This is from Homeschool Skedtrack. It's an online scheduling tool. It's free. And I love it!

I'm an organized person by nature and this lets me toy with things without creating my own spreadsheets or erasing a lot.

This is Sweet Pea's course list for next year, so far. If you click it I think it'll get bigger so it's readable. :)

Homeschool room

I post pictures off and on of the changes in our homeschool room. I just took more tonight. These maps have been on this wall since shortly after we moved in. They continue to be useful and frequently used, so they stay.

Opposite the maps is my china cabinet. I have candy stashed on the bottom shelf. And my newspaper stash.


I have a few super messes that stick around- mostly the large stash of newspaper I save for floor protection, crafts, and cleaning. I could probably whittle it down, but it doesn't bother me too much. My bookcase also doesn't stay lined up well- as you can see things are jammed in chaotically. The blanket covered thing next to the book case is the dog kennel- I also need a prettier cover for that!


I really like these two cabinets- the corner where they meet provides a nice, out of sight place to store posters that aren't currently in use.


Finally- this is the room as a whole, as seen from the kitchen doorway.
And that's where all the magic happens. :)

Subject planning and resources, part 1

I recently received a complaint from my mother about the lack of pictures on here, so I'll go wildly in the opposite direction now. ;)

I have the large bulk of my planning for the first nine weeks done.I also think that I have our daily schedule planned.

I intend to start with the subjects that my girls will do together- Bible, Catechism, and french.


My goal for Bible work this year is to make it through the major points of the Old Testament, with one story worked on per week for the full week. I used Child's Garden of Bible Stories to pick what to do. We'll also be reading it from other sources, as well as the actual Bible, so I think we'll preserve accuracy.


At the end of the week I'll have Sweet Pea write a sentence or two in her own words about the story and have Little Bird narrate her thoughts. The next day I'll have them both make a picture about the story and we'll put them into book form so each girl has a book about each story. We'll also work through the pages of the Child's Garden of Bible stories workbook.


Just for fun, here are some of our "supporting texts". My main goal was resources on level for both kids.


We're also using CPH's Arch Books series.

To coordinate it all I planned out nine weeks of lessons, with five days of work for each lesson. I didn't date anything on purpose- we can work in vacations and sick time without altering the time line this way.


Same format, only math here. I put together Singapore Primary Mathematics 1a (standards) with Math Mammoth Addition 1 and Subtraction 1.


I've put together a preliminary course of study- it looks like a lot all together! Form from Donna Young, my favorite home-school organization site.

Next, I'm guilty of jumping on the current trend of file folder organization. Here's the folder for week one.

Contents of week one- everything but the textbooks. I've already done all the printing I need for the lessons so no running to the computer for worksheets!


And the checklists. A big goal for the year for me is to get Sweet Pea working a little more independently and starting to take some responsibility for time management. To that end I'm putting a weekly list in each week's folder so she can see and mark off everything as it gets finished. I hope this'll help her see what is done and needs to be done.


Week one has a slightly different checklist since we aren't starting all subjects the first week.


And that's where I'm at currently!

I still need a start date. ;)

Cabinet organization and our homeschool room

This room is also our dining room, so the decor is a little dual purpose.
Here's the view of the room from the kitchen. This is the whole room.


We do most of our schooling at the table. It allows us enough room for Sweet Pea to do her work, me to record what we're doing and help, and Little Bird to do Play-Doh or color. I like that we can all be together at the same time.
I have two cabinets that close that I put all the messy and weird shaped stuff in.

They allow me to close away the chaos and not worry about how the kids put away the art stuff. I also keep some homeschooling stuff that we use occasionally, or that I plan to use but am not currently in the cabinets.

See that mess? Unless the cabinets are open, you can't!


I have a book shelf that I keep our current, in use, stuff in. That whole top shelf is just religious ed. stuff right now! Since I'm involved in putting things away, this stays reasonably well ordered. Usually.


Last but not least we have our huge maps. It's pretty classy having these up when I'm entertaining, but they are very useful for geography and history, so they stay.


