Faith, Marriage, Motherhood, Homeschooling, Essential oils, Herbs, and Holistic Living
Faith, Marriage, Motherhood, Homeschooling, Essential oils, Herbs, and Holistic Living
We just finished up our first year with My Father's World and it was remarkable! I seriously cannot say enough good about MFW. Beyond learning more then we have with any other curriculum in a school year, I love how the family cycle brought my older two children closer together. If you would like to see my post about the curriculum you can do so HERE. I will be adjusting some things in the coming year, for example, in addition to Language Lessons for Today I'll either be adding more of either Weaver Wisdom Words or else Abeka Language Arts then we did this last year. The only reason is because I want my kids to be extra solid writers when they leave home. I thought about starting with the next level in MFW in May. I decided it would just be so much easier to begin the new MFW level July 1st when the school year officially and legally begins, just to make record keeping a bit more organized. But that meant that I needed to create our own schedule to fill in the months between now and then. You might be wondering "What about summer break?"! We are basically year round homeschoolers. But that's not as bad as it sounds! We've found this is what works best for our family's unique learning needs, and with our work schedules. It also gives us a little bit of freedom to do "half days" every now and then if we have something else going on or want to take a field trip. I also like doing year round school for math, language arts, and reading because kids loose so much of what they learned through the summer if you don't! If you are a homeschool mom or a teacher, you know what I'm talking about! So for May and June, our calendar is filled with some things I feel like we need some work and polishing up in instead. It's not specified, but Psalms is also a Bible lesson and handwriting practice. In addition to Teaching Textbooks the kids are reading through Life of Fred and Usborne math books. We just choose whichever topic or Usborne book that applies to what the kids are learning in Teaching Textbooks. Here are some of our favorite Usborne books that we are enjoying right now! You can just click the pictures if you are interested in ordering any of them and you'll be redirected to my dear friend and Usborne consultants page. The geography game is everyday because not only is it fun, it has worked so well for teaching the kids the countries around the world!!! Since we are doing a garden this year, it's on the school schedule. In my opinion every kid should get to do gardening as a school project! They LOVE it! So ironic, in my middle son's school he had the assignment to plant a small garden the very week we began planting our three big gardens! I didn't plan it that way, (I'm not that organized), it just happened! We will be replacing a day here and there in with a couple field trips. I laid the summer schedule out similar to MFW schedules (sample below) just because the MFW layout worked so well for me. This year we will do half day's for a couple weeks starting June 13th to July 1st so the kids have plenty of outdoor time. During that time we will also have some cooking lessons and hopefully fill our food with casseroles and goodies for after baby comes. I'm also planning 1 week off after the baby is born, and half days in October-November, as usual. During the off time and half days, the kid's will do nature study, and the older two will probably be diving deeper into area's of interest. My oldest has been on an animatronics kick, so that's probably what he will research with every waking hour with his free time! So far we are a week and a half into this schedule. I had to fine tune a couple places after the first few days, and we probably won't make our goal of 3 pages in Abeka like I had hoped, nor have the kids fit in foreign language, but that is to be expected while we get used to the schedule. If we are unable to fit foreign language in the kids will just work on that during half days too. Best of all, and BIG change, the older two have already learned how to follow it independently! Of course I still flit around the room supervising, but they are like a well running machine (with the exception of Language Arts)! That's huge to us, I've dreamt of this for years, lol! It's a big deal for me because it (hopefully) means they will be able to follow their MFW schedule once July hits. That will be a massive help after the baby is born. It's big for them because once I showed them how it works they seem to enjoy taking the responsibility of following it. They have such a spirit of achievement while they are working and since they can see the end of the list it inspires them to stay on task as opposed to daydreaming or chit chatting, henceforth, they finish sooner! And, since they are working better on their own it enables me to focus on Gabriel, which helps him finish sooner too! Do you homeschool? If so, how is your year finishing up? What plans do you have for summer? Leave a comment below! Never miss a thing! Follow along with us!
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