New Year's Resolution 2013: Posting Regularly

Trying again. I've got a new plan, which is to open up a new post each school day and write in those brief spaces when my children are occupied with their work. We'll see how it works out.

It is 12:40pm, and I've just released the kids to lunch. They get 40 minutes. We started school yesterday after a 2-1/2 week winter break. It went well, for the most part. We had cut out language arts to catch up on our time. History went a little long, but I thought the extra time was worth it.

Today we are covering each subject as scheduled, but we are behind time-wise. We started about 15 minutes late today but somehow ended up 30 minutes behind by mid-morning. ??  We are currently 20 minutes behind, but that is partly due to cutting our morning recess down by half to 5 minutes. Hey, I've got to make up the time wherever I can get it! I have learned, however, not to cut out recess entirely because that generally leads to unhappy children.

We've been working on Volume III of The Mystery of History, supplemented with Christian Heroes, Trial and Triumph, and A Child's History of the World. I elected to cover American history concurrently this year so that the kids would get a better idea of the context of our history. As a child, I was always confused as to how American events fit into the larger picture of world events. Unfortunately I have been unable to fit the two curricula neatly together because I'm trying to finish this school year out at the end of the world history book and the end of the first volume of the American history books (America the Beautiful).

Before Christmas break, we finally finished up Exploring Creation with Swimming Creatures. Yesterday I introduced the kids to Exploring Creation with Botany, which we continued today and just put away before lunch. I am planning to alternate the botany study with Exploring Creation with Land Animals. I want to make sure the kids don't get bored with studying plants, particularly the Artist, who finds animals much more interesting.

I'd changed the approach I was taking in supplemental literature and history and other books from the library. I had been going through the Sonlight readers for my kids to use as their readers but found that we were spending an enormous amount of time on school, so I combined their readers with the free and supplemental reading. They now choose from books in a basket or from a list of e-books every morning and read silently for 20 minutes. Then I have them come and narrate to me a bit about what they read so that I can ensure that they did indeed focus on their reading. This has saved us some time from our school day, but it has also allowed me a little room to take care of last-minute things (like feeding the fish or watering plants) before joining the kids for school.

We've also gone back to Scripture memorization this year. I had neglected this aspect of the children's studies and finally implemented the Simply Charlotte Mason Scripture memorization program. We don't do the weekends because we just never remember to, but otherwise we've done pretty well, I think. We are also using the memorization system with poetry. The length of the poems has necessitated the use of a binder in place of an index card file, however. This has been working very well for us.

 It is an overcast, drizzly day here in Austin. The forecast calls for more rain this evening into tomorrow. That's all fine, but the Engineer has basketball practice tonight, so I hope that doesn't create problems for transportation. The unfortunate thing about practice is that it is from 7:30-8:30pm on Tuesdays. I'm glad it was changed from the original 8-9pm slot, but it's not much better. He's got a really good coach, and his team won their first game on Saturday! I know the Engineer was so glad. It was very difficult for the boys on his team last year not winning a single game all season.

I don't remember if we were working the Bible Study Guide for All Ages when I was posting regularly, but we had left that curriculum for a number of years and went back to it last year. The kids aren't super excited about it, but I think it's a comprehensive and thorough program for their level. When they've grown out of the worksheet levels, we'll reconsider our Bible study. We do BSGFAA once a week, doing as much of a worksheet as we can in a 20-minute period. Other days we work on character training (reading from a book called Making Brothers and Sisters Best Friends, written by a homeschooling family), Henrietta's Mears's book What the Bible Is All About for Young Explorers, and a devotional for each child.

I'm a bit distracted right now because I'm doing dictation with the Engineer on his Spelling Wisdom exercise. Not sure how much his spelling has improved since implementing this program, but I do see improvement. I wasn't seeing much joy in other attempts at spelling that we'd done, which wasn't too many, really, because of CM's insistence that children can learn all they need to know about composition and writing through copywork and dictation. I have started formal grammar work with the Engineer this year. We are using a program called Junior Analytical Grammar. Once we finish this book, we will continue with Junior Analytical Grammar: Mechanics. It has been a good program so far. I've been improving my sentence diagramming skills quite a bit as well. The Artist will not begin any spelling until next year and will begin grammar in two years.

We've also begun a program called Institute of Excellence in Writing. It is very teacher-preparation heavy and very expensive, but we've been making pretty good progress with a structured, formal writing program. Again, I had been relying on CM methods to improve my children's writing, but I think the very direct nature of this course, which very specifically has the kids include certain aspects of writing in the manner of doing sports drills, has been a good trainer for me in terms of learning to teach writing. I am hoping that by going through this with my kids, I will be able to develop my own methods for helping older people learn to write. As I go through the program, I have some objections to the use of certain elements (like the heavy use of -ly adverbs), but I understand the creator's reasons for including such elements, and I'm okay with incorporating it into the program for now. Eventually, we will streamline and develop good writing skills. I will liken the heavy use of adverbs to crawling. It's not what we aspire to, but it is necessary to the development of the brain and the eventual coordinated function of the body.

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We're done now at 4pm. Tuesdays are our long days because we have half days on Wednesdays and Fridays. Mondays and Thursdays we end around 3:30pm. Wednesdays the kids are in a homeschool P.E. program, and they attend classes on Friday afternoons. The Engineer is taking Engineering I and Introduction to Robotics, and the Artist is taking Exploring Art Mediums.

Our language arts went reasonably well today, although we just kept getting later and later in our schedule. After language arts was literature reading, which I cut down to about a third of the usual time to make up for being so far behind. It worked out though because we only had a reading from Pilgrim's Progress to do. I had originally started with the original version last year, but it was very difficult to read and to understand, even for me. So this year we are going through it again but with a modernized version. The archaic quality is still there but the difficult words have been updated to modern equivalents. Anyway, it is much easier to understand and try to appreciate. Then we had our poetry recitations and poetry reading, the kids did their math (the Engineer is working through A Key to...Series, currently Measurement, and the Artist is working through The Life of Fred elementary series, currently Edgewood), and then we finished up with art. They had been doing a "Van Gogh still life" with chalk, which we finally finished up today.

I need to go make dinner in a moment, but I wanted to finish jotting down my thoughts. I was thinking that I would create links to the above resources before publishing, but I don't have time to do that right now. Just after school was over for the day, the Artist wanted me to help her unpack her new sewing machine, which she received for Christmas, courtesy of Gran and Grandad. It is a Sew Pretty, Sew Perfect Hello Kitty sewing machine by Janome. It is green and so cute! Anyway, I'm glad to see that she is very excited about it. I need to refresh my own sewing machine skills in order to help her figure out her new machine.

On a quick side note, I had been thinking that we would be done with American Heritage Girls after this school year because the Artist and I had talked about that. Well, I just brought it up and she wants to continue doing it! I told her I might not serve as a Unit Leader anymore because it takes up so much of my time. She reluctantly agreed that I didn't have to be Unit Leader anymore but that she wouldn't continue anymore either. She doesn't want to do it if I'm not her Unit Leader. So now I'm rethinking quitting. I had thought that perhaps we could quit for a year and see how that was working out. But I don't want to take that away from her either. I had envisioned a future with more time to do more fun things, but I don't know if that will be the case now.

Well, time to make dinner.

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Well, it's 10:48pm now, and I never got the opportunity to put in those links that I wanted to do. I suppose I could go back at a future date and put in the links for anyone who wants to check back.