And now you can picture where all of our fabulous learning happens!

Advent preparations

This is our Advent wreath. It's not terribly wreath like, but it's something that works. For the Christ candle in the middle I have another votive. At some point in the future we may get a more traditional set- or we may all be attached to it. We'll see. I'm currently looking at a few of the sets that Autum sells.


This is our Advent calendar. The goal is to move one item per day to the top in the evening along with family devotions.


This is our new, kid friendly nativity set from a very generous Grammy. Thanks! It spans the top of both homeschool cabinets. If you look closely the little baby Jesus is missing- he's waiting for Christmas to make his appearance.



I also included two pictures of my homeschool cabinets. The bulk of what we currently use is in these cabinets for ease of use and general neatness. This first cabinet is mainly intended for schooly type stuff- the binders and texts we use, my organizational stuff, the pencils and art supplies we use for notebooking, and the reading we are currently working on.


This cabinet is more craft and art supplies. The kids have free access to all of the paper and crayons. They are supposed to ask before using the scissors and glue. There are also pipe cleaners, pom poms, math manipulatives, paper bags, and stickers. There are also some coloring books that Little Bird prefers to use right now instead of the more open ended mess creation that Sweet Pea likes. :)

Daily reporting continued + pie!

Not pictured but also done today was Spelling First. I'd like to do some extra lessons in spelling, phonics and grammar to get to where I thought we'd be in my preplanning. If we don't we don't, but it's a nice goal, isn't it?


I restarted the phonograms from Cursive First. I had been just correcting Sweet Pea's handwriting as we went, but I'm seeing now that what she really needed was just a few minutes at a time of practicing individual letters and sound combinations again. I was really inspired by Hunt Classical Academy and how great her son's handwriting is. So here we are again. Good news is that sheets that 6 months ago met a lot of resistance and whining now are easy and quick and joyfully done.


We finished Earlybird 2A yesterday so today we began Earlybird 2B! Sweet Pea was very excited to have a new book.


Today we finished Chapter 2 of Story of the World. Obviously about Egyptian mythology. I saw some interesting parallels with the Cain and Abel story we talked about last week. I'm pretty sure this is NOT a traditional Egyptian coloring scheme.


We are eight weeks in! That means we're almost one quarter finished with our school year! I can't believe how fast it's whizzing by.


And just because this turned out really well and a lot of other blogs I read have been talking about pie lately- this is a panless apple pie. It was SO good and very easy to make.

On schedules

Inspired by a conversation I had earlier.
I am a big fan of schedules- not just for homeschooling, but for sleeping and eating for children.
There are a few reasons.
First- I think it's very important with multiple kids to have sleeping and waking times together. This means that most of the time it's quiet when one child wants to sleep and it's OK to be noisy when they want to. They are usually into playing at the same times, as well.
Second- kid free time is very important to me. I love my little ones dearly, I do. But I very much value that after bedtime I can count of doing grown up things- chores that are more time consuming or dangerous with running toddlers around, quiet mama reading, knitting, and other decadent activities. I also value time with my husband where we don't have to focus on being parents, we can instead focus on being each other together. Enough said on that.
Third- I like knowing when to expect them to be rested. I can commit to activities and projects out of the home with a reasonable expectation of them being well rested, well fed, and ready to play or focus, whatever the situation warrants.

In other news- we FINALLY finished lesson 100 of the Ordinary Parent's Guide! It took so long due mainly to all the just plain reading we've been doing, but I am determined that we will finish phonics this year. Sweet Pea is doing an awesome job reading- tonight we started a Magic Schoolbus book together and she managed most of the words by herself, becoming mainly tripped up by names. Yay, Sweet Pea!

Curricula review time!

Now that we're getting a feel for what we're using, how it fits, and what we like.

