After rearranging the playroom, rearranging all the upstairs bookcases, gathering up all our resources (I still need to do a bit more of that) and writing up the schedules, we finally had our first day back to school yesterday.  Overall, it went well!

I always find the first day of homeschooling difficult.  I just never seem to have things organized right until I actually start doing what I need to do. This year went fairly well.

Math took up a lot of time, mostly because I was not as prepared as I should have been.  I am still getting used to MEP and getting a better feel for how it is organized.  I also decided to use the laptop for the lesson plans instead of printing them all out.  I need more play dollars, dimes, and pennies to demonstrate regrouping...

So far the boys all worked well.  With computer programs and "toys" restricted to certain options during school time, they found many educational ways to fill their time while I was busy working with one or another of them.

Ds#3 was the most excited of the three, always eager to be doing things.

Off to another day!

Here is the general schedule that is intended  to guide us for the entire year.

Boxes with two items listed are for ds#1/ds#2 (I work with one while the other works independently.

ILL is Intermediate Language Lessons from Hillside Education

PLL is Primary Language Lessons from Hillside Education

PACE is Program to Achieve Character Education (Catholic edition)

MEP is Math Enhancement Programme

LA is Language Arts

Ds#1 going to use Rosetta Stone Italian while ds#2 will use Italian for Children

This doesn't include our nature walks, working on our commonplace books, learning Latin phrases, or even our Country Club (studying a country a month with 3 other families.)

Last year I had every subject, every day scheduled and I would drive myself and my kids mad trying to stick to it.  This year I have scheduled subjects or programs but not daily content.  Also I used to schedule 36 weeks; this year will be 33 weeks since my kids have done at least 3 solid weeks of school activities over the summer.

I put some subjects into blocks.  During these blocks we will do a variety of things depending on how the day or week is going.  We may spend the whole time working on a project or we may do some reading, activities, and games during it.  We may even spend time getting caught up in our commonplace book for that subject.

My next step is to create a list of books, activities, and games to choose from to fill those blocks.  I will create a blog entry for each subject with the resources that I gather for others looking for new resources (since I benefit so much from other blogs in this way!)

For me, the key is to not feel the need to cover a certain amount of material before a deadline.

I rely heavily on Mater Amabilis and For the Love of Literature to create my book lists.  For activities I get ideas from books, blogs, and web sites.  I also have a lot of games, especially for math and history, but some for science and language arts, too.

This type of schedule allows for a bad day, a sick day, an opportunity, or a surprise without the dread of feeling you are falling behind.  We all know Life happens, so we pray and trust in Him to have it all turn out just as He intends.

I was talking with CherylinMA (Talking to Myself) and she said she was keeping track of educational things they are doing over the summer and counting that as "school."

This got me thinking about my own plans, and it is probably something that most of the rest of the homeschooling world figured out long ago.  That week of VBS and Nature Camp, those museum trips, performances, special activities--those are school days, too.

I realized that my kids have had at least 3 weeks worth of educational activities this summer so far, and we're not done yet!  I am going to plan for 33 weeks this year instead of the typical 36 weeks for which I usually plan.

“Education is the science of relations.”  This is the center of Charlotte Mason’s philosophy.  Facts must be presented with their informing ideas—“living ideas” from “living books”—in order for relations to form.

From the preface to her series:

9. But the mind is not a receptacle into which ideas must be dropped, each idea adding to an 'apperception mass' of its like, the theory upon which the Herbartian doctrine of interest rests.

10. On the contrary, a child's mind is no mere sac to hold ideas; but is rather, if the figure may be allowed, a spiritual organism, with an appetite for all knowledge. This is its proper diet, with which it is prepared to deal, and which it can digest and assimilate as the body does foodstuffs.

11. This difference is not a verbal quibble. The Herbartian doctrine lays the stress of education––the preparation of knowledge in enticing morsels, presented in due order––upon the teacher. Children taught upon this principle are in danger of receiving much teaching with little knowledge; and the teacher's axiom is, 'What a child learns matters less than how he learns it.'

