Summer School

SUMMER!

Morning Time Bible....

Geography map tracing...

Timeline sorting...

Play-doh Geography...

Sometimes Claire chooses to weave instead of finger knit for her handwork time...

Place Value Villages...

Instructing your sister on something...

We are still loving this devotion book! We just grab it every few nights and read a few devotions from it and then search Youtube for videos that correlate with the cool things mentioned. I am all about installing the wonder of God and His creation to the girls and this book helps us to wonder!

All of our current school stuff is in these colored bins...
Left to Right:
Geography: Maps, tracing paper and pencil box with dry erase markers, pencils, and markers
 Math: Math Books, Manipulatives
Narration: Main Lesson Books and Waldorf Essentials Grade 2 book
(Which we use for our narrations)
 Morning Time Supplies: Bible, Children's Story Bible, The Feelings Book for Girls, and our American Girl Caroline book

Kenley had to do end of year testing required by our state this year. Thankfully my sweet husband took over the task of test master. Thanks Brian!!

We found some better containers for our Place Value Villages. The mason jars were clunky to store and move around. We already had 2 sizes of these ziploc containers and just had to purchase the small ones...

Making our own CC board games...

 

Summer is my favorite season. For me, summer stretches from when CC ends in April until we start CC back up again mid September. I realize that we only "go to school" 1 day a week, but wow, the schedule feels 80 times more open during the summer months! 

Since CC only meets for 24 weeks that's not quite enough time for us to get all of our schooling done. This year we have decided to move to a year round schooling schedule. So far I am absolutely loving it! The pressure is off to "finish" curriculums and we are free to work at whatever pace fits us best at the time. Also, we all seem to function a little better when we have the routine of school to frame out our days. 

For me, summer is a great time to evaluate the last year of home school and decide what works and what doesn't work for our family. It is also a great time for me to read lots of books! I have also been working on customizing my own ultimate life, homeschool, CC Director, meal planning, grocery list, etc. planner. I'm pretty excited about that thing! The base will be the Peaceful Planner from Jennifer Pepito at the Peaceful Press.

I have been in the past and will always be an eclectic homeschooler. We use Classical Conversations as our spine and then add in from there. This summer we are switching Language Arts and Math curriculums. In the past we have used a few different Waldorf Curriculums and while I REALLY love Waldorf for early childhood, I felt like it wasn't preparing us well for when Kenley hits Essentials next year (2019-2020). Though I am an eclectic homeschooler, I also have a huge fear of gaps occurring due to curriculum changes! Because of this I have decided for us to start our new math curriculum at level 1 and then go through it fairly quickly to hopefully be back to "grade" levelish by Autumn!

We are using Math Lessons for a Living Education and I can not speak highly enough of it! We are absolutely loving it! Kenley is flying through level 1 and I will be ordering level 2 really soon! Since we are enjoying it so much, we are switching over to Language Lessons for a Living Education for our Language Arts too! Master Books is currently rebranding their Language Arts so that it can all fall under the Lessons for a Living Education name. I ordered Foundations Phonics for Claire and Basic Language Skills for Kenley. Basic Language Skills  also requires that you purchase Not Too Small at All by Stephanie Townsend which is a cute book about a mouse who lived during the time of Noah and Charlie and Trike in the Grand Canyon Adventure (The Green Notebook Series) by Ken Ham. I think I ordered them each a level too far below where they are but like with math we plan to fly through the easy stuff and use it as a time to review the concepts that we already know. 

So that's a little update on some of the materials we are using in our homeschool! 

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