Homeschool Memoirs "Mom" Help!

THEME:
This week I’d like to invite you to share what YOUR “Mom” help is. Some drink coffee, soda, or chia-tea. Others check email or read their favourite blogs. Some talk a walk…. what do you do when you need to clear your head and take a breather?

I find there are a number of things that bring balance to my life. One of my favorites is going walking, running or to the gym, either by myself or with a friend. Of course, with three small children such activities generally have to be planned in advance, when someone else (usually Daddy) can watch the kids. I miss the days when I could put one or two babies in a stroller and go for a long walk while I let my mind wander.
When I need more moment-by-moment encouragement, I turn to music and especially to my favorite hymns. Whether I sing, play the piano, or listen to a recording, I find encouragement and comfort in sacred song. Here is one of my favorites.

Count Your Blessings
When upon life's billows you are tempest tossed,
When you are discouraged, thinking all is lost,
Count your many blessings name them one by one,
And it will surprise you what the Lord hath done.

Count your blessings, name them one by one;
Count your blessings, see what God hath done;
Count your blessings, name them one by one,
And it will surprise you what the Lord hath done.

Are you ever burdened with a load of care?
Does the cross seem heavy you are called to bear?
Count your many blessings, every doubt will fly,
And you will be singing as the days go by.

When you look at others with their lands and gold,
Think that Christ has promised you His wealth untold.
Count your many blessings, money cannot buy
Your reward in heaven, nor your Lord on high.

So amid the conflict, whether great or small,
Do not be discouraged, God is over all;
Count your many blessings, angels will attend,
Help and comfort give you to your journey's end.

Favorite Study Spot

This week share your favourite spot to study with your kids. There are many places you can sit down to teach, learn, and work, but where do you prefer and why? You’re welcome to include a photo of your study spot! Looking forward to seeing everyone’s!

Well, I missed last week's theme. I guess life just got to busy! I like this week's theme, though. I'm not a very formal sit-down-and-do-school type. A lot of our schoolwork takes place on the living room floor, on lying on the bed while I read aloud. My true favorite, though, is outside. I know it might seem to disctracting to some, but for me there is something calming about being outside. I like the open sky. I think being hemmed in by four walls makes us feel confined both physically and mentally. When I was a kid I couldn't wait to get home from school so I could go outside. For a few years we lived near a forest, and I remember throwing my backpack over the fence into the backyard and taking off into the trees, just to wander. I don't know that I ever studied there, but with my kids I do take them outside to read, or even for violin practice. And some subjects, such as nature study, are obviously better undertaken out of doors!

Oh, and the best part? If I'm working with Lily on something outdoors I don't have to worry about what Luke and Esther creating havoc in the house. They, too, are much happier to play on the grass or in the sandbox.

Summer Photo Essay

My Favorite Things

Our assignment this week is to write about favorite things. Now Miss Jocelyn suggested a nice list of favorites we could write about--web sites, memes, blogs, etc. Trouble is, although there are certainly resources I appreciate online, and I've mentioned one or two before, none of them really qualify as my favorite things. So I'm going to tweak the assignment and write about those things in life that really are my favorites, in line with "snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes"!

A Few of my Favorite Things

Fresh mountain air

Wild blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries

Walking on a beach at sunset

A starry sky out in the country where there are no lights to dim the view

Holding a sleeping baby

The way I feel after running four miles

Reading to my children

Playing chamber music with my family

Singing Christmas carols

Talking with friends

Dancing

Watching children at a zoo

Puppies and Kittens

A home-cooked dinner I didn't have to fix

The little songs my children make up

Long-distance phone conversations with family

Real, handwritten letters

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir

Vegetables growing in my garden

A ripe peach straight off the tree

A cold shower when I'm hot and sweaty

Figuring something out myself

Water-rounded rocks

Mountains

Pine Trees

Hot French Bread

My children's firsts--first steps, first words, first talk in Primary (Junior Sunday School)

A baby's laugh

Cornfields

Running across green grass

Singing hymns

Listening to my dad read aloud

Watching my husband playing with our children

The world is beautiful and God is good, and there are times when beauty and goodness and love seem to overflow. Those are the times I cherish.

Something New

Our assignment for this week is to talk about something new we are using in our homeschooling. Since this is our first real homeschooling year, in a way everything we are using is new to us. I guess the biggest "new" thing we are using is the Ambleside Online curriculum. Ambleside Online is a free curriculum plan generously made availabe by a group of dedicated homeschooling moms who have put in the time and effort to carefully study Charlotte Mason's educational philosophies and put together a curriculum that closely follows her guidelines.
Needless to say, a lot of thought and effort has gone into designing the curriculum, and to top it all off all of this has been made available for free on the internet. These ladies have done a fantastic job: weekly schedules, wonderful book choices, a truly comprehensive curriculum. Go take a look at what is available: http://amblesideonline.org/.

