Friday, May 18, 2012

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.

Hip Homeschool Hop Button
Posted by at
Labels: , ,

2 comments:

  1. UnknownJune 5, 2012 at 8:10 PM

    I love the idea of a timeline, but they always seem to flop around here! We're trying Story of the World next year for the first time. Do you have posts of timelines? LOL (Stopping by from the Hip Homeschool Hop!)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. KellyJune 6, 2012 at 1:33 PM

      We really struggled with consistency on a timeline until this past year. I finally figured out something that works for us! It just took us 5 years, lol. We use SOTW, too, and it is really easy to chronicle on a timeline I think. (Though you will find that the stories aren't always exactly chronological! Hasn't been an inconvenience for us.) Hopefully you'll find that, too! I'll take some pictures of what we finally ended up doing for our timeline and put it out there so you can see. It was helpful for me to see how others did theirs before I settled on something that worked for us. Thanks for stopping in! =D

      Delete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)