• Homeschooling - Uncategorized

    A Much Needed Break

    This week was break week in our homeschool. Can I get a “holla” from all the homeschool mommas reading this? 😉 Let’s face it, as much as we love homeschooling our kids, it is not all sunshine and roses. Some days it’s just plain hard! The discipline to keep showing up and guiding our children through the work of learning is hard to cultivate, both in ourselves and in them. So it is good to take a break sometimes and step back to breathe, rest and re-evaluate how everything is going. We just finished Term 1 of AmblesideOnline Year 2,…

  • Homeschooling

    Memory Work Planning for March

    Here in our homeschool we are entering week 8 of our term and school year. Normally, we would have had a break last week, but since we missed a lot of days due to moving last fall (and now we will likely need a break during our move this spring), I knew we would have to press on and do a full 12-week term before taking time off. I also started looking at the calendar and realized that I have a lot of work to do around here if we are going to get all the work done at our…

  • Homeschooling

    Our Homeschool Curriculum Choices for 2018

    After I wrote my scheduling posts, I remembered that I had also wanted to write a little about what we are using for curriculum this year. We have made a few additions this year that are really helpful, so I wanted to talk about those a bit now that we have been using these materials for a little while. The Curriculum Core: As is clear from previous posts, we use AmblesideOnline for the core of our curriculum. The subjects that are fully covered under AO’s curriculum are as follows: Bible, History, Literature, Artist Study, Composer Study, and Geography. What I love about…

  • Homeschooling - Uncategorized

    Scheduling AmblesideOnline Year 2, Pt. 2

    As promised in my previous post, here are the rest of the details of my planning process for scheduling AmblesideOnline Year 2. If you missed that post, you will want to go back and check it out to see the first steps before moving on to these last few! If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments, and I will do my best to answer or help you find someone else who can! How I Created Our Schedule for AmblesideOnline Year 2: Steps 3 and 4: Decide how much time to spend (maximum) on each lesson…

  • Homeschooling

    Scheduling AmblesideOnline Year 2, Pt. 1

    Now that we are almost a month into our second “official” year of using AmblesideOnline, I feel like we are really getting into the groove. Not that I don’t still have a lot to learn about teaching and living in a more Charlotte Mason-esque way! We certainly have not arrived! I do feel, however, that I have a handle on the flow of the academic portion of our school day, and that is a welcome change from last year. Many days I felt scattered, and I often could not remember what I was supposed to be doing from one day…