Piney Woods Homeschool

Our organizational system for this year's school has worked excellently, which happens to make life so much easier as I am physically unable to keep school running by myself this year.  We have finished our first term and are working on exams, although since I really can't sit at the computer for more than a few minutes at a time exams may drag on for awhile this term. One facet of our system that may not be clear from the original post is the way we categorize our work.  I thought I'd give some examples.  For Ambleside's Year 7 , Term 1, we sorted the work this way: Devotional Bible Mere Christianity Saints and Heroes Enrichment CM's "Ourselves" How To Read a Book Story of Painting Whatever Happened to Penny Candy Extras Artist/Composer Chess Drawing Handicraft Geography The Brendan Voyage Lay of the Land Map Drill Map Work History Asser’s life of King Alfred Bede Book of Centuries Churchill's Birth of Britain Histo...

Let's explore this wealth of topics, from what it means to study history to how to save our children's imaginations! Dewey's Treehouse:  Tell Me Another Story -  History is supposed to be a great story. Surviving Mexico:  Parenting Challenge-Living History - This was dead history, no heroes, no battles, no great achievements to remember. Letters from Nebby:  Learning History -  When we study history, we study human beings. ...where the blacktop ends:  Tendrils of Attachment -  A well written tale of history really comes alive and I'm looking forward to reading them with my son.    Living Books Library:  Anything New? -  Do books have to be "old" to be worth reading, are there any "good" new books, and how can we offer contemporary books to children to interest the "modern" child? Classically Charlotte:  The Nature of Children - A development of Charlotte Mason's second principle of education Joyo...

Last school year we implemented a revised scheduling system that was a bit more complicated than what we had done in the past, so that I could manage work for three kids (plus a roamer) and give them some independence and flexibility.  This year I wanted to tweak this a bit to improve some aspects that were time consuming.  I'll have four needing a schedule, although only three will be doing an official Ambleside Online year. Our schedule has two parts:  the master schedule and the child's weekly sheet. The master schedule for each child is a chart (like this one for Year 2 ) that shows every assignment for every week for the 12-week term.  I print this out and keep it in my binder where I keep everyone's schedule.  I do edit it first to reflect our own preferences and to add other items I want to track.  I sorted the work into somewhat arbitrary categories so that each category has a fairly even work load for the week.  This becomes importa...

I've posted before about how we organize our chores, more or less.  As summer approached I determined to get more serious about organizing our meals (with which the children take turns) and along with that our shopping.  Also, I needed to have a way to keep track of extra chores needing to be done. Our Household Organizer The easy part of this is the orange-bordered sleeve with the dry erase marker on the top.  I bought five sleeves like that to use for our school schedule (another post on that to follow) and only needed four.  Inside the sleeve are five sheets, one sheet for each of our zone chore lists.  (The zones are loosely based on Fly Lady's cleaning system .)  When someone needs something extra to do, they can now come look at the list for the zone for that week (which will be the one displayed), choose a chore and do it, and come back and cross that chore off the list.  Once a week I'll clean the sleeve and move the new zone sheet to t...

Obviously every family will handle these subjects differently, which is as it should be.  In fact, each child may require a slightly different approach.  My intent here is merely to share what we have done, not to prescribe what anyone else should do. A great parent resource is Kevin Leman's A Chicken's Guide to Talking Turkey with Your Kids About Sex .  In fact, with this book alone a family would be in great shape to adequately handle these topics without any other resources. We generally first approach these topics very informally by talking about babies.  Anytime I, or anyone in our immediate circle of family and friends, am pregnant, I pull out our books about babies.  We especially like Hello Baby by Lizzy Rockwell, which follows a pregnancy through the first day at home with baby from the point of view of big brother, and The Miracle of Birth by Jenny Bryan, which uses acetate overlays to show what is going on inside of Mom as the baby develops....

