It's always difficult to think of a clever, witty way to start out a new blog.  I hope you'll bear with me in that I'm all out of clever and witty this late at night.  However, I promise to restock and be more entertaining in entries to come!

My name is Laura and I have an awesome little girl who finished third grade at the local elementary school this past year.  We are returning to homeschooling for a variety of reasons, and I may expound on that in a future entry.  For now, I'll just say that for both academic and moral reasons my husband and I felt the strong need to return to home education.

Jami is an exceptional reader (hence my choice of "theme" for my blog) and I love taking her to the library each week.  You'd think she'd discovered the lost treasures of King Solomon the way she gets so excited over new books!  Her love of reading will go far in making homeschooling a pleasant experience for both of us.

We plan to start school the day after Labor Day, like they did in the "good ol' days."  We are using the classical method as a guideline for our studies.  We've chosen Susan Wise Bauer's The Story of The World for our history studies, A Beka for grammar and math, and Martha Wilson's Latin Primer, Book I.  I plan to use several books recommended in The Well Trained Mind for our science studies (which will correlate with our history lessons in that we'll study scientific discoveries that ocurred during the same historical time period we're reading about).

Fine arts studies will include ballet, choir, and recorder band.  We were fortunate to discover a homeschool supplemental class group that offers the choir and recorder band instruction (and an opportunity to get to know some other kids).  I was especially excited about choir because she was in choir last year in the public school and I worried that she'd really miss it.  God always provides, though, doesn't He?

I guess that's it for now -- still have a good bit of prep work to do, but I think we're in good shape, considering our start date of September 6th.  I look forward to reading the other blogs here and sharing experiences and ideas!