For Math: we're continuing with our tangrams- still a win! Singapore- still a win. Miquon- Sweet Pea is enjoying this a little less right now, although I'm not sure why. Some of it the way that they are introducing addition- sliding the blocks and then sliding numbers. We'll see.
For Reading: I have to admit that we are in a McGuffey slump. We are doing the Ordinary Parent's Guide regularly, and while I can't say that Sweet Pea really LIKES it, it's short and effective. We are not using Hooked on Phonics any longer, unless I feel like Sweet Pea needs reinforcing or if she wants to read one of the stories.
For Language Arts: I like Spelling Power. It's pretty independent and so far all review. Sweet Pea enjoys it and is working steadily. Writing With Ease- this one is tougher. I like it, and I like it a lot. Sweet Pea on the other hand does not enjoy it quite so much, mostly because it's work. It's probably one of the more academically challenging things she's doing right now. We will continue to do it, and be grateful that it's short. First Language Lessons is a much bigger hit, on all sides.
For History: Story of the World is a hit. The activity guide is a bigger hit. I'm not sure how much is being retained- and that's the big benefit is the history rotation. There's no pressure to pund all the finer points of ancient history into my little one's head- it's just an introduction.
Latin and all others: I must confess that we are not yet doing any extras. So far we are doing our core, and regularly. Once we're more settled we'll add in the electives.

Daily updates continued

Today we had a royally awful morning, with behavior that was so bad it was amazing. So we didn't get any school done. By the time that Sweet Pea was ready I had a raging headache and I just wanted to sit with a hot cup of tea- so I did.
We did our school work in the afternoon.
We started with Spelling Workout- lesson three complete! Then Singapore Earlybird 2A- lesson 13 complete! Lesson 13 focused on the introduction of the written numbers and how they correlate to numerals.
After that we did Writing with Ease- which is now done for the week. I love the illustrations on the workbook pages for Writing with Ease- kudos to whoever put them in. Our assignment today was a short narration from a passage from, "Little House in the Big Woods". Sweet Pea's choice of sentences inadvertently perfectly complemented the picture!
I'm throwing this in, out of order. This is Sweet Pea's illustration to go with the poem, "The Caterpillar" by Christina Rossetti, from First Language Lessons.
I'm also posting the first part of my weekly schedule sheet now that it's filled out. It goes across the top to include Friday and Saturday, but there's nothing interesting there yet. Over on the far left is where I keep track of the weeks dates. For each day I then enter in what we actually accomplish vs. what I had planned on my planning sheets. I have another page that I've worked out all the acronyms, since the boxes are tiny. For example, under Thursday I have: SW- Spelling Workout, S2A- Sinagpore 2A (lesson 13), WWE- Writing with Ease (lesson 1), SOTW- Story of the World (intro), and the Ordinary Parent's Guide (lesson 93). I really enjoy keeping track like this- being able to know exactly what we did on a given day has been very useful.

Organizational post

You can click on any of the pics to make them large enough to read clearly.


This is the worksheet that I used to slot things by day and then time of day. I also put time estimates down for everything so that I could tally the total estimated time spent per day to make it even and not too long.
Writing it all out in a spiral notebook helped. It's also an easy way to divide up how much should happen in each week to finish books.


This is a general outline of what I'm planning on using for 1st grade.


The cleaned up daily schedule. This is the first item in my planner binder.


A blank school calendar. I plan to circle the days that we school.


Next is an attendance form. I won't need to file this with the state until Sweet Pea turns 7 but I like to practice skills before we need them. And try out different forms.


Next I include a course of study- which is a fancy way of saying I write down all the books I plan to use and what subjects we'll use them for.


Then I have a sheet to keep track of the abbreviations used for each subject. This way when I record keep I don't have to write the full titles everyday- and so when I look back in time I remember what the acronyms mean.

I plan by semester each subject on it's own worksheet. It's broken down into specific days for each week. I do one semester at a time so that if we're ahead or behind I can reevaluate at the semester's end.

The forms I use for much of this I've found at http://www.donnayoung.org


Also in the binder are reading logs, library books lists- including when to request books needed for Story of the World, and daily schedules.

I also have the binders suggested by the Well Trained Mind ready for language arts, history and science. They're pretty blank right now, though, since we aren't starting until this fall.

I'd also like to make a household management binder at some point, but that's a ways off.