Back to School

This past week was back to school for us...

As with every year, this school year is bringing some changes...mostly in curriculum and schedule, but hopefully also in my presence. 

In case you care HOW we homeschool, here's a rundown of our schedule....

7:30 - breakfast 

8:00 - noon - SCHOOL work

• Bible and prayer
• math / independent work (I work with one girl on math while the other does independent work from her "loop" - I'll explain the concept of loop below) After 30 minutes, we switch who is doing math and independent work.
• read aloud
• 15 minute break
• writing (our writing program is based on a monthly read aloud and I'm loving it so far - this month we are reading The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart). I'm a big advocate of reading aloud and sharing stories as the backbone of our education - of using literature to learn the basics of grammar and spelling. 
• subject loop

noon - lunch

1:00 - violin practice

On Tuesdays the girls have gymnastics at 10:30 so we skip the read aloud in the morning and do it at 2pm during "Tuesday tea time". We will also skip the subject loop on this day.

On Thursdays we all go to Classical Conversations all morning (9-noon) and this will be our school for the day. We'll come home and do violin after lunch, but that's all.

On Wednesdays we are doing a "book detective class" with another homeschool family - we'll read a book together (starting with picture books) and then discuss the elements of the story - learning how to analyze and recognize how the author implements these elements.

Now about "loops" .....

We have two of them:

• Independent work - cursive, typing, copywork, Spanish, geopraphy
• Subject - history (ancient history and American history), science, music appreciation

The idea of the loop is that you don't need to do everything every day. When it's time for independent work, Kayleigh starts with cursive doing a lesson or so, then moves on to typing for a while. The next day she will do some copywork (literally copying Scripture or literature passages by hand) and a Spanish lesson. She might even get to geography depending on how much time she spent on Spanish. OR....she might spend the entire time on one subject. The point is that you work your way through the loop, hopefully getting to each subject at least once during the week.   The subject loop works the same way - there just isn't time to get to everything every day, but we can do a little bit of each subject on a regular basis. 

This is what we are doing for now....it's far more organized and rigorous than last year, requiring more focus from me. We'll try it for 6 weeks and then evaluate and see what is and isn't working.