Piney Woods Homeschool

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...

I've posted an example of one of my edited chart-format schedules , where I took the generic chart-format schedule (new up-to-date copies soon to be available on the AmblesideOnline website ) and edited them for our use.  The formatting didn't transfer particularly well, but I think you'll get the idea. Update 7-Apr-2013:  To respect AO's copyright, I've edited the sample chart to include only two weeks and a handful of the scheduled selections.  You can still get the general idea.  I also edited this post to reflect the new source for the chart-format schedules.

A recent blog post inspired me to think about our Bible curriculum for school.  Long ago, I had planned to have a Bible curriculum for school, separate from what we did for our family devotions.  But when my oldest entered Year 1, we had craziness going on and I didn't do much research--I just used Penny Gardner's list of readings for Old and New Testament because it had been recommended and it was easy.  We read one passage a day and just kept going until we finished.  When my 2nd child entered Year 0.5 (our made-up year between K and 1st), I no longer wanted to use Penny Gardner's list, so I used a list from Calvary Chapel instead, and used it in much the same way.  I've not been completely happy with this, but since it was working and other matters seemed more pressing, we just kept on. I'd like to sit down now and read all the appropriate CM passages plus the relevant PR articles, but that's not going to happen just yet.  I'd like to look at all t...

Just today I finished, with my ds who is just barely 6 years old, the lessons for Robert Louis Stevenson's poem "Rain", which are the first full-fledged reading lessons in the Delightful Reading package. Prior to this, for about 3 months now, we had done simple word-building work, using the word families suggested in the teacher guide. My ds appears to be a natural reader, along the lines of my oldest dd who in Year 1 was using the Declaration of Independence for her reading lessons because we needed something that challenging in order for her to have at least one new word in each lesson. I provide this information so you'll have context for my comments below. The teacher guide supplies you with the text of CM's Volume 1 that applies to teaching reading, along with some helpful notes. It supplies you with suggestions for alphabet and word building activities to use before beginning reading lessons. It supplies you with reading lessons using primarily po...

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...

When my oldest was 3, I told a group of older homeschooling moms that we were going to have a CM homeschool. They laughed at me! They told me I'd soon give it up because it would be too hard, primarily because at the time there was not a curriculum available (or at least not well known) that used CM's methods. *Now* we run into a different problem--there are so many choices that it becomes confusing. What *is* a CM education? It's hard to find out what a CM education means, these days, because the idea of it has become fairly popular and lots of curricula, websites, blogs, etc. have picked up on key CM terms and may even call what they're doing CM, but aren't necessarily actually following Charlotte Mason's methods. Also, a CM education changes dramatically over your child's life. In other words, what it looks like in preschool is very different from what it looks like in high school, and there are a couple of shifts in between as well. During the pr...