Contemplating Next Year Part 2: What I'm Keeping

I hit the high points of the things that need to be tweaked, or just aren't working for us altogether. There are several things that I absolutely love or have crafted to the point that I think they're working optimally for our household for the stage we are in right now. These practices will be staples for the next term - at least a few items I don't have to make decisions on. Have you noticed that making decisions requires more mental effort than almost anything else in the day?

Some of the great things to our days:

• Our picture study. I just love it. It couldn't get any better or any easier.

• Our Fine Arts Co-op that we belong to. My words just cannot do justice to the blessing this group has been on our homeschool. No longer do subjects like composer study or Shakespeare or Folk Songs get tossed aside from lack of time and know-how by mom. This group is made of like-minded mamas who each take one of Charlotte's Fine Arts subjects they would like to teach and then we meet every other Friday and get it all done. A blessing many times over.
• Our Bible study. We've settled into a fabulous routine incorporating self study, narrations and family sharing.
• Our timeline. Everything we study gets put on here and it has been so fun to start to see things overlap. The other day we were reading about Ivan the Terrible and as we put him on our timeline we realized that he was a contemporary of our term's artist, Michelangelo. Love the connections!

• Our literature and history readings. Love them so much that I won't change a thing about them! We're finishing up our Medieval study this term and will be on to the Renaissance next.
• Of course, narrations, which are at the heart of the CM way. Whatever your educational methodology may be, if you are not doing them, narrations are the absolute most valuable tool you can use with your kids. We've seen invaluable payoffs from being diligent with our narrations.

There are many other things that work pretty well, and a few other things that are OK, but these are the absolute "I will keep no matter what" practices in our home for the next year.

Next on to the changes to be made.

Contemplating Changes for Next Year

It's that time of the homeschool year...any frustrations that have been realized through this year's curriculum choices are now at their peak and I start looking ahead to our next term, boldly slashing, analyzing and adding to make our homeschool machine run a bit more smoothly next time around.

We're a Charlotte Mason family. We read...A LOT. It's what I love about homeschooling. It captures my children. They make connections on their own that I could never put together for them. Their eyes light up when they recall historical characters from one novel that exhibit similar character traits to a current novel. They can tell the story of history on their own in one fluid story.

And HELLO, I'm getting the education of my life.

So, as I contemplate what needs to change for next year, I also bear in mind what has especially worked for us this year. So much of what we have is wonderful. So much of what isn't working is because of my own failure to have our household run in the smooth efficient manner that is should.

To help my jumbled mind out, I'm focusing first on the things that need to change, or "opportunities for improvement" (said in my best boss-mimicking way). These are things I need to find solutions for and be intentional about implementing for the next year. Random reflections:

• Math for my daughter is NOT working for the family. Tears abound almost daily. A change must be made. Have I ever mentioned that I have a degree in math? You can imagine this is rather alarming to have a child that isn't thrilled at the prospect of a daily rap session with mom on the beauty of Fibonacci numbers and the joyful mysteries of the integer '9'. We have been happy users of RightStart Math for 4 years now. This is a rock solid math curriculum. However, it's taking a lot out of me right now because it is extremely teacher intensive and quite frankly, I think she would perform better if Mom wasn't driving every step of the lesson. I could go on and on about my thoughts surrounding RightStart, but the bottom line for my planning is that for her I need a different curriculum. I'm currently leaning towards MathUSee for a variety of reasons.
• My son, on the other hand, delights in math! He begs to watch "The Joy of Mathematics" from The Great Courses as a reward for finishing school. Be still my heart! He's thriving with RightStart. I'm trying to decide if I stick to that one for his last year (Level E), or switch him over, too. I would really love to use a curriculum that is a little (OK, a lot) less teacher dependent...
• Over the past year I have been delegating subjects to the children for independent work. This has been mostly readings. I recently went to a lecture by Andrew Pudewa where he exhorted the audience to NOT cut back on reading out loud to your children especially after they begin to read for themselves. It was quite convicting. Hence, why I am looking to move to more independence in math and take back some of the delegation I have given in literature.
• Written narrations have been inconsistent at best. We are very diligent with verbal narrations after every single reading. It's time to start easing into writing.
• Copywork has also been sporadic. This is something that we should be doing every single day. Why haven't we? Because half the time the child cannot find the copywork book, or we're out of lined manuscript paper, or Mom hasn't written out the words and sentences to be copied for the day. See how it stems to me not having it together?
• Latin has completely dropped off the spectrum. Time to get that going again.
• Nature study hasn't happened. Not a formal nature study where we take sketch books outside and learn dry brushing and other ways of preserving our observations. Since we are dabbling in our own garden growing, that at least has provided some non-formal studies for the kids to learn what grows when, watching for progress on their sown seeds, harvesting fruits and greens, collecting seeds for future sowing after a plant has gone through the bolting process. Better than nothing, but I'd still love to add in the sketching component as Charlotte recommends.

Whew! Solutions (the ones I have come up with, that is) and what is working for us to follow.

Thanks for indulging my thinking out loud!

