My family does homeschooling year round, but we do relax our standards quite a bit during the summer. After all, each season brings it's own educational opportunities, and it's not always practical to spend every moment bent over a book. With that said, today is Monday, and it is also time for the local public school to begin their year. Even though we don't have children in the local public school, the excitement of the new year is in the air, and my kids can feel it, too. Therefore, I go ahead and make this the time when we shift gears, break out new books, buy a few new school supplies, and make some new plans about how we will study for the year. I'm simple and committed to giving them the easiest, most effective education possible, so my plans are equally as simple.
This year, with Tarja starting Y1 of the free curriculum on amblesideonline.com, I determined that the reason that I'm not always as happy with that program as I would like to be, is that it is too complex. Reality hit me that there is no reason that I should make my family plug through every single book on the book list. The books are wonderful, but they are classics, which usually means long and more complex than the "twaddle" that school kids tend to read today.
I downloaded as many books onto Tarja's kindle as I could find on Amazon.com for free. I also subscribed to the Amazon Unlimited program, which is about $9.95 a month, and become sort of like Netflix for books. You still can't get every book that you want this way, but it is way cheaper than going to the book store and a lot less frustrating than looking for all of these books at the library. We now have a beautiful arsenal of bedtime and story time books waiting for us.
For Bible, we have been reading through a children's Bible story book that was given to us. Again, I don't push or pressure to have a designated Bible reading time. It is part of the all of the other books that we pull out when we want to hear a story. It just so happens that we have a lot more story time and bedtime story reading than our non homeschooling families have.
Therefore, today was a new day, new week, and the beginning of a new school year. I started off by getting Tarja to read the next lesson in McGuffey's Eclectic Primer for me. We read the page in the book, then read the words again on her writing tablet, where I had printed them in my own print. Tarja copied the words in her tablet. While she did that, Abbey took a history test for a course that she just completed on Alison.com. During that time, Tarja, Ivana and Tico Suave (their puppy), went outside to play. After they came back inside, I read "Jenny Wren" out loud to Tarja from the Burgess Bird Book for Children. We looked for photographs of Jenny wrens online, watched a youtube video of a Jenny wren singing in a tree and then found a tutorial about how to draw a bird. Tarja drew a beautiful Jenny wren for her notebook.
After that, I helped Tarja make her own soup for lunch, while Abbey put Ivana down for her nap. Tarja ate her lunch, and I read from her Bible story book. As soon as lunch was over, she tuned on an episode of Magic Schoolbus on Netflix and laid down to rest.
It is 3:00p.m. and there is so much more than can and will be done before the day is over. Some of it will be from no real effort on my part. Learning is a lifestyle and can be enjoyable. Abbey still has some work to do, and the younger sisters will entertain themselves will all kinds of good things while Abbey is busy with her work. It's easy, and it can be fun.
Have a Great Day!
Laurel Santiago
No comments:
Post a Comment