12. But, believing that the normal child has powers of mind that fit him to deal with all knowledge proper to him, we must give him a full and generous curriculum; taking care, only, that the knowledge offered to him is vital––that is, the facts are not presented without their informing ideas. Out of this conception comes the principle that,

13. Education is the Science of Relations; that is, that a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we must train him upon physical exercises, nature, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books; for we know that our business is, not to teach him all about anything, but to help him make valid, as many as may be of

     'Those first born affinities,
     'That fit our new existence to existing things.'

The benefit of homeschooling is that we can individualize our curriculum for our children.  Textbooks and prepared curricula take the Herbartian approach, so relying upon them diminishes the science of relations.

I read about “spines” and “living books” but I got so caught up in doing my math, science, spelling, and grammar curricula, and reading the large history book in chronologic order that I never developed that science of relations.  The made-for-the-masses textbooks and programs kept me separated from it.  Finally, I understand Charlotte’s ideas; I call it Thinking Outside the Textbook.

For most subjects I will use a “spine,” that is, a living book that covers a variety of topics on a subject.  Just reading from the spine will be enough if my children are not inspired by a topic; if they are inspired, I’ll add in living books and activities until we’ve followed that interest to its end before moving on in the spine.  We won’t have topic deadlines we must meet to stay on schedule.  Our weekly schedule will list blocks of time to spend on a subject without detailing what will be covered during that time (for that, too, would be Herbartian.)

What about holes?  To me, this is the inside-homeschooling equivalent to “What about socialization?”  I know what you mean—I had that same fear.  Consider the following:

1. You can never present all the information on a topic, much less know it.
   
   
2. Public school goals are greatly based on utilitarian values in terms of making children into productive citizens.

While there is nothing wrong with productive citizens, that is not the ultimate goal of my educational philosophy.  As Charlotte Mason states, in agreement with Hebart, “…the knowledge of God is the principal knowledge, and the chief end of education.”  As the old Baltimore Catechism states: I am made to know, love, and serve God.

So why did I put so much stock in making sure my kids learned the “facts” that institutional schools taught?  Oh, I glance at my state’s frameworks to get ideas of what I should cover; they are more skills-based in the early years and I don’t pay too much attention to years.  My child may seem “behind” in some area compared to an institutionally-schooled child, but that child will be behind my child in other areas.  And which one is more likely to have a love of God and a love of learning?

This is an example in my favorite subject: science—check back to AtHomeScience for posts about spines I like.  I’ll be posting my approach to other subjects here.

Day eight of the Novena to the Holy Spirit for the Seven Gifts

Trying to get my boys to sit while I read to them is impossible.  This is so central to everything Charlotte Mason, which is what I hold dear in homeschooling, that I am trying different approaches to see what works.  Of course, with my boys, what works one week may not work the next so I need to keep looking for ideas.

A few days ago, I was reading about the causes of the Civil War in Eggleston's A History of the United States.  They both had a Boomwhacker in their hands (a long plastic cylinder) that they used as swords because they wanted to act out what was going on in the chapter while I read (no battles in this chapter, but I wasn't going to stop them.)  They narrated fairly well afterwards, though ds#2 continues to struggle with narration.

Today, I read about Nineveh and Babylon in Hillyer's A Child's History of the World, followed by a chapter of A Door in the Wall while they each had a ball of modeling clay to fiddle with.  The clay worked remarkably well to keep their fannies on the couch, their mouths quiet, and their ears open.  I hope this technique works for awhile...

You can view our family's homeschool schedule here, the latest and greatest now that I have combined ds#1 and ds#2 for most things.  Both boys have said they really like the change, especially ds#1 who just like to have people around when he does school work.

Co-op has ended so the pace really gets easier for us.  Next fall this will look different as I contemplate the best approach to Language Arts, and I add in P.A.C.E.  A friend suggested I use P.A.C.E. to get my weekly studied dictation for ds#1, which I think is a fabulous idea!

