(Hopefully) Helpful Homeschooling Resources

With more schools and businesses closing their doors everyday in attempts to slow the spread of COVID-19, families everywhere are being thrown out of their usual routine in a time of heightened anxiety. I know that personally, my anxiety feeds off of a disrupted routine and I know that I am not alone in this. I want to share today how we structure our day as homeschoolers, as well as a list of free resources that I love and social media accounts that I have found helpful in our homeschooling journey, in an effort to hopefully help some people out there navigate their new normal for the next several weeks. 

Before I start, I do want to be sure to say that I don't think you have to come up with a plan at all. Some people I know will be happier to take things day by day as far as any structured learning activities and others will be happier just enjoying a nice long spring break. I don't think there are any right or wrong answers in this situation, and think that different families will all have different ways of coping that work best for them. But if you are looking for some structure or ideas for a plan, I hope this helps!

First I'll share what a typical homeschooling day with no outside of the house activities looks like for us. We don't have a set schedule exactly, but more like a loose outline. It's too hard for us to stick to an actual schedule because babies and toddlers complicate things, but an outline at least gives the bigger kids a sense of what's going to come next. I have found that the more you try to structure your day like a typical non-homeschool school day, the more you will frustrate yourself. There are so many disruptions and distractions when schooling at home, it's just easier to stay flexible! 

We start our school day over breakfast. For us it's an easy way to get some reading done without too many interruptions since everybody is occupied eating! We do poetry, Bible, and memory work at this time, but any reading out loud would be an easy thing to do. After breakfast we clean up, get dressed, AM chores, all that good stuff.

Once everybody is dressed and chores are done and the baby is either down for a nap or up for a nap and fed (depends on the day right now because we are at the mercy of the 4 month sleep regression) we start our big chunk of school time. We always start with a gross motor activity because it's really hard to go from playing with your toys in your own house to doing schoolwork immediately. We do something called Swedish Drill which is basically a formal Simon Says, but in the past we've done freeze dance, stretching, skipping around the room or house, or red light green light across the room. 

Once we are finished some sort of movement, we settle into the sit down work. I have out puzzles, books, or sometimes a fine motor activity for the little guys (I have a whole post about homeschooling preschoolers and toddlers, check that out here), but mostly they just play. I try to alternate independent work and one on one work with the big kids, but sometimes they'll need to wait for me and then they go play. 

The breakdown usually looks like this:

-Phonics lesson with Kate/Sam copywork and 1 independent reading

-Kate copywork/Sam narrate independent reading and 1 reading and narration together

-Kate reading and narration together/Sam math lesson (we go over it together first) and mapwork, history timeline, nature journaling, or drawing

-Kate math lesson (go over together first and map, timeline, nature journaling, or drawing/Sam reading and narration together

-Repeat same sort of thing for whatever is left

Over lunch is when we often do music and art appreciation study and in the afternoon we do more crafty things or go outside or nothing structured and just play. 

Everything we do follows our curriculum, but there are some aspects of it that could be easily adapted for temporary homeschooling. In particular:

Copywork- We start copywork with just the alphabet. I write it out on primary lined paper and they copy it out slowly and neatly underneath. Then we move up to words and eventually sentences. I pick the sentences from their poetry books, but you could choose them from any books. Sam right now either does copywork that I have chosen or he chooses a couple lines from one of his books and copies them straight out of the book. When he's doing copywork that I have chosen and already written, he covers a few words at a time with an index card as he writes them down. This helps him with spelling. Copywork helps with handwriting obviously, but also sentence structure and punctuation without having to really drill it. Next year Sam will start studied dictation, which is something else that could easily be used in a temporary situation. I will choose a short passage from one of his books and he will have the week to read over it and get to know it (including punctuation) and then at the end of the week he will write it out as I slowly read it. Any misspelled words will go onto a spelling list and any missed punctuation will be highlighted and worked on.

