school

  • school

    homeschooling q and a, part three.

    Happy Friday, dear friends! We’ve almost made it! I hope this series has been helpful for practical ideas, trouble-shooting your home school, or perhaps thinking through whether homeschooling might be for you. If you have any other questions, please let me know through comments or email! Last few for now … Q. How do you homeschool multiple grades? A. I feel barely qualified to answer this since this is really the first year you could say I’m schooling “multiple” grades, but here we go. I’ve been pleasantly surprised how smoothly the transition has gone to homeschooling three grades. My best tricks for helping this go smoothly are to: 1. Be…

  • school

    homeschooling q and a, part two.

    Good afternoon! This is the second of a three-part series answering homeschooling questions. Part one talked about Classical Conversations and homeschool groups. Today I’ll focus on curriculum and planning. Friday, I’ll speak to homeschooling with littles and homeschooling multiple grades. Friends, I know all of this is super information overload. Truly, it’s easier for me to write in all here in one week, but do not try to read it all at once! The minute it becomes a burden or overwhelming, just stop! You can always file it away and come back to it as you have time. The last thing I want is to discourage you or make you…

  • school

    homeschooling q and a, part one.

    Hi there, friends! First things first: I love hearing from you, whether by email, text or comment! Please don’t ever feel the need to leave a comment, but if you want to (hint, hint), I know the system I used was a little un-user-friendly. I had it installed because of spam, but I’d really love to encourage more dialogue here, so I just switched back to the original format. I’ll be on the lookout for spam, and I hope it makes it easier for you to chime in! Remember when I wrote a blog post about homeschooling, oh, about five months ago? I fully expected to write a follow-up, giving…

  • school

    book club for kids: mary poppins.

    This year a friend of mine organized a little book-and-field-trip group. We meet the first Friday of every month during the school year for a field trip and three times we’ll read a book and have a “book club party” to discuss and celebrate it. Today was the first book club meeting. It was scheduled for tomorrow but we decided to move it a day forward due to all the hurricane craziness around here; we showed up at a local park but discovered all government building/organizations are closed for the coming storm. So our friend Kristin offered to host us last-minute in her backyard, and it turned out to be…

  • columbia,  school

    august.

    Hello friends! Can you believe that we’re in the second week of August? We officially started school last Monday. We attempted to start back in July. I wanted to try my hand at more of a year-round-schooling schedule because I fancy myself to be one of those mothers for whom the world is a classroom and life is our education and every walk outside fosters a love of nature. Why would we take a man-made break from learning for two whole months? Well, after about two days, we quit viewing the world as our classroom. The little boys loved it because they crave more structure, but the big kids weren’t…

  • school

    school at home.

    What I understand now that I didn’t before, regarding my work, is that when you love what you do the drive you have is unstoppable and you will find a way to keep moving forward. I wake up before the rest of the house wakes up to learn, I listen to podcasts in the car and when I cook and clean to learn, and I read any spare moment I have to learn. – Melinda McCoy via Design Mom   We finished our third year of home school at the end of May. The turquoise school cart in the dining room is cleared of textbooks, math flashcards, and random bits…

  • motherhood,  school

    spring semester.

    We’re ten days into our spring semester of school! I always try to take some time in between to sit and evaluate our previous semester, and then make a plan for the next one. The last month or so of school dragged, friends. It felt like pulling teeth to get our work finished. There are just so.many.distractions with four kids. Day after day of not feeling like I could finish a complete sentence, much less a reading lesson in one sitting, made me feel frazzled and very tired. I’m so glad I planned to start school at the beginning of August expressly so that we could have a three-week break…

  • school,  the kids

    judah’s first poem.

    Judah wrote his first poem last week. It wasn’t an assignment — we were doing our daily reading in Story of the World, and afterward he said, “I’m going to write a poem!” He remembered from our grammar lessons that the first word in each line should be capitalized. And then he sat and wrote it. He presented it to his class at Classical Conversations today, and this proud mom can’t help sharing it with you!   History History is not a mystery How do we know? From The earliest creation To the best information. Epic battles take place. Astronauts go to the moon in space. And that’s how we…

  • school

    homeschooling with four kids.

    To be honest, I was scared-stiff about attempting to homeschool with four kids in our family. Especially when two of them are new-to-us. David and I considered and prayed through our options this summer, and in the end, we both felt in our gut that, even with its challenges, this is the right path for our family. But it was with fear and trembling that I began school on August 3rd. Like I said in last week’s post, every moment of the day is not smooth. We have lots of interruptions, and Mommy loses her temper sometimes. There was one particular Disastrous Day when David stopped by the house at…

  • school

    the start of school.

    We’re in our fifth week of a new school year. Our days are not idyllic or without interruptions, but I’m here to report that we’re off to a great start. We are learning and laughing and, for the most part, very much enjoying being together. This is due to a whole lot of God’s grace, and also, I think, two main factors: 1. We found a great daily schedule, and 2. We love our curriculum. More on that later this week, but for now, some photos! Happy Labor Day!