home education schedule

this year, i decided to change a couple things with our lessons.

i decided to make out some "long-term" (semester) goals for getting through academic subjects and curriculum. up until now, i've allowed the boys to determine their own pace in learning and i've also allowed many things to interrupt our lessons so that many days we did not accomplish what we should have or could have because i did not have a goal to accomplish anything.

last year, i would make out a schedule of work to accomplish each week. if we did not get to a particular subject at all, i would just put all the same work on the next week's schedule. thus, we did not accomplish as much as we could have.

so this year, i've planned out the entire fall, from august 30-december 17. if we miss something, we'll have to make it up - this leaves me more motivated to get it done when it's scheduled. what a great idea! :)

i am still, of course, allowing grace when we don't understand something in any given subject and the schedule was already tweaked a little when the boys actually were moving more quickly through their math books than i had planned for. but overall, i am excited to have goals in place to guide us. afterall, "if you don't know where you're going, you'll probably never get there." right?



we've done well for several years now without academic goals.

our first year, my goal was to teach jojo to read. i figured if he could read, he could learn anything. in the spring, we added a formal math curriculum - after doing fun math activities i found in library books. we continued with the fun science activities from books i found at the library. (janice van cleave's play and find out about... math and nature and science.)

over the next year, as kik began "formal" lessons, we added cursive (cursive first & abeka) and spelling (spell to write and read - SWR), missionary biographies (ywam series) for history & geography, and a health curriculum (abeka).

this past year, we joined classical conversations (CC). it was perfect timing, as i felt the boys were ready for more substantial academics, but not boring, traditional, textbook learning. CC has been a blessing to our family. i am so pleased with what the boys have learned and the freedom i have to add to it or not and still feel good about their overall academic progress.

in the spring we added first language lessons and are working to get caught up to their proper "grade" level.

this year, we're enjoying adding lots of read-aloud literature that compliments what we're learning in other subjects, especially history. who knew learning could be so fun?!

the conclusion... we have a long list of subjects to accomplish each day, but each of them really does not require a lot of time. all of them are "slow and steady" works. if we do just a few minutes each day, a page a day, a chapter a day, we learn so much! consequently, i created a little schedule to keep us all "steady" in pushing toward our goal - to be better equipped, to know God and to make Him known.