Homeschool Update

It’s been a little while since I did a homeschooling update. The schedule wasn’t working for us. Tony changed jobs again at the beginning of January, and just last week began to work from home. We just haven’t had enough stability lately to keep a schedule. However, now that he’s home and things have settled down a little, I brought out the daily schedule I’d been working on. We looked over it together and refined it, and it’s been working quite nicely, at least for the past two days. We fit in everything, including eight hours of work for Tony.

Since Axa and Raj are 5 and 2, and Charlotte Mason doesn’t recommend formal academics before age 6, we do other things. They have a good four to six hours of outside time scheduled. When we first moved here, they would barely leave the front porch. Now they range all over the yard, from bike riding on our long driveway to playing in the “hut in the forest” in the very back, to the large mud-space left by the recent rains, to climbing trees, to running races on the grass.

We have been working on responsibility lately. They each have some chores to do in the morning. Axa makes her bed, gets dressed, and cleans her room. Then she comes downstairs, feeds the goats and chickens, and gathers eggs. Raj sets the table for breakfast while I make breakfast and milk the goats.

After meals as they are finishing up, I read poems to them. We have a couple of scriptures and poems that we are working on memorizing (I just read them once, every day. You’d be surprised at how quickly they memorize. I just started using the memory work system from Simply Charlotte Mason, and I love it). Today Axa said the entire Owl and the Pussycat herself. She was pleased. And I was impressed.

They beg for picture study every day. The funny thing is, I tried to do picture study with the gospel art picture kit, which we use often for family home evening (as well as the new spiral-bound version). No dice. They quickly tired of the activity and didn’t want to do it anymore. Now that we’re back to “real” artists, they can’t get enough. I guess the twaddle-detector is inborn. We’re doing Raphael right now (I make an attempt at following AmblesideOnline’s rotation). They now ask to do picture study multiple times per day, and Raj will stand in front of my computer screen saver (into which I’ve loaded all our Raphael pictures up till now) and watch it go from picture to picture for twenty minutes if I let him.

We went to a couple of free chamber music concerts in January, which the Bobbles enjoyed. And I found out that the San Diego Symphony is putting on Peter and the Wolf in April, so we’ll be attending that. (Tony took me to the Symphony for Valentine’s Day, which if you ask me is the most romantic Valentine’s date possible, especially since half the program was Chopin).

I had another great day at my local library bookstore, and came home with Misty of Chincoteague, which I’m reading to Axa (in between The Fellowship of the Ring).

So that’s homeschooling for now!