Routines

I'm late this week on my Homeschool Memoires post. Partly because I've been busy, and partly because, quite frankly, I'm just not good at routines. The best scheduling method I have found for myself really isn't a schedule at all; it is essentially a prioritized to-do list. Those things that have top priority for the day (or week, etc.) go at the top of the list and get first attention. For a homeschool day, my list might look like this:

Scripture Study
Outdoor Time
Music Practice
Habit Development
Math
Reading
Science

Things can move up or down in priority on a given day, although the things at the top tend to stay out the top; these are the things I really want to do every day or almost every day. I'm not too concerned at this point if we don't study math every day, as long as we are doing it on a reasonably regular basis. Obviously the need to focus on a particular subject or area will vary from child to child, or year to year. I wrote in an earlier post about my spreadsheet tracking method--if I notice on the spreadsheet that something (say, history) has not been getting much attention I might move that to a higher priority on the daily list. Similarly, if a child is week in a particular area that subject can be moved higher up the priority list.
I like this system. It follows the principle of first things first--generally, the things at the top of the list are accomplished towards the beginning of the day, before too many things can happen to interfere! There are of course exceptions--for example, if we are working on developing a habit of going to bed early, we obviously need to focus on that towards the end of the day. But if that item is sitting un-checked-off at the top of my list, it will be attracting my attention all day and is much less likely to be neglected!

Homeschool Agendas

Maybe I should start with a statement of my overarching goals for my children:

I want my children to grow up with personal faith in God and the skills, abilities and attitudes necessary to provide for and direct their own families and to be contributing members of society.

Wow. Do I know how to accomplish this? Of course not. I do have some pretty good examples to follow, both within and without my own family. I take great comfort from the fact that in spite of inperfections in my parents and in the circumstances in which I grew up, my siblings and I have seem to have turned out pretty well. I have a lot of dreams for my children--what parent doesn't? I want them to learn to be hardworking. I want them to do well in their schooling and be able to go to college at a good school; I would be really happy if they could qualify for scholarships! I want them to choose good marriage partners and have happy families of their own...OK, most of that's in the way far future. How does that translate to homeschooling this year?

Well, Lily is just in Kindergarten. That means, to me, that any schoolwork we do should be very low-key and not stressful. My plans, consequently, are not very structured; I just don't feel that a child this age needs to be made to fit some adult's mold, even my own. She needs lots of time outdoors, lots of time for experiencing the world around her and for outdoor exploration. This is why Outdoor Time is one of the three things on my To Do list for school every day. I think it is much more critical at this stage in her life than math, reading, or most other things.

What are the other two Every Day items? Well scripture study--preferably reading together and working on a memory verse. Why? Because we come to know God by studying His words as given to us by prophets and apostles. And we need to know God if we are to live our lives with meaning. And have you ever noticed that the things you learned when you were young are never forgotten? Your first phone number (no matter how many you may have had and forgotten since)? All those TV commercials? Nursery rhymes? I remember very distinctly when I was about Lily's age my parent's teaching me William Blake's poem beginning "Little lamb, who made thee?" I remember every line of that poem to this day. So this is the time to be teaching our children the things we want them to remember. Scripture verses, songs and hymns, poems, those things that they can call on when they need to be uplifted anytime throughout their lives.

And my third every-day activity? Music practice. Why? Ummm...because that's what my mother did? In all honesty, I consider my mother to be one of the wisest women, and certainly one of the most intuitive mothers, in the world. She tells me now that music was her way of raising children--her way of giving us something really challenging, requiring consistent work and focus. She didn't produce a crop of great performers; she never wanted to. She did produce a family who know and love music, who learned about persistence, cooperation, and how to record yourself practicing then turn on the tape to make mom think you were doing it when you weren't. Oh wait, that was only me :-) In any case, doing music just feels right, kind of like doing homeschool just feels right to me. By the way, Lily has chosen to study cello this year. I finally have a use for that absolutely adorable little cello I just had to buy two years ago...

