Our Home School Year 2016-2017 Is Still Not Over

Since I never got around to posting our school pictures when we were actually starting school, I figured I'd go ahead and post along with everybody else's 2017 first days.

We kicked off our homeschool LAST YEAR on September 12, 2016.

Here are my adorable students and their ages as of that date:

Noah Paul

14 years old

8th grade

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Saylor Kathryn

11 years old

6th grade

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Gabriel Isaiah

9 years old

3rd grade

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Atticus Joseph

7 years old

2nd grade

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We have been working through Ambleside Online Year 3. This is our official "curriculum." My bigs do some additional work at their varying levels. Noah, especially, carries a huge workload. Translation: he is reading a LOT of books at once. But our family as a whole works together in most subjects, including Bible, church history, British history, early American history, Greek hero stories, American tall tales, natural history, fine arts, foreign language, literature, geography, science, and Shakespeare.

We try to get our individual math and grammar lessons out of the way first thing in the morning and then move on to family subjects. Copywork and/or dictation exercises help us to transition into a time of independent work, during which my bigs have other assigned readings. Independent work time is when we finish up math lessons, try to do our vision therapy homework, enjoy a bit of free reading, etc.

We decided to take time off from our fine arts co-op this year. And it was just as well. If you could've seen our weekly schedule, you'd completely understand! We had one in soccer twice weekly, one in ice skating twice weekly, one in ballet twice weekly, one in vision therapy twice weekly, and for a time, one in hand therapy twice weekly. It was a killer schedule. We couldn't do any more than what we were already doing. So fine arts had to take its place into our OWN daily schedule. Right where it belongs, really. We have enjoyed doing our own picture studies and composer studies here at home. Although, I will admit. It is hard to fit it all in.

One area that I have really struggled with is making sure we all get enough time out of doors each day. There just isn't a lot of time. Besides, we are not the most focused family in the world, especially in the morning. Getting in gear is rare around here. :( We are working on it.

Some time between 3:00 and 4:00 in the afternoon a couple of times a week, we try to have tea time with poetry readings. The kids look forward to this so much! Sadly, though, there are days when we canNOT have tea, simply because we are not all home (see above schedule). We also live in a neighborhood full of public-schooled kids who come home and then knock on our door to play right at about the time we'd be sitting down to tea. It just doesn't always work out the way we plan. So we go with the flow. And that's okay.

We also like to go somewhere fun-ish about once per week. Sometimes it's just to a park to do our school; sometimes it's a hike and some nature drawing; sometimes it's a museum or a dollar movie or roller-skating. Fun activities help break up the busy week and give us something to which we can look forward.

We are FINALLY coming into our last couple of weeks of this school year. The home stretch!! ...Just in time to start the next school year. Waaaah!! (I promise, we take plenty of time off. Just not when everyone else in the world does it.)

Stay tuned. Maybe I'll actually manage to post OUR first day of school soon (2017-2018, that is). You know, if it ever rolls around.

What Our Homeschool Has Been Like This School Year 2015-2016

Most people do these posts at the beginning of the school year. Ahem...I'm not most people.

For this school year we transitioned more fully to Ambleside Online curriculum. Admittedly, I still have much learning to do with regard to Charlotte Mason and her methods, and I still have unhealthy attachments to various and sundry curricula. (It's a sickness.) But I do have a good working foundation, thanks to all the meetings I had with a little CM group in North Little Rock between 2011 and 2014. If it weren't for those ladies and Charlotte Mason's writings through which we were reading, I might never have found my way as far as I did. I am also thankful that my friend Holly invited me to a Teach Them Diligently conference in 2014, where I was blessed to hear Sonya Shafer speak. Her talk solidified my decision to school in this way. That didn't mean I had it all figured out, mind you, but it was a start and helped me give up some of the aforementioned attachments. Since then, just by knowing my new Dallas friend, Joel, and then attending a CM Gathering with immersion in northwest Arkansas last spring, I made leaps and bounds of improvement in my understanding of Miss Mason's pedagogy and resulting practice of her methodology, and I love it all the more.

However, having four kids and attempting at 100% the rigorous workload of Ambleside Online, as written, is not something I am willing or capable of doing, as each kiddo would ideally be in a separate year of study. There simply aren't enough hours in the day for that. So I spent a lot of time over the summer making modifications, choosing literature with a realist's outlook, gathering supplies, etc. And many of the things you will see here are not new to us exactly; implementing them on a regular basis is what's new. 

This school year, as a family, we have followed the Year 2 plan of study at Ambleside Online. A few of our texts for history, geography, biography, and science have been This Country of Ours, A Child's History of the World, The Burgess Book of Wild Animals, and The Little Duke, among others. Continuing from our Year 1, we also have readings from An Island Story, Trial and Triumph (church history), and Parables from Nature. Of course, we have spent time in Shakespeare and poetry and have enjoyed some more Holling C. Holling books and plenty of other wonderful literature. Plus, there has been the occasional music and drawing lesson. It is so hard to get it all in!

One thing we've been doing differently this year is separating the bigs from the littles some as well, to provide a bit more challenge to the former. I intended to have the bigs explore geography with Halliburton's Book of Marvels while the littles continued in their phonics studies. But the littles ended up being around for the geography, which is just as well. And, I had hoped to try Delightful Reading for phonics this year, but I have struggled to make time for it all, honestly. Charlotte, I sincerely hope that your copywork and dictation will come through for us. I am trusting the process, as they say. But while things didn't exactly go as I had planned, Noah and Saylor have both become increasingly independent. I write individual assignments in their own personal plan books. These items are generally taken care of once our family time is over.

