Piney Woods Homeschool

  I am, I can, I ought, I will. The motto of Charlotte Mason’s PNEU schools helped students and teachers focus on their own capabilities and responsibilities.  This is not a self-help motto though.  Behind these words lies an understanding of God at work in me and through me to make this possible.   Because of God, I am.  With God’s help, I can.  For God’s glory, I ought. By God’s grace, I will. As homeschool parents, we often feel the weight of responsibility and inadequacy.  How can we possibly nurture, and teach, and civilize these tiny humans so that they reach all the potential God gave them?  Where do we find the courage to keep trying, day after day?  With God’s help, I can. Homeschooling is a ministry to our families.  For some of us, it will be a lifelong ministry.  For others, it will be a season of ministry.  We can’t know in advance which it will be, either.  God has His own plans for us and for our famili...

  This is Part 6 of 6.  Find the other parts here. Less than perfect *is* success.  Focus on what happened, not what didn’t happen.  Today, this week, this term, this year, what did you and your students accomplish?  Where did you grow?  What new experiences did you have?  How did you improve?  Appreciate the beauty in what you *are* doing.  It’s easy to feel inadequate and worry that you’re failing.  And of course we have to consider where we need to improve, but first we have to seriously look at where we’re doing well.  So your Year 1 student isn’t narrating beautifully even when you read a paragraph at a time.  But what *is* she doing that she wasn’t able to do at the beginning of the year?  Where can you see growth or forward progress? Where are you seeing small glimpses of success?  Maybe your Year 4 student isn’t adding Latin or taking to Plutarch or the original Shakespeare plays, but is he enjoying one ...

This is Part 5 of 6.  Find the other parts  here. When you make your plans, plan to delegate.  The first place to delegate is to your kids.  Pass responsibilities to your kids as they can handle them.  This looks different for each child and each home; it will even look different from week to week sometimes.  Don’t fear for their failure.  You want to be wise about adding responsibility, but you also need to let them own the responsibility even if it turns out to be more imperfect than you would like.  Plan for boundaries to help teach them as they take on these new roles.  They need regular checkpoints where they can see the consequences of their success or failure.  This helps them learn to manage their own work.  But within those checkpoints, give them freedom.  Some of them will pick up on what they need to do sooner than others.  I have one child who starts his week’s work on Sunday evening and tries to come ...

This is Part 4 of 6.  Find the other parts  here. The map should not rule us.  Plan, but hold plans loosely.  AmblesideOnline’s booklists, schedules, and other plans are such a help!  They give us a place to start.  Sometimes we can work with those plans with very few changes, and other times we’ll find we have to make big adjustments.  When you’re ready to plan, plan for what you think you can realistically accomplish plus a little more.  Give yourself room to grow into the plans.  Looking at the schedule for a new term can seem overwhelming--all those books!  All those new types of work!  And we weren’t getting everything done *last* term!  Don’t panic!  Take that work, and organize it into whatever template works for you so you can see how it might actually play out in your home with your unique situation. Adjust your expectations down if you need to, but don’t adjust them all the way down to a level that feels c...

This is Part 3 of 6.  Find the other parts  here. How do we measure success?  Charlotte Mason said it wasn’t how much a child knows, but how much he cares, and the connections he makes.  Most of the time, I don’t get much indication of how much any of my children care. I worry just like anyone else about where I’m falling short.  When the kids were young, it was sometimes really hard to find signs of caring and connections.  Somehow my kids never seemed to act out the stories they read in school like I hear about other people’s children doing.  Now that they’re older, I’m more likely to see connections in a dinner table argument over Richard III.  I’d prefer not to have the argument, but it’s undeniable that the participants both know and care about the history they’ve studied.  My kids normally don’t love their handicrafts, and that’s a subject that gets skipped regularly by at least one of them.  But that one has voluntarily tak...

This is Part 2 of 6.  Find the other parts  here. Imperfection feels like failure, doesn’t it?  We want to know that we’re doing what’s best for our children, that we’re competent at this job of homeschooling that we’ve embraced, that we measure up, and the clearest way to know that is to judge ourselves and our children against the standard.  But what if our standard isn’t the right one?  And what if we aren’t competent to judge how we measure up because the results aren’t necessarily visible?  What if our expectations fail to account for the true challenges we face?  What if the “right thing to do” isn’t actually best for our specific situation? My oldest and my youngest both learned to read painlessly and early.  My youngest taught herself by helping me do DuoLingo Spanish on my phone at bedtime every night!  (That’s not an officially approved method of reading instruction.)  When my oldest started Year 1, for her reading in...

This is not a post about how to do all the right things.  This is a post about finding success in the midst of the impossibility of doing things right.  No matter how long you’ve been homeschooling or how carefully you study and work to implement Charlotte Mason’s methods, you know the sting of imperfection.  None of us is doing everything “right”, no matter how we define “right.”  Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what “right” even is, especially when what’s “right” for one somehow doesn’t seem to achieve the same results for another. I’ve been using Charlotte Mason’s methods in my home for a long time.  My oldest will graduate from high school in May, and we started when she was in preschool.  I take this seriously.  I believe that Charlotte Mason’s principles and even her specific instructions are wise and well founded and almost always I can find a reason for why she suggested what she did.  You might think that means that my home is a p...

I've always used flexible schedules for our school time.  When my oldest was in the early grades, one year I tried putting together a detailed schedule for her with specific times for each subject.  We couldn't stick to the times, as anyone with several young children at home (especially with a baby) will understand, and my estimates for how long things would take were usually too high, but just plotting the work out like that gave us a sense of how much was realistic to expect in a day. Since then, I've used other scheduling methods to help juggle the needs of multiple kids (I have four school-aged and one preschooler right now) as well as to train for independence.  You can see more about how this has worked for us in these posts: Sample Term Schedules Organizing Our AO Year Categorizing Our Schoolwork Organizing Our Homeschool This type of organization of our day really worked well for us, but for two of my four school-age kids it wasn't working as well...

