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101 Doodle Definitions: A Timberdoodle Review
This is a sponsored post by Timberdoodle. All of the opinions are my own. __________________________________ This year our homeschool has been a bit more streamlined than it ever has before. Less fluid and more structured. Some this has to do with life circumstances. I need the schedule to be more predictable so I can arrange meetings and work hours around what is known and planned. Some of this has to do with the ages and grades of my children. Older students have greater demands on their school days, a larger amount of studying is required for say, Chemistry, versus a nature walk for a second grader. Some of…
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routines. chore lists. schedules. I share a few and I’d love to hear from you.
We’ve been extra diligent about getting up on time and starting school on time. This year. And yet – school is taking a loooong time lately. I mean, that’s normal. It’s fine. I have two high school students and one middle schooler and two elementary students and that all just equals a lot of educating and computer sharing and mom-help-needing. Add in work and teaching at Meadowlark and I don’t know how to manage it all mostly. I was laughing with a couple other families after church on Sunday about busy schedules and meals in the car between karate and soccer practices and whatever it is your family is…
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Little Time, Big Time, No Time
This week the girls are taking a biology camp. No, it wasn’t exactly their choice. But it’s a really wonderful opportunity for them to dissect things that need dissecting, to learn how to create lab reports and how to document their findings and to have a reminder of how to use a microscope accurately. These are areas that perhaps I have not emphasized enough at home. Or, you know, at all, when it comes to dissecting. I mean, they took another dissection lab earlier this year too so I make sure it’s covered, but I like to have alternate teachers besides myself cover these specific requirements. Because, well, it’s…
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Five Finds Friday (funny photos and my dog’s grin and how we homeschool)
It’s been a good week. And a rainy week. And a regular old week week. All at the same time. Like it does. funny London likes to take my photos and turn them into silly things. Recently she grabbed this silly photo of herself and did this. I like that she can laugh at herself too. Also. Ryder’s birthday was this week. There was a dog cake made. And – he’s smiling in this photo – isn’t he? fashionable Oh these gorgeous kantha blankets from Basha and Open River Imports. They are incredibly beautiful. flavorful Sometimes history meets…
Keep Reading . . .
Mand Labs Lit: A Timberdoodle Review
these days ….
Scrunch Map: A Timberdoodle Review
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reading and literary journals and your suggestions
There’s a lot of details I’ll get wrong in education. (Same was true when I was employed in mainstream education too.) Ideas shift. Trends in education rise and fill. Diagramming sentences matters in one decade, not so much in the next. I started farming out math to tutors and computer “textbooks” at about the third grade. Science isn’t my jam. At home we don’t raise our hands and sometimes we do history class in our pajamas. We travel as much as we’re able for the best sort of learning and no one calls roll each morning. The one long standing, enduring, hasn’t changed detail that I do manage to…
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you pick the story from our day: a beautiful & terrible world.
Which story should I tell you about my day? The one where the kids and I sat on a gigantic rock outcropping behind poet Carl Sandburg’s house in Flat Rock, NC and read his poems to one another while the mountains and the trees listened in? Or the one where my kids acted so ridiculous at the dinner table that one of them spewed lemonade all over his sweet potato? Should I tell you about how we visited a new to us apple orchard and loved the dwarf trees and the views and the staff there? Or should I tell you how my…
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it’s easy to love homeschool on a day like this.
One of the more challenging aspects of homeschooling five students at once in five different grades is that their needs and desires and skill sets, both educationally and otherwise, are so varied. When they were all younger, this seemed less dramatic. There seemed to be less of a division. Now London, in high school, can be rather tethered to giant books or a computer for her math program. Her science can take nearly an hour to wade through each day. Labor intensive. Much more so than elementary school. So the dreamy Little House on the Prairie days are fading and it’s certainly plausible that I am holding more tightly…
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Dr. Bonyfide, Science Books: A Timberdoodle Review
This was the year that I knew our science would take a giant shift in the Wildwood Halls of Ivy. London started high school which means the rules all change and there is a particular order and type of science that she has to cover. She’s taking Biology this year but I didn’t want to have all of the kids take high school biology because, of course, my elementary students couldn’t keep up with that. We’re still doing a weekly Nature Study together because it’s important to me, but this year I decided to have London take biology and Bergen and Mosely (7th and 8th graders) are trying a…
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Beautiful Coloring: A Timberdoodle Review
School is back in session and I haven’t even snapped one single legitimate back-to-school photo for some reason. Maybe because not every kid is always dressed in photo worthy attire at the same moment. Or because our first days have been sort of anti-climatic. (This morning I started the day out by artfully dropping a glass bowl full of hummus – shattering the glass across the entire kitchen floor. Despite our careful clean up both Bergen and I have received glass splinters in our feet already today. It was even hummus that I used real tahini in so it tasted top-notch. I don’t know which made me more sad…
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Day One School Thoughts
School started back for us today. Hello Wildwood Halls of Ivy. I have a high school daughter again. And two middle schoolers. My “baby” is in third grade. He feels super unexcited to be required to do school again. Today it was difficult to stay on track for all of us, but I think over all we did alright. High school curriculum is not cheap, let me tell you. Our Latin curriculum has yet to arrive but I like the first couple of days to be a slow start anyway so we don’t hit all the subjects all the days. Latin is new for us…
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Local Beowulf Class: My Girls Loved It, Maybe Yours Will Too
Even though my official piece of paper declares that I have a degree in English and Theatre and Communications (it was so hard to choose), I am always looking for opportunities for my children to participate in the arts in memorable and challenging ways. I know that, even though the deepest core of my home education philosophy is reading and living books and art, I need other teachers and educators and perspectives and experiences feeding into my children’s hearts and minds. I believe they need to sit in the audience at theatre performances and I believe they need to step on stage sometimes too. I believe they need group discussions…
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A Simple Map Study: A Charlotte Mason Geography
Sometimes in home school (in life) we make things so complicated. Well, sometimes I make things so complicated. My family moved from the coast of Virginia to the mountains of Virginia the year I was leaving the sixth grade. In my old school on the coast, geography was taught more exclusively in seventh grade. In my new school in the mountains, geography had been taught in the sixth grade. I missed the window. Therefore, I have nursed a deficiency in geography for most of my life. I am good with directions and carry a pretty decent mental map around in my head of my own hometown and my own area…
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how a year round schedule is saving our homeschool. (and me.)
Two years ago the Wildwood Halls of Ivy (that’s our fancy registered homeschool name) switched it up. We started doing school year round. I’d say the year round aspect of school has been a complete success. I’m so glad we made the shift. I only wish I had done year round school always. The first year we tried year round our schedule (and our life) was in quite a bit more upheaval than it currently is and our weeks off were wildly flexible. God was gracious and that free time fit our needs more organically and fluidly when the occasion called for it. It worked, but I wouldn’t call…