Starting out with Ambleside Online and now using Mater Amabilis, I have often seen forum posts wondering how to use these programs with multi-ages kids. They make me think, “I’m barely doing this with two; what will happen with three?” In my own homeschooling, I didn’t feel that books were central, we didn’t have enough “fun” learning, and I wasn’t sitting and “teaching” my children much. What was wrong?

This, misguidedly, was how I created my schedule last fall. I had creatively scheduled workbooks and readings such that one was doing workbooks while I was reading to the other. In the end, I realized that the workbooks were really so much busy work and the kids never got my attention as a teacher, only as a reader. My boys are only 2 grades apart each; why are they not doing more together?

The biggest barrier to combining kids with both AO and MA is the year to year format. Unlike Sonlight or KONOS in which the same material is used for a variety of ages, with MA and AO each year has a new curriculum and very little overlap. Even my earlier idea of creating 3 year cycles didn’t really work well with my particular situation—every few years I would end up with all 3 in a different cycle!

I was not, however, going to walk away from the wonderful materials chosen by MA and AO. Yet I also have burgeoning bookshelves with many more wonderful books I want to incorporate into our schooling.  How could I put all this to good use?

It took me almost two years to finally understand well enough, and to get comfortable with, the Charlotte Mason approach. I starting this homeschooling journey so concerned that my children learned what was taught in schools so as not to leave any “holes;” then I wanted to make sure I completed everything that was laid out on the AO/MA web sites so as not to miss anything "important."  Now I realize that by keeping great books and interesting learning central to our schooling, our children will thrive.

Given all these things, this is how I made over our term 3 schedule. I made a list of all the subjects I wanted to cover and how much time I wanted to dedicate to covering each subject. I filled out a weekly schedule, broken into 20 minute slots, and filled in the subjects. This step was very important for me to see that I was dedicating too much time to science and language arts such that there was little time for anything else! I reassessed and adjusted my first step.

Next I choose books and activities that both boys would enjoy. Subjects in which the boys are clearly at different levels, like math and language arts, they either work on them at the same time with me present to answer any questions, or I give one child reading/study time while I work with the other. Each year I will look at it anew, combining as many children as appropriate as my youngest starts schooling and my oldest grows more independent.

Regardless of how the years change, my first stop will always be Mater Amabilis, especially for Religious books, and next to Ambleside Online to extend our literature list. Finally, I will turn to my own bookshelf to take advantage of the many gems I have placed there waiting to be read.

I love old books—the cloth covers, the paper, the print, the illustrations. I have many of them.  My children really appreciate these old books, too, especially when they're holding them in their hands.  They help foster a real love of books.  And having a rich library is key to Charlotte Mason homeschooling.

Just about any book written before 1924 is in the public domain (and, by the way, works created by the federal government are in the public domain, too.) There are many reasons to consider using these treasures. They were written at a time when God and Christian values were more honored in the general culture; they reflect these values, even include reference to God in their content. If they have endured they are likely good reading, maybe because of writing style or historically important information; some are truly classics. At the very least, they are free to download or inexpensive to buy (usually.)

Project Gutenberg is the first and now most extensive source of electronic books (ebooks.) Many other sites get their ebooks from it. You can search by author, title, or subject, which is good if you know what you are looking for, but you can't really browse. For example, Eva March Tappan's book, Diggers in the Earth, which I found through another web site, is listed under subject:reader, which I never would have guessed. While they have greatly shortened the very annoying legalese at the beginning of their books, this is not so of many of the ebooks they first published. That can all be easily deleted unless you are downloading the ebook for your PDA.

Manybooks takes books from Project Gutenberg and converts them into a wide variety of formats for PDAs and Smartphones, even for the new Amazon Kidle. Not only can you search by author and title, you can also browse by category. (I only wish I could limit the choices by selecting books that have two or more categories.) When you view a title, it will also provide a link to Librivox if the title is available in audio.

