Piney Woods Homeschool

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...

I haven't put a lot of thought into Advent this year.  However, I did pull out the resources I have. (Not candles, though; I'm not sure I have candles yet.  Oops.) One I haven't used before, although we've done a Jesse tree in various forms for many years, is the Jesse Tree book.  I need to go through it and match it with the sheets I printed to supply us with inspiration (and tracing patterns if needed) for the pictures for each story.  (We've done lots of different types of images in the past; this year I thought we'd draw or trace pictures onto plastic cut from milk or vinegar jugs, then color them.)  Since I'm using our tabletop tree for a baby shower the first week in December, it won't do for our Jesse tree this year, but it isn't big enough to handle four daily ornaments for 25 days anyway.  We usually use it for our weekly ornaments.  (See next paragraph for more on that.)  We have a larger tree that is still small that we rescued fr...