Happy New Year everyone! Today is a day of celebration and relaxation in our home. Plans include relaxing, maybe some shopping (thrift store, yay!), and card and board games. Tomorrow, since we were able to wrap our Advent activities, we will ease back into our homeschool routine.
I should also mention here, I am currently only homeschooling my 2 younger boys. My oldest is pretty much done and just waiting to test out for his diploma. So the curriculum and routines I talk about are with my 13-year-old and 10-year-old.
Our Curriculum
For most of our school work, we use a curriculum called My Father's World. This covers Bible, History, Science, Art, Music, and Read-Aloud. Right now, we are studying the time period of Rome to the Reformation. So, our history revolves around that. Actually, it all starts with the Bible, which ties a lot of our subjects together. I really like that about My Father's World! We have used this homeschool curriculum ever since our oldest started with it in Kindergarten. So, that will put 12 years of homeschooling under this Mama's belt! My Father's World has been such a blessing to us over the years, and if you are thinking of homeschooling or switching up your curriculum, go at least give them a look!
Our General Daily Routine
First, we start our day with chores and breakfast. Once that's all done, we go into our Bible reading. I will have one of the kids read the passage for the day and then we will have a short discussion, and I will try to answer any questions they may have. Plus, the kids have verses they have to memorize weekly.
Next, we work on English. My Father's World does have recommendations for each grade's English, and we do follow them. We have 2 Latin root words we learn every week by making flashcards. Then we do spelling, grammar, and I add in typing. Then, the 13-year-old will read an article from the World Teen news website to himself and discuss it with us. The 10-year-old does the same, but he goes to the World Kids news website.
After we're done with all of our English subjects, we move on to History. This includes reading from various books. Then, we move on to what's called Book Basket. This is 30 minutes of quiet, free reading from books I have selected from the library that go with what we're studying that week. By the time we're done with Book Basket, we're usually ready to break for lunch.
When lunch and cleanup are through, we get out the science and math books. This year in science, we are first learning about human anatomy, then astronomy in the second half of the year. Math is where I deviated from the My Father's World recommendations. We were using Singapore, which worked well for our oldest. Our middle son was really struggling though, so after some research, we switched over to Life of Fred. This math has been really wonderful, teaching math as you read through the story about Fred. I plan to do separate posts sometime, going into more detail about our various subjects, so I won't get too much into our math at this point. Check out the Life of Fred link above if you want to learn more about that wonderful curriculum.
Lastly, the end of our day is pretty relaxed. Each of the boys has a grade level-appropriate chapter book that they spend 30 minutes reading each day. These books usually take them 2-3 weeks to finish. After they are done reading each day, they need to summarize to me what they read. Then, we have either music or art, foreign language, and read-aloud. Currently, we are reading Bronze Bow, and I will do a review of that on this blog when we finish.
And there you have a typical homeschool day in our home! In writing this post, I realized I wanted to go into more detail, but I also realized it was getting a bit long. While we do have our rough days, I truly love to homeschool, and I love to talk about it! So, I am planning on doing a series sometime to cover more thoroughly what we do and use for each of the main subjects.
Thank you so much for reading!
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