I use AmblesideOnline in our homeschool, and I appreciate the chart-format schedules that are provided for each year .  Before I use those schedules, though, I modify them to make them work for our family .  Here are some samples of a shortened version of my edited schedules for a few different years to give you an idea of what these look like.  (The samples show only a few weeks of each term so as not to violate AmblesideOnline's license by reproducing the schedules on another site.) Year 1 chart Two terms of Year 1 Year 2 chart Another Year 2 chart Year 3 chart Another Year 3 chart Year 4 chart Another Year 4 chart Year 5 chart Two terms of Year 5 Another Year 5 chart Year 6 chart Another Year 6 chart Yet another Year 6 chart Year 7 chart Year 8 chart Year 9 chart Another Year 9 Chart Yet Another Year 9 Chart One More Year 9 Chart Year 10 chart Year 11 chart   Year 12 chart Another Year 12 chart Briefly, I follow this basic process to prepar...

Why do we teach children about history (or literature or any of a number of subjects)?  What is the best way to teach these subjects?  How do we know if we have taught them successfully? In Consider This:  Charlotte Mason and the Classical Tradition , Karen Glass explains the choices facing all of us who have the responsibility of teaching children.  When we choose to present or not present certain topics, even more so when we choose to present topics in particular ways, we are making philosophical choices whether we know it or not.  These choices have a profound effect on the way each child views the world. Karen explains that today's preferred methods of teaching resemble the old story of the blind men and the elephant, as we present children with disconnected bits of information without ever showing them the whole.  Without that view of the whole, children do not come to care about the subjects of their studies or to care about the process of learni...

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...

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....

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...

"No plan survives contact with the enemy" and no school schedule survives the first few days of school.  Accepting that as true, I am still thrilled that our new scheduling system has survived the first *day* of school.  Every year, and sometimes more than once a year, we have to completely revise our way of tracking schoolwork and managing its implementation.  This year we had students in three separate years plus a challenging (sometimes deliberately challenging) preschooler.  Our previous methods of managing students and work simply wouldn't do. We are still using the chart format schedules I've described before.  I have a copy of each student's schedule, and the older two also have their own copies.  This year I categorized the work on each schedule so that all of the work that didn't merit its own separate line item in our daily work list was combined with other work to make three or four (or in a few cases five) days of assignments.  Then I...

I love a beautiful, tidy schedule!  I love those neat homeschooling plans with each student in his proper place!  (I really mean that; this is not sarcasm.  I had tons of nifty neat-o forms for my Daytimer when I was working.)  Alas, God knows I love those things and tend to make them idols from which I derive my self-image, so He has thoughtfully blessed me with a family and circumstances that make such plans impossible to live by.  The more I have struggled to make them work for me, the more complications He has heaped upon me. All of that is to say, if you find that scheduling your day into precise segments does not work for you, do not despair!  For some families, it apparently works well.  But you are not alone in your situation--many of us must use a much more flexible, organic approach.  lol  When AO had its one and only conference back in 2005 ( notes ; reviews and a link to purchase CD's which are well worth listening to), one ...

Our reading assignments came from Volume 5 and the Parents Review , but in contrarian fashion I'm drawing inspiration from the end of Volume 2 : "The old, old story has all its first freshness as we tell it to the eager listeners; as we listen to it ourselves with their vivid interest it becomes as real and fresh to us as it is to them. Hard thoughts drop away like scales from our eyes; we are young once more with the children's young life, which, we are mysteriously made aware, is the life eternal. What a mystery it is! Does not every mother, made wise unto salvation, who holds a babe in her arms, feel with tremulous awe that, that deep saying is true for her also, 'The same is my mother'?"    Volume 2, p. 281 Our piney woods, in a rare snowy moment. Holidays provide an opportunity to rethink our treasured values and beliefs as we help our children experience them through family and community observances.  We also have the opportunity to encourage true h...

This summer I sat down and read the first few chapters of Barry Farber's book "How to Learn Any Language" . I made notes on his suggestions for how to begin with a foreign language (because although we've been working with Spanish for several years, I still consider dd to be a beginner). The part with suggestions begins in Part II, "Gathering Your Tools", although the previous chapters help you to understand what you are trying to accomplish and why you are using these methods. After I made my notes, I pulled out my bin of Spanish resources and chose what would best fit my needs. I scheduled out a term's worth of work, written work from a textbook and audio work with Pimsleur. I have a whole collection of Spanish textbooks, some of which we've dabbled in before, but based on Farber's explanation of our goals I chose one I picked up at a homeschool booksale on a whim, " Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish " by Margarita Madrigal. ...

The Ambleside Online curriculum supplies you with a booklist and a schedule for all the readings, so most of your planning for each school year is already done. However, you must still do some planning of your own to prepare for the coming year. Start by reading through the AO FAQ . If you've already read it, skim through it looking for areas you may not recall well or that you may need to do this year but have not done in the past. The FAQ will help you with implementation details. Next, check the booklist for the year you'll be using and make sure you have all the books. If there's a free copy of the book available online, the booklist will usually link to that. Then, you need to tweak the weekly schedule to fit your scheduling style and to include all the extra areas you want to cover each week. I do not try to plan by the day. Instead, I try to have a plan for how much we will cover each day, but then allow my dc to choose or help to choose exactly what w...