Homeschooling with heart: Getting ready for a new year....

Well August is upon us and that means school will begin again. Our family likes to start in August so we have many days to play with. We also love taking Friday's off to have some free time. We have 3 children whom we school at home, Katrina-15, Hannah-12, Andrew-9. The above picture shows how creative I have to get sometimes to teach them. We were learning about north, south, east and west, they just could not get the concept of it so I made up a song for them to sing and move to. IT WORKED!!!

My husband is very involved with our homeschool. He not only works full time to support us but he also goes to Grand Canyon University (online of course) working toward his BA in Christian Ministry. If that were not enough for him, he teaches math to Hannah and Andrew. He also does PE with all of them. He is an amazing man!!

So this Monday August 3 we will start our 4th year of home schooling. I can not believe it. It seems like yesterday we began this wonderful journey. We began home schooling 4 years ago this month, just to "try" it out. We had no idea of what we were doing when we pulled them out of public school. Here we are loving every minute of it....well ok almost every minute of it. I'd be lying if I said every moment of homeschooling is a bed of roses!

This year we will be using the Prairie Primer as our main curriculum. It goes through each one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books. In each lesson there are many options to do unit studies. We choose to just get a lot of books from the library (they love to see us coming with our lists of books LOL!) and read about the different topics. Our children love to read so it is a great fit for us.

I'd have to say our learning style is a little bit of everything. I love just being able to curl up on the couch and read to my children, although they are growing up so fast. Their favorite time of the day is when we are able to read our Little House books, so I use that as incentive to get them to finish their language arts, math and other things they need to finish. Each day we do some sort of fun activity based on what we are reading about.

This week we will be starting out with "Little House in the Big Woods". Some of the things we will be covering are, bears, owls, light and prisms, manners, lungs and breathing, rabies, Louis Pasteur and much much more!! We will be making our own butter, bread, and clean the house like Ma did. We want to experience as much as we can through our studies. (I have a link to a site with a ton of fun activities, just click on experience)

At the end of the week at the Genesee Country Museum there just happens to be a Laura Ingalls Wilder Day. We have been looking forward to this all summer!! There will be a guest appearance of Karen Grassle, the actress who played "Ma" on the show, "Little House on the Prairie". So not only will we have our first week of school but we will also have our first field trip of the year as well!