Narration- Our curriculum is literature based, so we don't have textbooks. I read out loud from a history, science, geography, etc book and afterwards they orally narrate back to me what I read to them. The science behind narration boils down to the fact that telling information back after hearing it helps lock it into your brain. Sometimes for fun they'll do a drawn narration. Next year Sam will start written narrations. It's sort of a gradual lead into learning to write essays. It can be done with any book that you read to them or that they read to themselves. It's a really good brain exercise for everybody! Sometimes when I'm reading a heavier book I challenge myself to narrate it back to myself. It's hard! But it really does lock the information in there and makes your brain work in a different way while you read, organizing everything. I try not to ask any leading questions before they narrate. Just simply, "Can you tell that back to me?" or, "What can you tell me about what we/you just read?"

Mapping and timeline- Keeping a big map and a history timeline is a really fun accompaniment to any reading that you're doing. A timeline especially (we use a big long piece of paper, but you could just use any notebook with each page showing a hundred years) is super interesting! It's cool (and often surprising!) to see which historical figures actually existed at the same time. After we read something about any historical figure or event, we write it on our timeline and mark it on a map. Just a good way for kids to get an idea of some basic geography and a sense of how the passage of time works. Before we start the history timeline (end-ish of 2nd grade-ish), we do a personal timeline and they just mark what things happened in their own life in what years.

The advisory board who created the curriculum that we use created an emergency curriculum plan several years ago, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It has many free resources and ideas for homeschooling through an abnormal season of life. I'll link it here.

https://amblesideonline.org/HELP.shtml

Some other great resources:

Librivox- free audiobook versions of a lot of titles, particularly older books.

Libby- app that connects to your library system so you can borrow e-books and audiobooks

https://www.myteachingstation.com/ - good resource for printable worksheets. I like to laminate them or put them in a plastic page protector so the kids can use a dry erase marker and use them multiple times

Hoffman Academy- online piano lessons. Their full program costs money, but they do have a free program as well. 

https://afterthoughtsblog.net/2016/07/beginning-swedish-drill-videos.html - this is a blog post that explains the Swedish Drill (structured Simon Says) that we use to start our school day

Some social media accounts that I like following for inspiration and ideas (most are on both Instagram and Facebook) I'm going to type their names with spaces to make them easier to read, but on Instagram obviously you'd need to take the spaces out:

TheDadLab

Play at Home Mom

Modern Miss Mason

Learning Well

Charlotte Mason IRL

Home Ed Printables

The Conscious Kid

Read Aloud Revival

A couple other companies offering free resources right now (I think there are a lot more, but these are 2 that I've heard of today that I can vouch for)

Raddish Kids

Logic of English they are putting out a series of new videos in the next few days that will be free for the duration of all of the closures

Pinterest is also a wealth of information and ideas. Craft ideas, fine motor skills ideas, printables. I have quite a lot of homeschooling related pins on my Pinterest organized into boards by subject. You should be able to find me on there just by searching my name!

Here are a couple other blog posts I've written about our own homeschooling journey.

Our Daily Routine at the End of 2018

'18/'19 School Plans

How We Homeschool Preschool 

What's Working and What's Not

Homeschooling Looks Like

Lastly, if I can, I want to offer some slightly more personal advice. Don't stress yourself out about it. There's going to be a different dynamic between you and your kids than there is between them and a teacher. There's going to be more tension and awkwardness because the whole world is tense and awkward right now and kids are feeding off of that. It's really okay to stop a math lesson smack in the middle because you're at each other's throats. It's okay to leave it for later that day and it's also okay to leave it for another day. It's okay to say, "This just isn't working today." and go outside instead. Or watch a movie. It's okay if that movie is a Nat Geo documentary, but it's also okay if it's not. It's okay if you have a schedule and stick to it and it's also okay if you just leave books and paper around your house and let them do with it what they will. And it's okay if you do both of those things over the course of a week. Homeschooling your kids, whether it's for a month or for 13 years, gets to look like whatever you want and need it to look like.

I'm here to talk anytime ♡

'18/'19 School Plans!

I don't exactly know how it's already gotten to be time to talk about our plans for the upcoming school year, but here we are! We still won't start for a few weeks, but I've been getting all of my planning and organizing underway because 1- I love it and 2- I can enjoy the next several weeks of summer a whole lot more without school prep work hanging over my head!