The Baldwin Online Children's Literature Project is another great site that is independent of Project Gutenberg, so it has many titles not available elsewhere on the web. The books are nicely categorized to make browsing easy. Unfortunately you cannot easily download any of the titles since the site is linked to Yesterday's Classics, a separate site where you can purchase paperback reprints of many of the titles.

Google has been scanning the book holdings of many academic institutions and making these ebooks available at Google Books. The site is so enormous that you really cannot browse it; you need to know what author or title you're looking for. Most of the books that are out of copyright, and some that are still in copyright, can be viewed and downloaded in pdf format. You can even do a full text search of books for which text is available to download.

The Internet Archive text section also has a vast number of books not found at either Google or Project Gutenberg. Their Americana collection contains almost 200,000 books from libraries around the country scanned by Microsoft, Yahoo, and the Sloan Foundation. The search feature is very good at narrowing subjects, though you can only truly browse by author or title. Thanks, Christi, for prompting me to take another look at the site!

Buying old books can be a bit tricky when one person's "good" condition may be another's "poor." In general, though, I have had very good experiences with it. I have been satisfied with the vast majority of books I have bought, I've even been impressed by some. On rare occasion have I not been happy with what I had purchased, and only once have I not been satisfied with how the seller wanted to resolve the dispute. I buy the vast majority of my used books from 4 places.

1. Library book sales. Most children's titles are $0.25 to $1.00 depending on the sale. I use Book Sale Finder to find out when they are happening in my area.
   
2. Abebooks. No book is less than $1 but shipping varies by seller, and many have discounted shipping for multiple books. I have used the aggregate used book engines like AddALL and Bookfinder, but abebooks usually has the best price.
   
3. Amazon. Many books sell for less than $1 but shipping is never less than $3.99 nor will you get a shipping discount for multiple books.
   
4. Used book stores. I have one I really like about 30 minutes from my house. Nothing is catalogued; he does not do Internet sales. It is a real adventure in serendipity!
   

My boys have much better retention when they follow along with the text even if I am still the one doing the reading (visual learners.)  When we are doing a family reading of a book, I'll have a hardcover copy that usually ds#1 reads from; I'll order another copy from the library for ds#2 to follow along with, and I'd download the text or the audio to my pda.

This month it is posted at In The Sparrow's Nest blog.  Beautiful!  A lot of great information there.

Christ is risen! Happy Easter…day 7.

I combined the schedule this week as a trial and the boys really like it.  They are both getting a lot more attention, and I am spending a lot less time backtracking, correcting, and having they do thing over again because I am right there are they do it.  This feels so much more like a CM education.

I started thinking about next year.  Oddly enough, it is the only year, ever, that I would not be able to combine any children using the 3 year cycles.  Ds#3 is still in kindergarten, ds#2 would be in the first cycle while ds#3 would be in the second cycle.  I need to first, pray, and second, realize that next year is an odd year and so I am going to do odd things to make it work so I just have to get over it.  What that will be remains to be created, LOL.

With the schedule going so much smoother, and with more time made available because of combining work, I decided to try writing a master schedule covering all the subjects as fully as I would like.  Well, I packed up all the 20 minute slots from 8 am until noon and didn’t have any literature reading scheduled, nor the PACE program.  Something is wrong and I need to look long and hard at my choices.

One major problem is that I am fitting school into 4 days, since we spend 1 day a week at co-op.  Co-op classes may or may not replace something on our home schedule, depending what is offered.  I consider it all extra-curricular.  The solution would be afternoon homeschool time (which I have not been very good with so far) or Saturday morning homeschool.  These are distinct possibilities.

I also noticed I scheduled 40 minutes 4 days a week for Noeo, plus 1 slot for nature reading, 1 slot for earth studies, and an afternoon slot for a nature hike.  O.K. so we are heavy on the science!  I really should do basic physical geography with both ds#1 & 2, and then move into countries and cultures in the second cycle, rather than doing both simultaneously.  Hmmm, maybe that would be good for next year.  And I’m reducing Noeo to 3 days, too.