During their independent time, Noah and Saylor complete extra readings in the areas of science, literature, Bible, and character development. I am also hoping to incorporate some typing lessons for them both in the next month or so. And as I mentioned before, we all spend time each week doing dictation exercises and working in our copybooks. And we have added map work to the mix as well.

One of the best parts of a Charlotte Mason education is the keeping of notebooks. We are still a work in progress when it comes to doing that well, but eventually we hope to spend regular time in our family Book of Firsts, Book of Centuries (for the bigs), Nature Notebooks for all, Book of Words (for the bigs), Copybooks for all, and several Books of Commonplace. 

Our afternoons are IDEALLY filled with nature study, handicrafts, free reading, and taking turns on the computer doing our CTC Math. But most often, afternoons look a whole lot like neighborhood kids coming and going and a whole lot of loud, messy, blessed chaos.

We also attend a Charlotte Mason Fine Arts Co-op every two weeks with four other CM families, where we focus on composers, artists, poetry, Shakespeare, and the like. Weird, unsocialized homeschoolers we are not. Well, not entirely weird.

And now for the portraits, taken September 8, 2015 :

Noah Paul
Age 13
7th grade

Saylor Kathryn
Age 10
5th grade

Gabriel Isaiah
Age 8
2nd grade

Atticus Joseph
Age 6
1st grade

 

My intention is to school more in the summer than we have in the past, as we have learned that Texas summers are brutal. So we took off nearly the whole month of December and then much of April and May (while the weather has been pleasant), opting to leave the third term for the summer months. As I type this, we are only a couple of weeks away from heading into our third trimester. I'm thankful we chose to school through the upcoming summer this year and take off more in the spring, because if you could've seen our spring calendar--

with all the homeschool days and field trips to various locales...

Let's just say, there's been no TIME for school; we're just too busy LIVING! 

(Which is probably fine with these four.) 

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?!

Throwback Thursday - Winter 2013

I left off with my rewind posts around the holidays of 2012. (This sad excuse for a blog is depressing, I know.) So I'm picking up with the winter of 2013. Let's breeze through right quick!

We started the new year with a plan: to prepare our house to sell...once again!! DEEP BREATH........

We spent lots of time clearing stuff out, organizing, and shopping for household items to help us "stage" our home a little better this time around. Certainly, some of our candid photos reflect that. And we had some heavy duty remodeling done, as well.

Good riddance, shiny black granite tiles! I have never loved you.

Early February, we actually moved OUT of our house, while we got it ready to sell. (We were refinishing the front door, painting most of the interior, refinishing our huge retaining wall, blah, blah, blah. It just wasn't conducive for actual LIVING.) And I highly recommend doing so, if you can swing it financially. We were blessed to be able to stay in the guest house where our good friends, The Rackleys, had just been staying while on furlough. For THREE WHOLE MONTHS we stayed. I'll admit, though, I was swamped with getting us moved and trying to do school remotely with just a little of what we own. Who knows where my camera was? I often had to snag a mere iPhone photo--when I remembered to get IT out! Pitiful, I know. It was just craaaaay-zaaaaay. But while we were definitely busy, we also did regular ol' Davidson stuff.

Like play. (still in our own home)

And school. (Yep, still in our own home...prepping this room for staging DURING class time, 'cause I'm amazing that way.)

Ballet. (Isn't she lovely?)

And Scouts.

Our last-minute (as in, we made it the night before) Pinewood Derby car creation ended up winning second place overall!! What in the world?!

We took a couple of family outings to see the Bisons play basketball--and Cousin Claire play in the band.

We had a special Valentine's Day luncheon. At Old Mill. Yum!

Uh. And in case you didn't know, when you are remodeling and packing and perfecting your home for numerous onlookers, you eat out a lot. Sad, but true. So...

We ALSO had a special Valentine's Day dinner. At Larry's Pizza. And the kiddos opened their luv cards from their grandparents, which is always fun.

Stay tuned for our spring activities and final pics of our house at its most spectacular.

Project 365: Week 33 "yes, i'm that behind"

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Paul has his car for sale on Craigslist at the moment, so he's been spending a lot of the weekend visiting car lots with one or several kiddos. Today, apparently, there was an empty golf cart. Just sitting there. WITH the keys left in it. And...apparently, that proved far too tempting for a certain daddy and his son who happen to enjoy a good race ever so often.

Project 365: Weeks 31 & 32 "it's a wild & crazy life"

Sunday, July 29, 2012

We had a sweet friend over to spend the night tonight. We were all so very excited and had to tell him all kinds of random facts and show him all our treasures.

Monday, July 30, 2012

Pal-ing on the couch

Project 365: Week 30

Sunday, July 22, 2012

The "besties" are matchy-matching today.

Monday, July 23, 2012

Gabriel's on his last workbox. He earns a sticker every time he gets through all ten.

Project 365: Week 29 "what we do"

Sunday, July 15, 2012

We were happy to be hosting Aunt Wendy, Uncle Mert, and Ezra again today. After all sleeping very late (see last week to understand why we were so exhausted), the boys spent some time together with their heads buried in technology.

And we had a late lunch together, which was great fun.

Project 365: Week 19 "piano, picnic, & playgrounds"

Sunday, May 6, 2012

This afternoon we went to a beautifully-performed senior piano recital and a reception afterward.

They loaded up on the treats for sure!

Project 365: Weeks 13 & 14 "it's spring!"

Sunday, March 25, 2012

It was so nice out, we took a walk to the playground late this afternoon.

Saylor, for some reason, enjoys riding Gabe's bike instead of her own sometimes. She was struggling up this hill.

Atticus (aka, The Superhero) immediately offered a solution.

Hilarious.