Category: Homeschool: Our Homeschool (what our day is like, curriculum choices, etc.)

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Our Homeschool Week (Grades 3 and 5)

The past couple of weeks have flown by. I wanted to write up a quick post to mention some of the things that are going well for us at the moment.  It’s hard to believe that we’ll be wrapping up another school year in four or five weeks! Here’s what we’ve been up to the past few weeks: Language Arts: In order to fulfill the requirements of our state, the...

Homeschool Purchases and Organization — Furniture, etc. 0

Homeschool Purchases and Organization — Furniture, etc.

Actually, there is no such thing as homeschool furniture or purchases since everybody’s home is unique and everyone has their own style!  But that being said, there are a few purchases I’ve made in the past six months that I really love and I wanted to share.  Book Display Shelves: We have all kinds of book displays, but I wanted one that looked “nice” and would display the writing books...

One of *Those* Days 0

One of *Those* Days

I’m pretty sure you know exactly what I’m talking about, right? Not only are there a mountain of dishes to be put away, but  there are dishes in the sink filled with cold nasty water with floating bits of who-knows-what. (Grrr.. why didn’t we just do them last night?) There’s laundry still in the dryer, waiting to be hauled out and folded. LD lost his math book. We spend 15...

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What We’re Up to In Our Homeschool – Curriculum We Use

One thing about homeschoolers is that each family has its own style. Some people have quite a structure/routine to their homeschool; some people unschool and support and follow the passions and interests of their kids. Our days are fairly loose, but we follow fairly traditional subjects. Homeschoolers often fall into different categories… Charlotte Mason, Montessori, Classical, or use online-curriculums. I would say we are eclectic, hands-on homeschoolers — meaning we...

Our Propane Bill More than Doubled! Here’s Why… 0

Our Propane Bill More than Doubled! Here’s Why…

When I opened the propane bill yesterday, my jaw nearly hit the floor.  Our propane bill had more than doubled from this time last year! Augh!  One reason for that is of course that it was much warmer last January than this. But also, the price of propane has gone up drastically. Last year (2013) in February propane was $2.40 a gallon. This year? It was $4.70.  So having consumed...

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Mom Down! Why I’m in Surgery Today…

The past three months have been very difficult.  If you’re a regular reader, you know I had ear surgery in October.  I have more complications than I can count on one hand. Healing was very slow and a couple of weeks after the surgery I came down with something called BPPV in two semi-circular canals (in my ear) which causes vertigo, the entire world to spin, balance issues and incredible...

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How to Get Started Homeschooling (with Unit Studies)

Someone recently asked me how to get started homeschooling. She was interested in creating some unit studies for her kids and wanted to know where to start.  Since I tend to create our history and science units myself, I thought I’d try to share how I pull our units together. I’ve written a lot of related posts about homeschooling things like planning, preparation, assessing our long term and short term...

Our Homeschool Plans This Semester 4

Our Homeschool Plans This Semester

Over the holidays I spent a lot of time away from the computer (blogging, that is), but I did pull together plans for the new semester. Here’s what’s on the agenda: Science: We’ll be starting an earth science unit on weather, wind and water. We’ll be starting with an overview of the Earth’s 4 systems and then will learn about the atmosphere before continuing on to wind, weather, etc. daily...

What’s Happenin’ in Homeschool? 1

What’s Happenin’ in Homeschool?

Tis the season to be flexible! Some days we get quite a bit done, other days… not so much.  I try to keep myself calm about that.  Yesterday, for example, all our friends had a snow day. Often time we do school anyway, but the appeal of sledding and playing outside with friends won over! Today, we were back to the normal homeschool schedule. Here are some of the things...

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What Happens in a Homeschool Day? Our Week (or 2) in Review (K, Grade 3, Grade 5)

I thought I would put a post together that helps give a flavor of what our daily homeschooling routine looks like. So many of my posts are compilations of our activities, but they don’t actually show what happens day-to-day.  It’s about time to do that again (and I enjoy reading these posts later as the kids get older!) We have finally gotten back to a relatively normal schedule. (If you...

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A Rough Week–When None of the Trivial Stuff Matters …and Only the Trivial Stuff Matters

This past week was really rough.  Last Wednesday, I had some ear surgery that was to reconstruct my ear canal and the inner bones in my ear.  The surgery was supposed to be relatively straight-forward, but wound up being much more challenging for the doctor (the surgery took a lot longer) and for me (I came out of the surgery very ill and in pain).  There was more damage and...

My Personal Life Has Taken Over! 0

My Personal Life Has Taken Over!

I love homeschooling — and I love writing about what we’re doing, but life is taking over for a little while. We have family coming from all over the US (and from Brazil) for my husband’s great uncle’s birthday party. He’s turning 90 and we are hosting several families (they started arriving earlier this week). Then tomorrow we will have 50 or 60 people over to our house. It’s been...

Building Happiness and Harmony in our Home :) 1

Building Happiness and Harmony in our Home :)

Sometimes we need an infusion of sunshine and happiness into our homeschool. There are times when the kids nitpick at each other, poke, needle and whine… we all (including me!) need to step back and ask ourselves if we are being as kind, thoughtful and caring as we can be! One day for our writing workshop, we read the book, Have You Filled a Bucket Today? A Guide to Daily...

When the House Falls Apart, You Find you Need Surgery… And There’s Lots to Juggle! 0

When the House Falls Apart, You Find you Need Surgery… And There’s Lots to Juggle!

So, a couple days ago I wrote a blog post about how are homeschool routine is working out this year.  It’s going pretty well and I love being back into a routine.  But as for life in general, it’s sometimes hard to juggle everything.  Preparing and time with the kids homeschooling takes up a good chunk of my day, as you can imagine. Plus, writing also takes time.  But there...