So Sam is going into *2nd* grade. Doesn't that just sound so old? I remember 2nd grade so clearly! *Insert every cliche about feeling old and how fast time is moving here*, but I'm so excited for this year with him! His reading has really taken off in the last 6 months and this school year is going to be a whole different ballgame! We will be continuing to implement Charlotte Mason's methods and will continue to use AmblesideOnline as our main curriculum. This year Sam will be in year 2.

Kate will technically be going into Kindergarten, but we do not do much formal schooling prior to 1st grade. The 2nd half of last year she was becoming more interested in sit down schoolwork, and she's been chomping at the bit to learn to read so I may structure her days some more later on, possibly after Christmas. For now, she and Henry will be listening in when they want and I'll have my usual preschool/kindergarten activities to pull out when they want to 'do school'. For more on how we homeschool preschool, go here.

In year 2, we'll be continuing with some books from last year, mostly for history, as well as adding in some new titles. Here's our book stack!

I didn't include any of the "free read" selections from the book list, but I am very excited to track Sam's free reading this year with how much he reads on his own now!

In addition to our daily readings, each of which will be orally narrated (or sometimes drawn and orally narrated) back to me, each day we'll have: math, copywork, Bible, memory work, poetry, reading, drill, and French. Weekly we'll have: hymn study, folk song, composer study, art study, drawing, nature study, geography, handicrafts, timeline, and piano. Depending on how piano goes, that might change to daily or every other day. A month or so into the year we will be adding cursive practice in with regular copywork.

Since Sam can read fluently, we don't really need to a reading program. I have this book, Discover Reading, which guides teaching reading the way Charlotte Mason did in her schools, and I might do some of the activities from the end of it with Sam, but he's mostly beyond all of it now. Reading out loud at least part of one of his readings each day, plus the 10 minutes of free reading out loud he already does daily will be his reading "curriculum". We are happy still staying a year "behind" with Horizons math since it seems to be a fairly accelerated program. Handwriting Without Tears will be what we use for cursive writing instruction. The Pictures in Cursive book is just extra because I really liked it 😉

Last year I feel like one area in which we were really lacking was our nature study. So this year, in an attempt to be more intentional, we'll be using Exploring Nature with Children by Lynn Seddon. It references the Handbook included in our AO curriculum so it's a great fit! I'm very excited! This will be for everybody, not just Sam!

We'll be learning French without a set program. Last year we were slowly compiling a list of French words that we knew, reviewing them all at lunchtime and adding a new one every now and then. We also started reading an English/French picture book which everybody loved! This year we'll be continuing all of that, plus reading more French picture books, and listening to French stories and fables on YouTube. As we get better, we'll work at translating what we listen to together and I will ask Sam for short, simple narrations in French after listening. 

Ambleside Online provides a scheduled art study for each school year. We study 6 pieces by 1 artist per term and spend 2 weeks on each piece. This year I compiled them all into a photo book. Our art study is still very simple. We'll look at that week's picture and talk about it. The 2nd week I'll give them a couple minutes to look at it, and then take it away and ask them to describe it to me. I'll usually read a short bio of the artist as well.

For memory work this year, we'll be using the memory box method found here on Simply Charlotte Mason. This will involve everybody because we do memory work over breakfast.

For recitation, Sam will have a Psalm, 6 verses from the Old Testament, 6 verses from the New Testament, a poem of his choosing, and a hymn per term to read out loud to all of us. The goal isn't to memorize, but a lot of it will likely end up memorized! He will recite just once a week for about 5-10 minutes, so he won't recite all of these each week.

For year 2, we study one poet per term and the poems for each term are available on the website. I printed them out and put them in a report cover just to make life a little easier. We do our scheduled poetry reading over breakfast.

We are still working on a personal timeline, to gain a better understanding of the passing of time, but we may also begin a simple history timeline part of the way through the year. In the later years of this curriculum, we will keep a detailed history timeline and later a book of centuries, but we won't take on this huge project just yet. We had fun starting Sam's personal timeline last year! I'm thinking around Christmastime (or earlier depending on how the year is going) I will put a fold out timeline in this section of Sam's binder so we can start entering some names and dates from our readings here and there.

