Hi! Welcome to my blog! My name is Jane (PlainJane) and I am the blessed and happy wife to Jeff and doubly blessed mama of two perfectly wonderful daughters. Please join me as I share our Lifestyle of Learning through Christian homeschooling and homesteading on our little hobby farm with our prairie girls.
Amber (Bookworm) is our dd15/10th grader.
Our perfectionist and over-achiever. She loves reading, playing violin, all things vintage, riding her Paint horse, and being a farm girl.
Anna (Ladybug)
is our dd12/7th grader.
Our "girls just want to have fun" girl. She loves to play and has a great sense of humor, but also enjoys cooking, music, and riding her QH pony.
We just completed our first week of school for the 2009-2010 school year and ahhh, what a great (although short) week it was. Once again we are following a 4-day school week (M-TH with Friday as a ministry, fieldtrip, or whatever day) and being Monday was Labor Day holiday, we enjoyed an easy 3-day week this week. With the 4-days-on/3-days-off schedule, we run a very tight ship with everything scheduled from 6:45 am - 3:30 pm in order to get everything done and be able to earn that extra day off and I have to say, it has been great for all of us. We all three loved getting back to school, and the satisfaction of getting er done, and having a clean house to boot with a 45 min cleaning time M-TH
Here are some highlights from our homeschool week...
Our Text of the Week: Actually, our school day begins the evening before as "the evening and the morning were the first day." We have family Bible reading time where we all gather in the family room and read a portion of Scripture (reading through the Bible - not skipping anything), discussing, and answer the correlating Balancing the Sword questions. Then we gather in a circle, holding hands to pray. It was always our beloved Peanut's habit to enter the middle of our circle for prayer time and her presence was truly missed. This week's reading was on Leviticus 1-7 which is on the law of the various offerings -- we were thankful that Jesus shed His blood for our sins and that we don't have to offer the blood of animals since Jesus paid it all.
Opening Time: Our school day begins with prayer, pledges, sword drills, hymn sing, or missions study, depending on the day. This week we sang: "Love Lifted Me", "He Lives", "Wonderful Grace of Jesus" and "God's Wonderful Book Divine (thanks Christina)." I found a couple of sites that play piano hymns or have congregational singing that we could sing along with too.
Scriptorium: Together we reviewed our verses from last year (Exodus 20: 1-17 and Psalm 119: 9-16) and worked on scribing various potions of these passages using Edwardian-type calligraphy.
Bedell Curriculum: We are continuing in Volume 4, Lessons 18 in the Bedell books. Here are some of the things we were learning/discussing this week...
The Offering of God
Types of Offerings
Presumptious Sins
Giving up things for God
Not eatting fat
Unsaturated and Saturated Fat
(Note: Since we use the Bible as our No. 1 textbook, sometimes we don't have a Bedell lesson to correlate with the day's Scripture reading and as in this week, may have a large portion of Scripture, but just one Bedell lesson to go along with it.)
Hands-on American History: More fun lapbook inserts with Homeschool In the Wood's Time Travelers "The American Revolution". This week we picked up where we left off last year with lessons 11 & 12. Reading about Nathan Hale, Patrick Henry, the Declaration of Independance and the Liberty Bell and doing lapbook projects about them.
Music & Ministry: This week in the ministry department, we had an AWANA leaders' meeting at our church - our whole family is volunteering. We belong to a small country church, so I am in charge of Cubbies and Amber & Anna are helping me and Jeff will be a T&T leader. I have served in AWANA for 10 years but this is my first time in Cubbies. Then today (Saturday) the girls and I helped at our local competition of the National Bible Bee. I was a judge and the girls volunteered as runners. Very fun.
Science: We finished up putting together our Weather notebook from last year and I need to bring it to Office Max to have it comb bound. Next week we start geology. US Geography: The girls drew states and got to work...Amber has Kentucky and Anna has Arkansas. They will have 2.5 weeks to research and prepare their oral & written reports for the family. They love geography!
Language Arts: They are both pretty much done with language arts except Anna is doing a little BJU Spelling that she didn't finish last year.
Equestrian: The girls continue with their weekly lessons and practice. This week they worked out a few bugs with their horses. Our trainer says I may be able to ride my horse in two weeks.
Home Economics: Amber is busy cutting out quilt pieces for a doll-size log cabin quilt she is making per her Christian Light Home Ec. book and Anna is starting out in book one with kitchen safty.
That's about it this week. I hope to have more photos for next week.
I like that you consider your school "starting" in the evening because of Genesis Hebrew roots. I guess we do the same thing, but I never really thought of it that way. We have history everynight with dad - we read from G.A. Henty books each evening (from Vision Forum). In the morning, we have our family devotions and then dad goes off to work.
The plus about all of this economic upheaval is that we have a LOT more of dh/dad time. He has really becomed involved in proportions I've never seen or imagined possible before. PTL :) :) :) :) :) :)
Your friend,
Antoinette
Love the new school photo! And the music links. I like that piano hymns one. I see that guy is connected with the third one, congregational singing. We were in that church once in WA, before they moved to OH. I'll have to tell you about that. ...Great old hymns. Thank you for sharing!
Ah...the picture is darling! The girls are growing up so quickly. I loved your description of your Bible evening and then the morning. We do something similar but I'd to incorporate a little of what you shared. (Thanks for sharing!)
I'll have to look into that DVD you mentioned. I have several others of his, and that is an area that with our recent 15% paycuts, it would be a great inspiration during this time in our lives.
HsKubes 
