) Right now we have a little bit of Singapore going on, which I'm not very impressed with AT ALL. And we use Khan Academy as well. We also enjoy Life of Fred for a nice change of pace and a fun way to explore concepts. And I've got the little boys getting started in some Math-U-See. Not real sure how I'm going to like that program either. It doesn't seem like my style. I can't help it--I still think Marilyn Burns is the be-all, end-all when it comes to math instruction. I just have to figure out how to make it all jive with all the levels of mini-mathematicians I've got in this household! Ha!-the story of my life. I'm so excited to try out a new program called CTC Math now that I've got four peeps needing math instruction. I'll keep you posted on how it goes for us.

The rest of our day is filled with Ambleside Online, which is our list of literature, including Bible, which is chock-full of history, geography, the arts, science, and everything else you can think of. We thoroughly enjoy Ambleside books. We are currently reading Aesop's Fables, Parables from Nature, Paddle-to-the-Sea, 500 Famous Stories Retold, poetry, and The Island Story, among other things. And then, of course, we strive to have plenty of independent reading time each day.

When we read Shakespeare, we have these guys, among others, to help play the parts.

We are also involved in a Charlotte Mason co-op here in Dallas, which meets every other week. (More than that would KILL me!) There, the children are studying Shakespeare, hymns, Spanish, folk songs, artists, composers, and we do nature study as well. They've enjoyed meeting new friends there, as have I! Speaking of, we are so blessed to live near one of the families in the co-op (the one who invited us to the co-op in the first place). My kids love to play with her kids, and I love getting together and talking about homeschool with their mom. Ha! Homeschool moms are such nerds.

The little boys and our sweet friend

Now. My goals for the future are to be on a more efficient morning schedule to allow time for the kids to explore activities of interest to them in the afternoons. I'd like to do more crafting with them and more group projects. But two moves in approximately two years has left us with some bad habits and a major lack of routine. Shocker, I know. We all still struggle to get up in the morning and no one feels like starting school first thing. Just going to have to work on that. And while I'm at it, maybe I'll get back to taking pictures and blogging, huh?!