My Friend Cathy
In the Nook…
I decided to participate in the Homeschool Open House, as you can see from the banner on my sidebar, and one of the main things is to write about one’s homeschooling schedule. Since our homeschooling is a lot of application it feels like it would be really hard to nail all that we do in one day, but I’m going to try. I homeschool my daughter who has just this hour having her 14th birthday and my niece who is 10. We teach rather separately (one at one desk and the other at another) except for our Bible Studies and our outdoor time. We’ve been homeschooling for two years and this will be my first full year with my niece…
First, I want to mention that we consider homeschooling at all hours of the day, it’s a Lifetime of Learning attitude. My husband also attends college so education is one of our top priorities along with God, the #1 priority, and our family. One of the easiest things I can tell you is the name of our school – Hinton Christian Academy and that’s because our house used to be Hinton Christian Church and I thought it was important to honour the original name of the building we live in. This place was built in at least 1891 but we haven’t found an original date as of yet, so we go by that date.
Next, we homeschool pretty eclectically and I use as many free things as I can get my hands on! I like writing my own lessons and being able to plan out what my students will learn. Most of our time is learning through application. How to do laundry, cook, clean, sewing, crafting, carpentry, painting, stuff girls will/should know how to do even after the older and married. I’ve also been teaching my daughter about cars and how to maintain them: changing the oil, tires, checking fluids, and watching out for things in the motor that do NOT need to be touched until they’re cool.
All this isn’t to say that we don’t have lots of sit down time for classwork — WE DO! I don’t think either of the girls learn “on level” because the oldest is above her level in most of her work, except Math and the youngest is below her level on most everything because she’s been allowed to manipulate her family and teachers in public school with temper tantrums. That won’t be happening here, young lady!!! As for our course of study we use Bob Jones, Abeka, Saxon (very little) and our newest addition is The Gift of Family Writing by Jill Novak and her family of writers. This year for our History/Geography we are going to do something entirely new to us and probably to many of you all. We are doing a postcard study and here’s how it works. We are contacting people, through email, longhand, or phoning and having postcards sent to us from all different parts of the World and as we get them we’ll post them on our bulletin board and online and do a unit study on each one that we receive.
My daughter is going to be those things and also these: Intro to The Constitution (HSLDA) and Founding Fathers study through Generation Joshua, then later she’ll/we’ll do the whole series of 11 courses over the next few years. She is doing Human Anatomy (including Tai chi), Nutrition and Biology this year also and, of course the 3R’s. I don’t have a specific curriculum for these…the postcard one we found online and made up our own study rules for it. Our neighbor’s daughter is a History buff and even though she goes to public school wants to join us in the HSLDA and Generation Joshua studies…that will probably be a Family study because we all love that kind of learning. I have Human Anatomy and Human Body books that my daughter has been working out of on a 4-year rotation and we also have some Reflexology/Massage cards that I bought a few years back from Body and Spirit. I guess this sounds like a whole lot of work and studying but it’s really not and we do it throughout the day. I won’t do all these things on every day anyway. We have our Co-op on Mondays and the girls take 4 classes there and have work for those classes also at home. We do our schoolwork at the parks, libraries, my hubby’s college while waiting for him to get out of classes and not just M-F classes…can you ever stop learning??? NO!
My niece’s classes – this is where the hard work comes in. Breanna is a very witty, warm-loving, wonderful and intelligent child! She is so so smart and very talented young lady and she has mountains of potential and the opportuntiy through my family. I love her more than I could have ever thought possible. Here’s the problem: she’s been labeled ADHD, ADD, bi-polar…she’s NEVER been tested for any of these things! The things I see her doing are NOT what she’s been labeled at all…there’s one word for them – DISCIPLINE!!! We’re going to teach her what discipline means because in her little head it means, “I’m in trouble or I’m doing something wrong”, it doesn’t mean what it should mean to her. The rest of her time will be filled with 3R’s, History, Character Training (especially), Music, Art, and Handwriting. She loves to read and comprehends what she reads way better than I do, so lots of reading and busy, busy, busy hands to keep her from idling into Miss Grumpy! We do lots of field trips in the Fall because the weather is sooooooo nice and we love all the pumpkin fields. Kentucky is a very beautiful state. Both the girls and I love nature walks and photography and nature journaling…these are new for us to this year.
So, these are our days…we’ve been back at lessons since July 9th for my daughter and my niece will have a little later start as she is still spending time with her family. She won’t go home again until we have Thanksgiving and between that and Christmas we’ll be very busy remodeling for a long while; actually, the girls will learn how to hang insulation and drywall, lots of painting to be done and cutting wood for the upcoming winter season. I have to account for 175 days according to KY Laws and the strange man that was at my door last April.
That’s about it…you think it’s long enough??? We won’t do everything everyday but we will do what we can and enjoy God’s gift of allowing us to be Homeschoolers!