I will continue to write out selections from our readings or poetry in Sam's binder for his copywork. His handwriting improved tremendously last year doing copywork and I'm looking forward to seeing how this year goes!

We will listen to a different hymn and folk song each month. Everybody really loved the folk songs especially last year. We don't do anything special with this, just listen. Sometimes some of them like to dance while they listen, sometimes we just sit quietly and listen, sometimes we listen while doing other work, sometimes while eating. The folk songs are pretty easy to pick up over the course of the month, so we're usually singing along eventually!

AO provides a scheduled composer study similar to the art study. We study 6 pieces by 1 composer each term, 2 weeks per piece. I usually read the composer's bio and we just listen at some point during our day. If I can find a video on YouTube of the piece actually being played we definitely watch that!

Handicrafts is another area I felt we needed to beef up this year. Finger knitting and soap carving are 2 high on our list this year. We'll also be trying our hands at paper sloyd using this free e-book. Sam is mostly excited to learn to fold paper into an envelope.

We have a geography reading once a week and we'll also be working on filling in several blank maps I've printed.

For piano we're going to be doing free online lessons with Hoffman Academy. We don't have a piano so the frequency of this will depend on how often we can use my parents' piano or if we get our own piano (or, more likely, keyboard). Just Sam will be learning to play piano, but everybody will be doing some singing lessons following the Children of the Open Air channel on YouTube.

For drawing I'll be getting Sam another Dover drawing book. He really loved the one he used last year. His drawing skills improved a ton and it absolutely helped his handwriting as well. I also want him to start some brush drawing instruction. YouTube has some great tutorials.

Drill is new for us this year. Charlotte Mason used Swedish Drill in her schools for both phys. ed. and cultivating the habit of attention. It's basically more structured Simon Says using movements that improve gross motor skills. It looks so fun. This blog has been really helpful figuring it all out!

Reading over everything I've just typed makes me realize this probably comes off as looking like a lot of work and very overwhelming! I feel like now is a good time to drop the reminder that Charlotte Mason advocated for nice, short lessons at this stage. This curriculum is very rich and full, but it isn't time consuming!

I take the term schedules from the Ambleside site and put them into my own, weekly schedules. I tweaked the template I used last year a bit.

Before starting a new term I sit down with this and input the readings for each week, as well as the scheduled hymn, folk song, art study, etc. and print the whole term (so, 12 weeks) to keep in my binder.

So that's Sam! Like I said earlier, Kate won't really being doing anything formal, but she will end up being a part of so much of Sam's work! I will also be intentionally reading quality books to her and to Henry (using the "year 0" booklist on the Ambleside site, as well as the books in our copy of "Before Five in a Row"), and we'll be starting at the beginning of Discover Reading. She already has a good grasp on a lot of basic math just from life, but I may begin the Horizons K book with her in the spring if she seems to want to.

Bits of our K and preschool "plan". I bought both Kate and Henry their own dry erase board this year. I use one to write important names or details when I'm reading to Sam, to help with his narration, and everybody always fights over it when I'm finished. So now Henry and Kate can scribble away on their own boards and not fight over mine!

All of our school stuff is still kept in what used to be our front coat closet, away from little hands 😉 I still use our 3 tiered rolling cart to hold the books and supplies we use most, but it still isn't safe for it to be left out although now that's less because of Henry and more because of Anna! 

The white shelf holds some free reads, nature journals, field guides, and some little art kits.

Construction paper in the front magazine holder, easily accessible for whenever anybody wants to draw a picture. Behind the nature treasures box is a crate holding paints and colored pencils, another crate with the zippered pouches that have little fine motor games for my preschoolers, and then coloring and sticker books. Above that are reference books, books for future school years, our binders, and the drawers have index cards, stickers, brads, staples, etc. The shelf above that has my two bins for sensory activities. One bin of tools (tongs, scoops, cups, etc) and one bin of materials (beans, pom poms, popsicle sticks, beads, etc)

Math manipulatives on the bottom, all of our books currently being used in the middle, mishmash of frequently used supplies on top.

Flash cards, early readers, glue, scissors, writing utensils. I keep things in jars so I can easily just grab a jar and take it to the desk with me.

