Their ideas...

When the new year started, I knew we needed to start school again, but frankly I hadn't made a plan for the week.  So when I announced last Tuesday morning that we needed to start school, I was pleased when Jared asked "Can I do my Rocket Phonics?".  We have not opened that book/curricula in over six months.  I was excited, that he was excited about doing something; so we kicked right in.  That led to starting up all their core curriculum again, most of which we hadn't touched since Amber was born.  It turned out to be a nice and easy way to start out the new year.  Thankfully, they weren't done sharing their ideas of how our school days should go.

Jared also voiced a real interest in the idea of writing in a journal.  He had seen an episode of "Clifford The Big Red Dog" about journal writing.  They also enjoy doing the "Draw-Write-Now" assignments and I decided to combine the two and for this I found the perfect composition notebooks.  These notebooks have room to draw on the top of each page and wide lines to write down below.  They are devouring these journal books.  I'm really enjoying all their creative ideas.  I limit them to an hour first thing in the morning, but if I let them, I think they'd spend hours everyday drawing and writing in them.  I am careful not to correct anything they write in these journals, the journals should be a way to express themselves freely and to practice what they learn in language arts.  Over time, I hope to see an advancement in their spelling, sentence structure, and vocabulary.

Lance "reignited" a keen interest in volcanoes after borrowing a video from the library.  He looked up Mt. St. Helen on Google Earth and watched videos from links found there.  Then he made models of exploding volcanoes, complete with doomed villages, in the sand box.

Titus, not to be left out, has been our creative/craft idea king.  The other day, he rummaged his way to the back of the craft cupboard and came out with old marshmallows.  I brought out the toothpicks and we started making letters. The letters then morphed into constellations.  When his brother completed the assignment they were working on they made their own creations.

Love Parachute - note the heart at the bottom

Jet Plane

Today, Titus started drumming on an empty container in the kitchen.  This reminded me about the containers I'd been saving to do a "Tom-Tom Craft" with the boys.  

I decided to I follow their lead on changing things up and updated our schedule.  First change was to get back to scheduling in Excel (yay!).  The second was to literally turn things around.  I transposed my spreadsheet so that the dates were now the columns and subjects the rows.  This allows me to print out a schedule similar to the one I was handwriting.  It also allows the flexibility to add/change/move around subjects easily.  I am now posting their schedules on the entertainment center (so they can't forget/miss them) and color coding them with things they can do on their own vs. things where they need my help.  The idea is that hopefully they can be more productive during the day when I'm occupied with Amber.  We'll see how it works in the weeks ahead.

We're going to do what I call our "Core Curricula" Monday to Wednesday and incorporate History on Thursdays and Fridays.  History is too reading intensive to do the same day with their reading and language arts curricula.  

Here's what our new schedule looks like:

BIBLE (M-S):  We are back to doing our CLE Bible curricula everyday.  I have struggled with how to approach this subject more than any other subject in our house.  I have felt pressured to do more to make my children incredible scholars and other lofty goals.  Most of my plans haven't made it past Tuesday of the new week, with us ending up doing no Bible work at all the rest of the week.  Reality set in this year and what is really necessary is for them to know and love the bible.  With CLE, they learn about the bible and its easy for me to teach and most importantly they like it so much they ask to do it.  This is exactly what I needed and its been sitting on my shelf all along.

LANGUAGE ARTS:

• Journal Writing (M-S)
• CLE Language Arts Grade 1 (Jared only)
• Easy Grammar - Grade 3 Student Book and Daily Grams (Lance only)
• All About Spelling Level 2 (Lance Only)
• Pentime - Cursive Practice (Lance Only)

READING:  In addition to continuing to read and narrate the "Christian Liberty Nature Readers" we have started our CLE Reading and "Rocket Phonics" curricula again.  I absolutely adore the readers in both curricula and the boys do also.  In addition, we always have a couple read-aloud books going and the boys have their own books to read.

MATH:  We have returned to our summer schedule of Calculadder (M-F) and CLE Math (M-W).

PIANO (M-S), CC REVIEW (M-F), HISTORY (R-F), SCIENCE:  No changes here from previous post.

Some days I feel like we change our schedule more than our clothes around here, but that's part of the reason I homeschool.  I love having the flexibility to continual improve on the whats, hows and whys of teaching my children.  My desire above all things is to ignite a life long love of learning.

Just because she's cute!