Winter 2014 Homeschool Plans & Schedule

Last semester we all felt bogged down by school work and like we "had" to meet some mystical set of requirements I'd created. Mostly it's my public school mind trying to run a homeschool- blah. It just doesn't work that way! So I simplified and adjusted and changed things up. 

During Breakfast: 

• Read & discuss a chapter of Scripture Stories - there is also a great website & app.
• Music Study - Handel - Firework & Water music. I think we'll change the composer every 6 weeks, with different music selections each week.
• Artist Study - Degas' Two Dancers. Discussion is "What do you think is happening? How do you think they feel? What else do you see in the picture?" etc. Changing up the artist every 6 weeks.

After Breakfast: 

• Get ready for the day - get dressed, hair, teeth
• Poetry Memorization - we've been using IEW'S poetry memorization system, but the three younger girls are struggling with the longer poems, so I've found some shorter poems for us to work on. 
• English - Olivia & Jolie alternate working in their Explode the Code books (Mon & Wed) and playing alphabet related apps on the ipad (Tue & Fri). Each week Austin & Nyah write a 5 paragraph paper on a topic of their choice, and then I help them edit and rewrite. 
• Math - Austin still loves Life of Fred and is almost finished with the Elementary books. Nyah does Teaching Textbooks twice a week (Mon & Wed). Olivia & Jolie practice on IXL twice a week (Mon & Wed). Twice a week (Tue & Fri) the girls and I do some living math activities. We are using the Bedtime Math app, MathStart books, other math picture books, and math games (board games, dice and dominoes). I'm thinking about dropping Teaching Textbooks and IXL, and going full time with living math for the girls, as they all learn better when it's hands-on and they are using math for a reason.
• Snack time
• Mom Reads - I'm currently reading Pioneer Sampler. This reading time will be for history and/or science books. 
• Austin & Nyah work on independent school work (reading, writing, projects, or chores).

During Lunch:

• Listen to Poetry - I haven't quite figured out how we'll do this. I think we'll listen to individual poets, changing it up every 6 weeks, but this depends on being able to find the cds/downloads. 
• Listen to Portuguese song - we want our kids to learn a foreign language and since Kurt speaks Portuguese (Brazilian) we're going to start with that. We have Rosetta Stone for the older kids, but I'm going to have the younger ones learning songs and read picture books. I'm still trying to figure it out and find resources.  

Afternoons: 

• Monday - Science day. Nyah will watch her Jacques Cousteau cartoon & research the topic. I'll do Young Scientist Club experiments with Olivia & Jolie. Austin watches physics videos & does his reading.
• Tuesday - Austin attends his online MathArt class. The girls make a Westward Expansion craft project. We all go on a field trip to a local museum that focuses somehow on American Western history. 
• Wednesday - Art Projects for girls- pastels, watercolor, whatever I feel like; Science club for Austin & his friends. 
• Thursday - Commonwealth: Shakespeare and art for Austin; Young Stateswoman and art for Nyah; Liberty Girls & music appreciation for Olivia & Jolie; Nursery-type class for Sophie. I help with the nursery class the first 2 hours, the art class the last hour, and it looks like I'm going to be the producer for the Shakespeare play done by Austin's class. 
• Friday - Dragon Quest with friends for Austin & Nyah; Olivia, Jolie, & Sophie go to a friend's house to play. 

Bedtime: 

• I read the girls their books for commonwealth - Olivia & Jolie are reading American Girl: Caroline this semester and we don't have Nyah's books yet, but they will be around the same time period (War of 1812/Pioneers). 

Additional:

• Tech classes - The girls do robotics on Thursday mornings instead of math, english, and listening to me read; Austin works on game design a little every day and is teaching himself to animate with a free program he found online and youtube videos.
• Piano - Austin & Nyah have lessons on Mondays, and I try to spend time with them on one other day during the week going over their lessons and practice assignments. Austin is doing Simply Music and Nyah is doing child-led, games lessons with a friend of mine. I'm hoping to use Austin's videos and books to continue teaching myself (I did pretty good through the first 7-8 months of last year), but we'll see if it works out. 
• PE - We've found with Olivia and her NF1, that she needs to be consistently physically active, and really it's a great thing for all of our kids to be doing. On Monday and Wednesday I take the four girls swimming at the rec center for lessons and free play. Austin has been skipping out by hanging out with friends, but I think I'm going to start making him go with us. He can climb the climbing wall or shoot hoops if he doesn't want to swim.  On Saturdays we've started going ice skating as a family. 
• Nature Study - somehow, somewhere I want to fit in a weekly nature hike, but I'm kind of a pansy when it comes to cold weather, so I may wait until things warm up around here. For now, I've been watching a nature documentary whenever I fold laundry and my kids end up watching with me. 

Typing it all out makes me realize we are doing a lot more than I thought and I feel like what we're doing now is much more enjoyable for all of us. I've brought back some of the things that we really enjoy like artist study and music study; the girls are doing more things as a group instead of individually; English is simpler for the older kids to do on their own; I've reduced the required work for some subjects; Some subjects are more hands-on---

One week in and it's going great :)