This is in our dining room. In the basket to the right I keep my Bible, our kids devotional, and poetry books since that's all reading that we do during breakfast. I'll put our scripture memory box here when it is finished as well.

And that's our plan! Of course it will evolve and shift a lot over the coming months, but I feel confident that the bones of it will work great for us and will stay as is. I feel so incredibly blessed to be able to do this. It is a privilege to get to stay home with my kids and do this, a privilege that I am very grateful for!

2017/2018 School Year Plans!

𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮 It's the moooost wonderful tiiiiime, of the year 𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

Anybody else hear this Christmas song in their head when all of the 4th of July festivities die down and stores start putting out their back to school supplies? I've felt that way my whole life. I LOVE summer and always feel sad when it's really coming to an end, but when I see the stacks of shiny new folders and notebooks in school bus shaped displays at Target, I get a major thrill. Everybody tends to think of New Years as being the time to make a fresh start, but to me its August/September. In January it's nice to get back into a routine after the holidays and everything, and New Years Resolutions are super fun, but it's still cold and gray and it's just the halfway(ish) point of school and kid activities. The beginning of the school year feels more full of possibility to me. What is our new daily routine going to look like? How can I make our days smoother? What extra curricular activities do I feel like we should sign up for? How will we make those particular evenings work best for everybody? And then the questions only homeschoolers get to ask themselves: What curriculum are we going to use this year? How will we structure our school days? How will we balance regular home life (laundry, baby naps, cleaning bathrooms, grocery shopping) with school time? FULL of possibility!

This year we'll be starting school a little earlier than we normally do. Normally I like to get started after Kate's birthday, August 20th. This year though, after Kate's birthday we'll be on official 'baby watch' for Baby4, so I want to get an earlier start. Starting tomorrow, 7/31, should get us about 4 weeks of school work before the week of my due date, at which point we'll start a break. I haven't decided yet how long of a break we'll take. Leaving that up in the air depending on when Baby4 comes and how quickly we settle into a routine. Our curriculum this year relies quite heavily on read alouds, so that should work in our favor with a new baby. I tend to do a LOT of reading out loud while I nurse a newborn anyway!

I mentioned in my last blog post that I had found a full Charlotte Mason curriculum that we will be using. When I first decided Charlotte Mason seemed like the way to go for our family, back in the spring, I was very pleasantly surprised to find Ambleside Online! It's a completely free resource that has schedules, book lists, composer studies, artist studies, and so much more available and organized by school year! Amazing and SUCH a blessing! Sam will be starting with Year 1, which is meant to be a 1st grade program and the first year of formal schooling, after the student has turned 6. Ambleside also has a very informal Year 0 (mostly just a book list) meant to be sort of a kindergarten year. Kate will do that next year, but we will likely read some of the Year 0 books this year for her pre-k year as well.

Our curriculum's main resource is the book list. The heart of a Charlotte Mason curriculum is literature and using 'living books' (rather than dry textbooks) to teach all subjects. This is done by reading (out loud in the earlier years, and then by the student themselves when they're older) and narration (oral in the early years, written in the later). It has been a BLAST collecting all of the books on the Year 1 list and I am incredibly excited to dive into these! Ambleside follows a history rotation throughout the years and begins Year 1 with early British history, to lead into early American history in Year 2.

Our books!!

In addition to our book lists for readings, we will also have a different composer and artist to study each term (Ambleside schedules their years into 3 12 week terms). For each composer and artist we have different pieces to study for 2 weeks each. This is to be really simple in Year 1. We'll listen to our selected piece from our composer of the term throughout the day, and I will have printed copies of our piece of artwork framed and ready to study. "Studying" the artwork will consist of looking at the picture for a few minutes, and then turning it away and seeing what we can remember without looking at it. 

We will also have a folk song to listen to each term, as well as a different hymn every month. The goal here is just to have kids memorizing these old songs, just by listening to them frequently as they go about their day. No special time will really be devoted to them.

Also essential to any Charlotte Mason curriculum is copywork. The goal with copywork is to learn correct formation of letters, as well as sentence and (later) paragraph structure. Sam will initially just be doing the alphabet in his copywork. He writes well, but I want to focus our first couple weeks on review and working on neater penmanship. Then we'll go on to copying out sentences from readings we've done that week. Sometimes I might choose some lines from Aesop for him to copy, then maybe something from our weekly Bible readings, and then maybe a few lines from one of our "free reads" like one of the Little House books or the original Peter Pan.