Here are some books about Texas history we have enjoyed, most of which we picked up here and there for little money: The Story of Texas by George Sessions Perry Texas: The Land of the Tejas by Siddie Joe Johnson Sketches from the Five States of Texas by A. C. Greene Johnny Texas by Carol Hoff Johnny Texas on the San Antonio Road by Carol Hoff Remember the Alamo by Robert Penn Warren The Boy in the Alamo by Margaret Cousins Call of the Southwest: Stories for Young Texans by J. A. Rickard

Charlotte Mason's first volume, Home Education , emphasizes the importance of habits in making our lives run smoothly.  We all operate on lines of habit, either good or bad habits; most choices we make are not made consciously but are made habitually. We are all mere creatures of habit. We think our accustomed thoughts, make our usual small talk, go through the trivial round, the common task, without any self-determining effort of will at all. If it were not so––if we had to think, to deliberate, about each operation of the bath or the table––life would not be worth having; the perpetually repeated effort of decision would wear us out.  Volume 1, p. 110  Modern neuroscience actually supports this idea , calling the "ruts" of Ms. Mason's terminology "neurological pathways" instead. Reading Volume 1, with its emphasis on formation of solid habits, it is easy to lose site of another part of Ms. Mason's philosophy.  Habits were a useful tool, in her es...

Dh and I talked through, tonight, our plans for Easter week this year.  We completely agree that our goal is for the children to understand the need for a redemptive sacrifice and the extraordinarily loving response to that need.  Here's our rough draft plan for this week: Sunday Matthew 21:1-11 Genesis 3:1-15 Monday Matthew 21:12-17  Genesis 22:1-14 Tuesday Matthew 26:1-16 Exodus 12:1-13  Wednesday Matthew 26:17-46 Isaiah 53:1-3 Thursday Matthew 26: 47-75 Isaiah 53:4-6 Friday Matthew 27:1-31 Matthew 27:32-56 Saturday Matthew 27: 57-66 Isaiah 53:7-9 Sunday Matthew 28:1-15 1 Corinthians 15:20-26 Later Ephesians 2:1-10 Colossians 1:11-23 2 Corinthians 5:14-21 Romans 3:21-26

I've been reminded recently, on several occasions, of how important is parents' role as the gatekeeper for the education of our children. We simply cannot turn our children over to someone else to be cared for or taught without paying close attention and intervening when needed. So often, I think, we assume that since no other parents object then there must not be anything about which to be concerned. I know that in some areas that was my assumption. For Christians, this is even more imperative since God's instructions in the New Testament regarding children continually warn us not to interfere with their development, not to hinder them, not to cause them to stumble. When we allow others to present them with incorrect theology and biblical interpretation, casual views of God and holy things, or instructions about personal matters that rightly should be handled by parents, I believe we are presenting them with a stumbling block.   Even when we ourselves...

I hate housework, but I do like a tidy and orderly house.  Not that I really ever have achieved that, but the ideal seems lovely. . .  I cannot possibly keep up with all the housework and homeschool, nor do I want to.  And I want to be sure my children know how to manage their own homes in the future.  So we share the work, just as we share the money . Several years ago I thought about the cleaning tasks that really needed doing on a daily or weekly basis.  I wrote each one out on a notecard, trying to break down large tasks into smaller steps.  (Instead of "clean the refrigerator" I wrote "clean one refrigerator shelf," for instance.)  I made a big pile of these.  I let my oldest (who was at the time the only child doing this type of chore) select the required number of chores from the stack.  She could choose whatever she wanted--I tried to define the chores to be of about equal importance and difficulty (although I've had to refine my de...

Previous blog posts working through the math recommendations from Charlotte Mason's Volume 1: Charlotte Mason Math: Vol 1 Pgs 253-264 More Charlotte Mason Math, Volume 1 pp. 253-264 More CM Math from Volume 1, pp. 258-259 – Place Value More CM Math from Volume 1, pp. 259-60 – Weighing and Measuring (This post saves having to look up each of the old posts individually.)

This is not a timeline for purists.  It's a timeline that fits in a binder.  Perhaps timeline isn't even really the right name for it!  This is a way to keep track of people and events as they fit into various historical periods rather than listing them along a strict line of dates.  It allows each child to have a separate journal and to add his or her own words and pictures to it.  This requires very little parent help.  Although this is not as visual as a true timeline, I've found it to be invaluable for helping my kids place people and events in history and remember them. The website I found this on appears to no longer be available, so I'm posting this so the instructions will still be available online. For this timeline, you will need looseleaf paper (I use unlined printer paper), a hole punch (if the paper doesn't already have holes), and a three-ring binder of some kind (so additional pages can be added later as needed). On the front of each sh...