A successful school day for us includes starting each morning listening to The Same Page Podcast Core Memory Work. This is a three-to-five-minute episode that we listen to every day for a week. It introduces us to and helps us memorize a passage of scripture, a poem (or two), a passage from Shakespeare, and is leading us through the Presidents of the United States. It is my favorite way to start our day and sets the tone for everything else.
After the podcast, we read from the Bible or a devotional book and follow with prayer prompts from our prayer calendar or journal. Starting each day gets us all in the right frame of mind for learning.
After our time in the Word, we launch into our read alouds. We are in the middle of the books, The Wild Robot, and we are all loving it.
Jack has been reading The Secret Chicken Society aloud to me, and we are almost at the end. Other things were are reading aloud are Brave Red, Smart Frog which is a series of Fairy Tales, we are almost finished with The Playbook, a inspiring book of life lessons learned from sports, and Words That Built a Nation that introduces us to important documents like the Constitution and gives background on why these documents are important to our nation. It's a good overview of our country.
In the middle of the day, we typically break to go to the YMCA so I can work out and the kids can have some time with some of their friends. If the weather is nice (or not too bad) we will stay and play at the playground.
In the afternoon you will find us finishing up with Math (we are using Singapore Math 2) and also Language Arts (we use The Good and The Beautiful). Jack loves Math but it is more of a chore to get him to do Language Arts and it often ends up being our last thing of the day.
We have a stack of library books that we are working our way through. They range from fictional picture books to non-fiction books about nature and geography and history. They are always changing and we sometimes we focus on one topic that we are really interested in. We also listening to a handful of different podcasts that relate to Science, History, and Literature when we are riding in the car.
On Tuesday afternoons Jack goes to a robotics class at our local community center. He is really enjoying learning how to write basic code to program the Edison Robots they use. If the weather is nice, Isaac and I will run to play at a playground during Jack's class.
Right now Thursday nights have been our night for Jack's basketball league.
He has really been loving playing basketball every week and his team has been doing great hustling, listening to their coach, getting better and dribbling and shooting, and learning some basic plays.
One day this week, Jack got busy during one of this breaks. I thought he was riding his bike, so I was surprised when he came in and informed me he had moved a bunch of firewood that needed to be moved. He had tracked his time and did it all without telling me. I was really impressed by his initiative.
We try to play board games at least once a week. Sorry! was the pick this week. And it's never a surprise if I discover Jack has decided to take something apart so he can put it back together (like a kid's IKEA chair).
If the weather is nice (meaning not pouring down rain) we try to spend as much time as we can outsides. Sometimes this means the kids are exploring our back yard, digging in the dirt or creating their own games.
Sometimes I go with them to the park across the street. Jack is really improving with his mountain bike skills on the little trails in the woods at the park.
They love the merry-go-round and swings, and sometimes we find something like a frisbee and practice throwing it.
This past Saturday I took the boys to a friends birthday party. They had a blast participating at a nerf war at a church gym. Complete with boxes that they could reconfigure to their hearts desire.
Our weeks seem to follow some version of this. It's been a cold and rainy winter, with no snow, but it really hasn't bothered us too much. As long as we can find some sunshine here and there, we are good to go. We haven't hit the February blues and our homeschool is ticking along like clockwork. I think that being flexible and open to changing things us makes us all happier in the day-to-day.
A Look Back at February:
Week 21 (Jan. 28- Feb. 3)
A glimpse back at our school year:
January
December
November
October
September was our trip out West
August
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