We are studying Italian, plus ds#1 is doing Latin.  I think I will put off formal Latin for ds#1 and stick to all the kids memorizing prayers in Latin since they really enjoy doing that.

I am doing 2 slots of US History and 2 slots of World History every week.  Many programs go every other year with this, but, honestly, I really don’t want to change this.  I’ll consider the other options first.

Finally, as much as I love CHC’s Catholic Speller and Language of God, they are really just so much busy work.  I need to focus on penmanship and written language, so learning by doing rather than learning concepts and choosing the right answers.  This is new territory for me, so we’ll see how this works.  Maybe I should dust off the Total Language Plus just to pull some ideas out of them.  Maybe I can somehow integrate the PACE material with this!

Thinking by blogging can be so inspiring!

I think I finally get it!  The question is, what can I do about it now?

I’ve been frustrated by our homeschool.  It just didn’t seem right.  We do not enough time for fun learning games, not enough time to concentrate on new skills and concepts.  The kids are spending too much time on workbooks, which, in the end, is so much busy work (as much as I love the way Catholic Heritage Curricula has designed them!)  Only Noeo Science is shared between them.  And now that I want to add in PACE, where do I fit it?  Clearly, something is wrong.

I’ve come to realize that I am not sticking to the core principles of a Charlotte Mason education, with the focus on narration, dictation, copywork.  History is not to be taught as a chronological subject, but rather through a book of centuries.  The books themselves will inspire my children more than anything else.

I love the Mater Amabilis program, even if they did decide to stick with Our Island Story and This Country of Ours, LOL. ;-)  I realize that the hang up is that it is segmented into years, so each child has a separate schedule, some of which extends over two years.  But what if I had viewed 1B and each year of 1A as cycles instead of sequential years?  In other words, I should have had ds#1 and ds#2 doing the same history, the same earth study, the same literature, the same saints, the same New Testament.  So much could have been combined, which would have left so much more time to focus on the CM basics and other activities.

Now we have only 1 term left, and next year ds#1 moves up to level 2.  This split makes it particularly difficult to combine their work.  I will have to get to know level 2 better and decide what to do.  Certainly there’s a lot of level 1 we’ve not done so I can make some sort of hybrid.  I need to focus on term 3, and I have two weeks in which to pull that together.  I need to brainstorm--after I pray.

God, you know what is best for our family.  You will guide us to what is good and right.  Amen.

Looking back on all the wonderful events of Holy Week, and knowing that my kids “get it” and have gone to Mass joyfully, I have nothing to complain about.  That is really what matters.

We've completed 2 weeks of our second term, and things seem to be going well.  The new history is working out well!  Funny, both AO and MA cover US History chronologically, using a textbook.  Charlotte Mason advocates choosing a time period and finding great literature to study it.  Kids fill in dates and facts on a timeline to keep events in relative order.  I plan on taking this approach with ds#1 during the next two years transition from Eggleston to Bennett.  I like doing US History chronologically, probably because it is so brief compared to world history.

I did had a math wake-up call, though.  Ds#1 was doing his MUS, finding the area of a trapezoid, when I became acutely aware that he was following the example without having any idea why he was taking the steps he did.  I spent one week on area, another on averages using living math approaches.  Not only has ds#1 gotten an idea of what he's doing, and remembers it better, he has taken a great interest in the many math-for-fun books I have lying about (I am teaching a Math for Fun class for our co-op, so I have these books piled in the kitchen.)  Time to rethink math.  I've scheduled in living math time for all my boys.  I'm going to look into the free MEP program to see if it integrates with math reading and play better than MUS.