Picture Study / Art Gallery

I LOVE that my children are getting a fine arts education. I love that by default I am getting a fine arts education. I'd be lying if I didn't admit that that might be a large part of my enthusiasm behind homeschooling.

Charlotte Mason was very particular about the manner in which pictures are studied in school. And it is so non-invasive and so influential it is almost unbelievable. For just 15 minutes a week you and your child can imprint hundreds of beautiful art works in the "mind's eye", imparting ideas on which to draw future experiences forevermore.

I recently stumbled upon this picture study help at Simply Charlotte Mason. I am in love. It couldn't get easier. I no longer have to download pictures and have them printed at Wal-mart, find a living biography of the artist, and do a little research on the piece of art we study that week. It's all put together for me in these packets, and the print quality is EXCELLENT on very sturdy picture paper.

Each packet comes with about 8 prints of 8 different pieces of art that the particular artist created. Like I said, high quality prints here. There is also a booklet that has a short living biography of the artist.

There's also information about each work for the teacher to help guide conversation with. We aim to study one print each week, which gives us a little wiggle room in each term to fully cover an artist well.

And here's what I've done with these gorgeous prints!

I frame them as we study them and then hang them in the dining room so we can have our own gallery of our term's art.

It also gives us good dinner conversation. Daddy notices when we sit down for dinner that a new print has been added to the wall. He will typically ask what it is and then the kids narrate back to him everything they remember from the art.

It's a nice reminder of the pieces we have appreciated over the term. And I also get to say that I have art up on my walls! Bonus!

Thanks for stopping in to visit!

My Plato Project

I mentioned I am working at working my way through "the classics". And it is slow going, let me tell you.

The Republic by Plato has been my pet project for, oh, a year. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that.

But, I think I'm doing it well! Or rather, to keep with my theme, doing it excellently. It has been a lonely adventure because I haven't found anyone who was up for forging ahead on this project with me. Can you imagine?

I'm just starting Book 9, so it's finally all starting to come together for me. Can you believe that I am actually curious to find out how Plato is going to resolve the logistics of establishing of this theoretical 'just' city? I tell ya, 15 years ago this would have been the slowest and cruelest form of torture I would have been able to fathom.

Resources I've used in "Kelly Learns Plato 101":

Obviously the text.

The translation I used was the one in the Great Books of the Western World collection. Oh be still my heart, that collection is a book list in itself. I very possibly love book lists more than the books themselves. Combine that with a collector personality....and you have yourself a lifelong project.

Actually, I'm not crazy about this translation. I have peeked into Allan Bloom's and I think I might be inclined to go with if I were picking a stand-alone volume. But of course that one doesn't look as good on the shelf with dozens of other volumes standing right next to it.

And I recognized I needed a helper, so I turned to Good 'Ole:

At one point in my life I would have been embarrassed to admit that. 

It's actually helped me a lot. But not as much as:

These courses are true gems! And you know I want to study through them all. They have a ton of courses. Tip: never ever ever pay full price. You can get them very steeply discounted. They rotate what is on sale, and you can also usually find a large collection of them at the library.

But, as excellent as these resources have been, they have not taken the place of a reading companion who will sit down and hash out the questions that inevitably arise with a careful study of a work of this magnitude. Perhaps if I pick a book a little more....universally enjoyable.... for the next project I can convince someone to plunge in with me!

Our Move and Our Gardening Motivation

It's been about 9 months since we moved about 15 miles from where we previously lived. Can I even begin to describe how much 15 miles has been a disruption to schedules and sanity? Ha. In all seriousness, this move has been great for us. We have to drive further into town to get groceries or to run to Home Depot, but we have a bigger area outside to run around on.

I guess this was my ultimate step in truly embracing and marrying up Charlotte Mason's saying "Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life" with her strong urging to spend much time outside learning about nature. We can now get outside and study nature in our own backyard. We can grow a garden and appreciate how God gives us food right from our very ground from teeny tiny seeds. We can learn a little bit about life cycles and become somewhat closer to our food rather than just depending that the grocery store will always magically have whatever our palates crave.

Don't get me wrong, I know we didn't *have* to move to achieve all this. There are ways to make any of these things work without uprooting the family and dragging all your possessions across city.

But I also desired to have some space to grow some food. I know I'm in for an uphill battle with my black thumb, but all this business with GMOs and pesticide laden produce really creeps me out! How cool would it be to just merely grow, say, blueberries for the family. Fully organic, completely fresh and straight off the vine antioxidants. Or tomatoes, fresh from the vine and even canned at home in jars as opposed to relying on the BPA-laden cans and who knows what else that I don't know about from the grocery store.

Hence, another venue of my life to pursue excellence in. The family's gotta eat - I might as well feed them excellently and make myself studied in the arena of nourishment and health. One step at a time!

So without further ado, I present our first blackberry pickings! Can you hear the pride beaming from my fingers?

Hopefully there are many more to follow, but my plans for the bulk of my crop (should we be so blessed) will be to freeze individually and keep for our morning green smoothies. Ooh, OK, maybe a blackberry cobbler, too. Warm. With a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top.

Here are my baby grapes. These vines came with the house, so I have no idea what variety they are nor how sweet to expect them to be. They give me hope, though!