Our science will mostly be comprised of nature study. We'll be spending a lot of time outside, but once a week we will go out (in our yard or we'll take a field trip) intentionally with our field guides and sketch books (even Henry has one!) At first we will just work on drawing what we see, and maybe writing down a name, but later in the year Sam will be making little notes to go alongside his drawings.

Ambleside suggests parents choose their own phonics and math programs, so we'll be continuing with Learning Language Arts Through Literature and Horizons math. Our LA program might be overkill with everything else we're doing, so I might switch it out for a more simple, phonics only type of program as the year goes on. Sam already has quite a good grasp on reading though after only sporadic usage of the LLATL program last year, and he seemed to really enjoy the lessons, so it might end up working out just fine!

Other things we'll be including in our school year this year will be French (we'll be using The French Experiment  as a super basic introduction to the language, mostly just reading some short stories in French and then using YouTube to learn the French words for basic things around our house), memory work (mostly poetry and Bible verses), handicrafts (beginning sewing, finger knitting, soap carving, basic wood working, etc) and drawing. Sam is especially excited about drawing, and spent a long time pouring over the simple workbook I found on Amazon. I also ordered a couple coloring books to supplement our science and history readings.

For Kate (and Henry a little bit) this year I haven't prepared much of anything. We have tons of supplies for sensory and fine motor activities that I can put together quickly whenever it seems like they might want something like that. I have 2 bins devoted to this kind of stuff. 1 bin of tools (scoops, tongs, cups, etc) and 1 bin of supplies (beads, pom poms, pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks, etc) I also made them a set of sensory alphabet cards (so simple, just glitter glue letters on cardboard) to run their fingers over as a pre-writing activity.

To keep everything organized this year, I first majorly purged and cleaned out our crafts/school closet to be more functional. The cute cart I got last year to house supplies has to be kept in the closet now (because... toddler...) and I decided to fill it with everything we'll use every day, including books, rather than just all of our supplies. This way, instead of going through the closet shelves every day to find what we need, I just need to roll out the cart and everything is already right there. Pencils, markers, colored pencils, glue, readers, flash cards on the top tier and then books on the second and our math manipulatives in containers on the bottom.

I also put together 3 binders, one each for myself, Sam, and Kate. Mine contains all of our weekly schedules (put together in my own format from the weekly schedules provided by Ambleside), the breakdown of our composers/pieces and artists/pieces, lyrics for our hymns, as well as copies of Sam's memory work for the first term (poems and Bible verses).

Sam's binder has all of his lined paper for copywork, his laminated and blank maps for geography, copies of his memory work (once a Bible verse is memorized he will hi-light it and once a poem is memorized he'll draw a picture to go with it), some coloring pages to go along with a few of our readings, blank paper for when he wants to draw his narration to a reading rather than just tell it to me, and his personal timeline ready to be filled in. Ambleside encourages making a history timeline, either in a notebook or on the wall, noting (or drawing) when events happen as you come across them in readings. But, in the beginning of Year 1, they recommend starting with making a personal timeline to help build the idea of time extending over the years. So we'll be slowly filling in Sam's timeline, starting in 2010 when he started growing in my tummy and going all the way through this year, marking important milestones in our family's life. I'm really excited to see how this turns out!

Kate's binder is full of tracing and matching worksheets that I laminated so she can do them again and again. I also added a folder full of coloring pages I printed from Pinterest. I want her to stay occupied while Sam and I go through his work, and she wants to be independent and have her own "school". I think this binder will take care of all of that.

I am SO excited for our school year! Nothing I have planned seems time consuming (as I mentioned in a previous post, Charlotte Mason believed in NO MORE than about 15-20 minutes per subject and only about 2 hours, max for the whole day in the early years!) and everything I planned seems engaging and like it will easily fit into our life! That was main goal in planning this year, for school to fit into our life, rather than trying to fit our life around school. Hopefully I've accomplished this!