The first step in the process is to look at the web site and figure out how many lessons per week I will be doing for each subject.  For Level 1B, for example, that would be the following:

• New Testiment  x2
• Saints  x1
• Catechism  x1
• Mathematics  x5
• Learning to Read  x5
• Handwriting  x5
• Copywork  x5
• Tales  x1
• Fables  x1
• Poetry  x1
• US History  x1; Catholic US History sporadically
• Family Geography (terms 1 & 2)/Earth Studies (term 3)  x2
• Map work  x1 (I keep a list and then find all the places once a week)
• Nature Walk  x1
• Nature Reading  x1
• Music Appreciation  x1
• Picture Study  x1
• Art  x2

Next, I collect all my books that I will be using with these subjects and break down the reading accordingly.  Some are easy, like the Religious Education books.  We read one chapter or saint for each lesson.  Others, like History, I look at to break up large chapters and combine short ones so that I stay on the MA schedule without getting surprised by a 15 page reading.  Lastly, I go through the books that require me to break them up into lesson-sized readings, like Tales, Nature Reading, or Art Studies.  All of this gets laid out in an Excel spreadsheet, though you can use a Word document, a paper spreadsheet, or write them directly into your lesson planner when you complete the next step.

Also, I look over the subjects and decide which ones a child can work on independently and which ones will require me to work closely with him.  This is an important step to scheduling as you will see below.

Finally, to create our actual weekly schedule, I break up the morning into 20 minute time slots, from 8:00 until 12:00.  I do this by making a table in Word, though you can also use a spreadsheet.  Next, I fill in which subject will be taught in each time slot.  To do this, I have several considerations.

• Decide which subjects will take place in the afternoon.  A few, like Nature Walks and Art are things that may regularly take longer than 40 minutes (especially if you’re out in the cold or you have a special art project planned.)
• Will a lesson regularly take more than 20 minutes?  Geography/Earth Studies, Art, or Math, depending on your approach, often require set up and clean up times; other subjects may be trouble areas for a child and so I will want more time to work with him.  I give these lessons double slots (40 minutes.)
• I try to combine lessons as much as possible.  Because the Religious Education readings are short, we all do them together.  Tales, Poetry, Map work, Art, Nature Walks can all be combined lessons, too, depending on your choice of materials.
• I look very carefully to make sure I schedule something that requires my complete attention for only one child!  This is my biggest challenge.  I can’t be reading Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt with ds#1 at the same time I am reading Aesop’s Fables with ds#2!  Breaking the subjects into ones children can work on independently and ones that require my attention is very helpful here.

Once I have figured those four things out, and I place the subjects into each slot on my schedule, I can easily create weekly lesson schedules.  I actually print one for each child every week with little check of boxes (that’s why I use Word instead of Excel for this) so they can see what lesson they need to do next.

What is nice about creating your own lesson plans is you can easily adapt it to your own needs.  I added in some things, took out others, and used different reading materials.  I found that very hard to do with AO because it was so packed with long readings—I would have basically had to start from scratch.  MA had much more room left in the schedule to either extend lesson times or add in other interests.

Of course, you don't have to be as scheduled as I am; unschoolers are laughing at me right now.  It works very well for us, and it gives us the rest of the day for unstructured learning or for outside activities.  It's the best of both worlds for us.

Tomorrow we will complete 8 weeks of Mater Amabilis, and I can say I am really glad I changed to this curriculum.  Overall, everything is going very well.  If you do AO, you need to do only AO and not try to add or modify things unless you want to lengthen your school day.  You'll get a lot of wonderful History, Literature, Shakespeare, Poetry, and Bible but not much science, math, or catechism.  And hopefully you will have a child that is either a skilled reader or a patient listener (or both), else you're doomed.  And of course it will have a Protestant flavor, if not an anti-Catholic feel.

MA has a good measure of science not just from nature studies but also from Geography/Earth studies.  A full science program, not just a living science textbook, is introduced from the beginning.  Nature studies, though, is conspicuously missing the wonderful living books AO has.  Religious studies focuses on Bible stories, Saints, and catechism.  Poetry is weak, however; I want to go back to daily poetry reading.  The literature is more age-appropriate with a list of a manageable length (who ever finishes all the books on the AO free reading list!) Shakespeare does not start until Level 2 (year 4).  Even using Lamb or Nesbit, ds#1 didn't really understand it until he was 8.

