Homeschooling

In an effort to be more diligent in my homeschooling time with my younger girls and also to include more poetry, art, etc, into our homeschooling, I've decided to try Morning Time. This has been modelled by other homeschooling moms I know, most notable Cindy at Dominion Family. If you click on the link, then search her site for "Morning Time" posts, I believe there's about 30 posts to read through.

We had been doing more independent work first thing in the morning (when we got to it), then history reading at 11 am. However, my oldest has been working more independently and hasn't been joining us for history time as often. So I decided to move all our reading time to the beginning of the day. Here's what we've done so far this week and my goals.

Bible

Old Testament - our kids are studying through the "God's Story" curriculum in Sunday School. There are weekly devotions for families to do, which I need to print out, but for this week anyway, until I get them printed, we've just been reviewing the story of Samuel, which they are studying at SS.

New Testament - I started using a Bible reading schedule this week that has four categories - Pentateuch, Prophets, Wisdom reading and New Testament. So the girls and I have been reading the New Testament chapter each day. We started in Luke, which coincides nicely with Josh's quizzing work for the year.

Catechism - We were going through Training Hearts, Teaching Minds with all the kids that has catechism questions and discussions. However, I didn't feel like the younger two have gotten the same indepth study as the older two did at this age so we started it again. However, the book wandered away after the first day! I'm hoping it will show up this morning.

Poetry - we're reading poems of Emily Dickinson. Lovely! As soon as the library catalogue is back online, I'm going to look for a biography and/or selection of her poems. I'm just printing them off from the Ambleside site right now.

Memory Work - the girls are each working on a poem to memorize. I'd like to do more Bible memory too - I should add that in this morning. I think we'll start with Ps. 23.

History - we're on Week 14 of Tapestry of Grace, Year 3, studying the Victorians. I'm also reading "I was there at the Battle of the Alamo", which was from a previous week, but we didn't read it then so I thought we'd do it now. The joys of freedom in homeschooling!

Science - I have to admit that science has been a largely forgotten subject in our home. However, I pulled out the Apologia book "Flying Creatures" and started reading it aloud. Yesterday, we read about mating rituals and I learned a lot too!

After Morning Time is finished, then we move to the table where they do math, copywork, grammar, Latin and writing. This week, they've been doing math and thank you cards for Christmas presents and we'll slowly get back to doing everything. So far (two days!), this schedule is working and I'm hopeful that it will be beneficial to all.