Well, I haven't posted about what we are doing this school year so I thought I would finally get around to that. First, I have a 7th grader, 4th grader, 2nd grader, and Kindergartner. Technically, Wild Man would not be in Kindergarten yet if we did public school but that is a part of the freedom of homeschooling. Plus, I figure we will call next year Kindergarten too unless he surprises me and is ready for more 1st grader type of work. Basically the label doesn't matter. As seen in this video! Or more appropriately at the end of the video! My girls laughed so hard. Everyday after I get Hulk and Bug down for their afternoon nap we do our group learning. This entails Bible lessons, scripture memory, History, Geography, Poetry, Literature, Music study, and Art study. Not in that order or everyday. We are working through Micah in Bible right now and memorizing Ephesians 4:29. We read good living books for History everyday. We have mainly been reading African American history books because every other week we attend an AA history class. But we also may read biographies about our composer, artist, or poet that we are studying. We just finished Sounder and are now working on The Boy Who Drew Sheep. It's about Giotto, our current artist. As we learn things that happened in the past we add it to our Book of Centuries to keep track of events. We will probably start back on Beautiful Feet Books come next semester. Geography is map drills where I set a timer for 2 minutes and we see how many states the kids can point to as I say the name. I need to get a good world map for the wall so we can start on countries. Wild Man even does this, by the way. We read poems from our current poet everyday. We are studying Rudyard Kipling right now and are working through his Just So stories, each story ends in a poem. We are studying Joseph Haydn as our composer and listening to his work a few times a week. The kids do not care for it. But it's important for them to be exposed to different types of music and not believe that what they listen to is "normal". That is such a privileged attitude. Once a week I pick one piece of work from our artist, Giotto, and have the kids look at it closely and then put it away and see what they can remember. Our nature study is about once a week of spending a large block of time outside exploring, writing and drawing entries into our nature journal about what we observed and researching things we don't know or understand. Literature is just me reading to them aloud from a good living book. Through out these group endeavors we have independent studies. Each child does Math on their own. The girls do Life of Fred, The Boy does Singapore or something more hands-on. Tender does Language Arts and Chinese a few times a week on her own. Hurricane may be doing a spelling bee so she will require extra spelling studies. The Boy does Reading with me everyday and formal Science once a week. Hmmm, I may be leaving something out. The Boy and Hurricane do copy work for writing and penmanship. Tender writes letters to friends or does a paper based off of some extra reading I've assigned to her. We pull spelling from the editing of her writing. Wild Man does Bible, scripture memory, literature, and nature study with us. He also will usually play some educational games online for about 20 minutes, not everyday. I do not believe in doing formal stuff for kindergarten. Everything a child learns in kindergarten they will learn on their own. What I strive for is providing plenty of free time for outdoor play and independent play and teaching obedience. For some children teaching obedience is a full time job! (ahem..Wild Man)And you can not teach a child formal studies if they won't obey you, so this is essential! Having said that, Wild Man likes doing a math worksheet every now and then because it makes him feel big. And he wants to learn to read so we have started that through informal play. He is no where near writing! I have never seen a child his age that is so bad at guiding a pencil! Ha! He'll get there, he definitely has plenty of opportunities to practice and I doubt he will be 12 and still unable to write his name. ; ) So there you have it! What we are up to this "school" year!
1 Comment
Husband
10/6/2016 02:53:09 am
Great job wife! I love you so much.
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LindseyI'm the mama and wife. Updating you on our life! Archives
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