As for our own schooling, I've been woefully negligent in our nature notebooks and poetry.  Next term, I'll do better (ha! I pray, anyway.)  The schedule over all is going very well, though.  We're all happy with it, and it is flexible enough to accommodate "difficulties" without getting too far off track.

I am using One Small Square African Savanna in place of the extreme environments reading scheduled in MA.  We're really loving it--I have 40 minutes slotted so we can read 2 to 4 pages, and then either do the activities in the book or work on a "savanna field guide."  We also replaced the science program with Noeo Physics I, which is also wonderful.  Ds#1 and ds#2 work on it together.

The one thing we're having problems with is This Country of Ours.  As much as this is supposed to be a living book, it is not capturing the imagination of my children (or me!)  Ds#1 is also reading The American Revolution book in the Landmark series with dad at night, which is more interesting.  I find it especially frustrating because I am reading the William Bennett book which is soooo much more engaging, though won't be the right level for my children until they are teens.  TCOO tries to be for younger kids but gives way too much detail to keep their attention.  Perhaps it is better to use Landmark and Jean Fritz books to cover time periods and people rather than trying to find something comprehensive for Level 1 kids.  I'm going to switch ds#2 to The Men Who Found America to cover the explorers, hopefully by next week.

Two weeks down...

It was very helpful to redo the schedule.  It is still very challenging because ds#2 really cannot work on much independently because he cannot write well--though the writing we do together is helping him learn.  It's just going to take awhile, that's all.  Meanwhile, ds#1 is not known for doing his best work without at least a little oversight.  He'll do better once he gets the hang of what is expected each week.  It's amazing how much he has improved since the start of last year--one of the real blessings of homeschooling!

I suppose I should do something with ds#3.  I'm hoping to start the "letter of the week" (name, sound, how to write it) and try to do some living math with him daily in addition to reading volume #1 of My Book House.  I read volume 3 to ds#2, and volume 4 to ds#1--we all think it's really neat that each child has his own volume.  The stories, poems, and pictures have been really delightful!  It's a great resource for both Tales and Poetry for Mater Amabilis if you can find it.

I'm back to trying to make timeline labels.  They're easier to make since I got rid of Norton's Internet Security, which used to slow down MS Word to a crawl, especially when working with a lot of graphics on a page!  I need to find some physics experiments for the next couple of days as well--Newton's Laws of Motion stuff!

All in all, it went pretty well--I must actually be getting to know what I'm doing!

O.K. maybe not.

God's blessings sees us through it regardless, TBTG!  Now that I've done one run through, I need to tweak.  I planned things such that ds#2 would work on something independently while I read with ds#1, and vice versa.  The problem is, I expected my first grader to be as independent as my third grader!    He needs help with his penmanship especially, though, interestingly, I noticed he actually does much better writing small than large.  When he uses only half the line of the first grade dashed paper he has a much easier time forming his letters.  All the wonderful little things you get to know about each of your children when you homeschool...

Last year I was able to have History Monday, Nature Tuesday, Literature Wednesday, Arts Thursday, and Geography Friday (see, I still remember it!)  Even with daily work, we would cover the same subject during the same time each day.  Certainly this will be more of a challenge with two schedules going, though I do have a better idea of the work load for each subject.  It's just a bit too chaotic for the uberscheduler in me.

Tomorrow we begin a full day of homeschooling (yikes!)  I never feel ready--it seems I always have something else I want to tweak or make or schedule.  I really need to just pray and relax!

I made the switch from AO to MA.  I even made a logo:

It has been interesting comparing the strengths and weaknesses of them.  I really like MA's approach to history--it's the way I was thinking of modifying AO's approach.  Start with US History and cycle through more quickly.  Introduce World History starting with the ancients and spending time on different civilizations.  It's very well done.

Poetry is only done once weekly, or less if working on memorization/dictation, using The Harp and the Laurel Wreath.  I will add in AO's resource here by reading a poem daily from one poet per term.  Our family really enjoyed that good habit.

