Ok, so a few of you have asked how are homeschooling is going since I had posted pictures about what I was up to all summer long! We are going into our fourth week of homeschooling and just starting to get into the swing of things.

Here is what our week looks like:

Mon, Wed, Thurs. Fri.-morning Bible and worship time- I am using Balancing the Sword for walking us through the Old Testament. We began lapbooks last year and we will continue working on those, I have a friend who sent a great link on creating an Old Testament lapbook with the kids I plan to order (this will make my life so much easier with the baby coming in only 5 1/2 weeks!) Scripture memorization (this week was 1 John 2:10- "Whoever loves his brother, lives in the light, and there is nothing in him to make him stumble." We also use Josh McDowell's Family Devotionals 2, my middle son LOVES to talk for more than an hour about "moral questions" we call them.

My oldest son (6th grade) is working on  A Beka Arithmetic 6, God's Gift of Language C, Spelling Workout F, Cursive Handwriting, required reading (he just finished Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson) and is working on Famous Men of Rome for Latin class, free reading and then studying and preparing for his other classes we co-op with (Story of the World-4, ( I added-King Fisher History Encyclopedia too), physics, and Latin) A couple times a week we add an outlining course, writing exercises, logic exercies and on Friday's we add a Read and Think from book 6 of A Beka. (My kids still really love those from the Christian school-so I decided to continue with them.) Tuesday we co-op, Wednesday he goes to chorus and band at the local Christian school, Thursday we cottage school for Latin with Christiana Latina. Friday I try teach the kids an art lesson from "How To Teach Art To Children". It seems like a lot but believe it or not my son still gets his work done well before noon and has tons of time to free read, play outside, read to my youngest son and work on his gardening experiments or just build with legos or whatever he chooses to do!

My middle son (4th grade) is working on A Beka Arithmetic 4, God's Gift of Language A, Spelling Workout D, Cursive Handwriting, required reading (he also finished "Kidnapped" and actually sat through a three hour movie version of the book after he read the book!) and he also prepares for his co-op classes of history, physics, and Latin. He also does a Read and Think (4) from A Beka on Friday's and is getting ready to learn the trumpet at his music class on Wednesday. (He struggles with some of his work and really requires a lot of my time but he can be a lot of fun as I watch "light bulbs" go off for him when he really  grasps a new concept.) I let him work independently as much as possible and we go over mistakes immediately when he is finished. I have learned to be more relaxed with him knowing now how accelerated A Beka curriculum can be and also how much repetition he will get before he moves on to middle school. He gets his work done usually just after lunch then he breaks for playtime then comes in for quiet reading. He is currently reading "The Drummer Boy's Battle" (a mostly fictional story about the Crimean War and Florence Nightingale) and "Famous men of Rome" and for free reading he is enjoying working through some of the classic books my husband read when he was a kid such as "Me and My Little Brain". He also spends hours-literally hours- pouring over his science experiment books borrowed from the library or books on How Things Work.

My youngest son is only four. We are working through, very slowly, "Teaching Reading", and he is learning his vowels as well as memorizing the alphabet. He knows all his colors and can count to 12 or 13. He enjoys finger plays of math, "life math" we call, it throught the day whenever we are setting the table, ect. We are always counting and quizzing him for fun on his numbers. He is learning to add and subtract numbers too. I let him play quietly most of the morning while I work with my middle son but I am so amazed at how much my youngest picks up on things. He has books he borrows from the library and I am just enjoying every day I have with him, not pressuring him to "school" .