So that is my agenda in a nutshell. Oh, I have lots of other things planned. I've written about some in an earlier post. We are (somewhat loosely) following Ambleside Online's year 1 reading schedule, working on the concept of narration...and I have a ton of math materials. I really want my children to understand and enjoy math. I'm always on the lookout for materials that help develop conceptual mathematic abilities. Over the last year or so I have picked up (all used) materials from Miquon, Singapore, Math-U-See, Right Start, and probably a couple of others. But I do math only as Lily wants to do it. She likes doing math, she especially likes workbooks. At this point I encourage her to do any problems she wants to tackle, and I do not point out mistakes. If I notice a particular mistake recurring (say, writing 7's backwards, or always coming up 1 number short when doing an addition problem by "counting on") I will take note of it as something to practice correctly with her on. Often though if she seems to understand the basic concept I just let "mistakes" be. Yesterday she was doing a worksheet where you color in shapes, i.e. "find the squares and color them". One page asked her to find rectangles. The first one she found was a cross, because, she said, it was two rectangles crossing each other. (It wasn't drawn that way, no lines across the arms). But her reasoning made perfect sense. That is exactly the kind of reasoning I don't want to kill by making her find "right" answers all the time! I'm also planning to do science--we just ordered caterpillars to raise into butterflies, and I'm always salivating over all the cool science kits out there. I've looked into NOEO science, which uses more of a "living book" approach. I also like what I have seen of the Apologia elementary books. But really I should save that for another year...

I'm editing this post to add a scripture verse:

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:

But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Matthew 6:19-21
I actually borrowed this verse from Amber over at http://liferondo.eletelephant.com/ who used it in her memoires post (I hope you don't mind Amber). I liked her reference to simplifying and focusing more on family. Sometimes it is so hard to not get caught up in, well, everything...and so we waste our time and energy and forget where real treasure is to be found!

Bible Reading Challenge day 3

I starting the 1-year Bible reading challenge on Sunday, reading 3 chapters a day. So I finished Genesis Chapter 9 today. Since these few chapters cover hundreds of years in human history, I wonder if we are meant to see in them the large patterns of God's dealings with man. Something that interests me is that thousands of people must have lived during this time period, but we learn of only a very few--basically one line of Adam's descendants, leading to Noah. This pattern is continued in the rest of Genesis--we learn mostly about one line, one family. Obviously we need to learn about the family of Israel, through whom Jesus Christ will be born into the world. But I wonder if God is trying to teach us too that it is very often through families that His work is done here on the earth. Each of us (since Adam and Eve, anyway) is born to someone--hopefully into a family with parents who will teach us about God, and about our place here on earth. When the Lord wants to do some great work, he starts by preparing a family. So we have Adam and Eve teaching their children, Noah and his family, Abraham and his family, Joseph and Mary...and I think it applies to each of us. I was born to parents who taught me the gospel and helped me prepare to live a life in accordance with God's will and hopefully teach my own children to do the same. And so on down through the generations...

About Me

I decided to participate in the new homeschool memoirs meme (see link in my sidebar). Their theme for this week is "All About You!". So here goes!
I come to homeschooling honestly--I was homeschooled myself until age 8, when I entered 3rd grade at the local elementary school in a small farming town in Utah. My mother, with a degree in Physical Education, didn't have much use for the educational and child-development theories of the day. She kept us home, made sure we were acquainted with basic reading, writing and math, made us practice violin pretty much every day, and otherwise gave us the run of a 25 acre farm. Honestly, I think I had an ideal childhood.
I started school at age 8, but bigger changes in my life were in store. The summer I turned 9 my dad left his small law practice to accept a Foreign Service job with the State Department. There were 6 of us children at the time, and we embarked with varying degrees of excitement/trepidation on the adventure of a lifetime. We spent about 9 months in Virginia while my dad was in training as a Foreign Service officer, then proceeded to overseas assignments in Guatemala, France, Bolivia, and Austria. Along the way our family grew to include 10 children, three of them born overseas. In addition to my homeschooling years, I was able to experience public and private schools in several different countries. In fact, in ten years of schooling I attended 7 different schools, in 3 different languages. After graduating from high school in Vienna, I returned to the States for college, where I attended Brigham Young University in Utah. I majored in Anthropology, minored in Microbiology, joined the Air Force ROTC, served as a missionary in Japan for 18 months, married the love of my life, graduated from college, and moved to Texas. Wow, those were busy years! A couple of highlights of my young adult years were an archeology dig I participated in at Petra, in Jordan, and a Eurailing trip with my sister and friends. I served in the Air Force for less than two years; when I was pregnant with my first child I decided she needed me more than the military did, and that has been one of the best choices I ever made. A few months after Lily was born my husband took a job in California and we have been here ever since. We added Luke to the family about 3 years ago, and Baby Esther last December. This is our first year of officially homeschooling, although in a way I have been doing it ever since Lily was born! When I was first introduced to Charlotte Mason's works, I felt like I had met an old friend--actually, I thought I was reading something my mother could have written. I think they would have liked each other very much. Anyway, I base much of my homeschooling on her philosophies. I'm really looking forward to the years ahead.