I like that MA does not have literature for dictation, only the more fact- and concept-based materials.  Of course I still discuss literature with my kids, it's just not formal dictation.  That never made sense to me when doing AO anyway.

MA has a much more manageable schedule.  AO is difficult for anyone that has a child with even a mild reluctance to reading.  The schedule is also so packed that there is little room to add anything in.  It has been a breath of fresh air to have readings that we could really do in twenty minutes!

We are using Noeo Science again this year, which my kids and I love.  Ds#1 & #2 are doing Physics I together, which should be a lot of fun.  I slated 40 minutes 4x/week for this.

Ds#1 will repeat Prima Latina this year only focusing on the vocabulary.  He learned the prayers well, and had a solid introduction to grammar.  This year I am looking for full mastery of the material second time through.

We're using Happy Scribe for penmanship this year, a program I found through HomeschooleStore.  I printed our script for ds#1 and italics for ds#2 and comb-bound them so they each have their own custom penmanship book to write it.

I still need to put together a notebook for them to keep their Poetry, Spelling, and Studied dictation sheets in--a project for today, as well as printing out Latin and Italian flash cards I made on the computer.

Please pray for our start, and I will continue to pray for you all as well.  Thanks!

I've finally made the decision to move to Mater Amabilis  from Ambleside Online, and I've changed my webring to reflect that.  I guess I had one too many antiCatholic surprises (though most were fairly mild) in their book choices.

I just finished reading Religious Literacy by Stephen Prothero.  It turns out that the long road to our nation's religious illiteracy had to do with the formation of "common schools" in the colonies that became the secondary schools of today.  Religion was essential then, but because children were of different Protestant religions, and because two key educational administrators were Unitarian, doctrine became less emphasized.  This was exacerbated by the Second Great Awakening, when scholarly study of the Bible was being looked down upon by charismatic preachers that felt everyone should interpret the Bible independently.  Still, Protestants remained united against the great wave Catholic immigrants, leading to things like mandating the KJV without commentary for all schools, and not presenting Catholicism in a favorable light.  This was the state of public schools at the turn of the Twentieth Century, a time during which many AO books were written.  Eventually, after the rise of Communism and Vatican II, Catholics joined in the de-emphasis of doctrine that led to the current US state as a nation of religious illiterates.

Now I have a comparative world religion book and comparative Christian faiths book on my list to buy at the CBD warehouse sale in September and I've changed from AO to MA!  I certainly will keep the AO book list handy, since I have found some real gems there.

So today I dropped off my son's sewing machine to get the tension fixed  while I ran over the the slaughter house to pick up 4 cow eyeballs.  I swung back to get the sewing machine (it was only threaded wrong) and made it back for ds#1 to finish up sewing class before we dissected the eyeballs (which was very cool!)  Just another day of homeschooling...

One of the difficulties I have been struggling with is creating a positive and effective learning experience based on good habits for my oldest ds age 8.  He is bright, yet he has no focus.  He reminds me of the "butterfly girl" Karen Andreola describes in the Charlotte Mason Companion.  Even though the switch to CM short lessons from the oppressive workbooks we used last year has been a tremendous improvement, he still does not like to sit and work at all.  Focus is an important skill to foster, though I'm sure #1ds will continue to be a challenge.

My biggest struggles have been with Math and Science.  The math problems he's doing in MUS Gamma involve multi-digit multiplication.  He know how to do them but his attention frequently drifts off in the very midst of a calculation such that he loses where he is and thus miscalculates.  Perhaps it's because he has mastered the concept that he is bored with no-context calculations?

I am really learning a lot from the Living Math web site and forum and I want to incorporate those techniques into our HSing, though I'm not really sure how yet.  Last week I did, on a whim, take out some tape measures and had the boys measuring various items and then have my oldest ds figure out area.  He approached the multi-digit multiplication with focus and vigor that was heart warming.  I just fear it is a fluke because it was a break from the routine and that making it routine will take the joy from it.  I pray not.