Back to School

We started back to school a few weeks ago and have been so busy with it that this is the first chance that I have had to blog about it. This is an interesting school year for us in many ways.

First, we are using new curriculum. After trudging through history the past 2 years with a satisfactory but not favorite curriculum, I was ready for a change. After much research, looking around, talking to lots of moms at convention, etc. I came across a curriculum called Tapestry of Grace. You may be familiar with it, but I had never heard of it before. It takes a Classical Approach to learning and uses various sources to make history come alive. It brings in Socratic discussions to encourage thought beyond the books and incorporates all of history as it happened from a Biblical World View. TOG covers history, government, fine arts, church history and literature. Sounds impressive, right - so what's the catch? The catch is that it has taken a TON of time to familiarize myself with the ins and outs of the program, to track down at the library the resources I needed and to plan out our units. Once I got through all of that, it was awesome! We are on the 3rd week and LOVE this study. We started with the beginning of American History, but they are learning about everything that was happening around the world at the same time. Did you know that the KJV Bible was written at the time that the Pilgrims came to America? There are so many things that I have learned as a homeschool mom that I never learned in Public school! And, Caleb is learning the same topics as the girls, but on his level, so we can have group discussions and they are learning from each other. We are all thoroughly enjoying school!

Second, Caleb is doing all subjects for the first time. He is doing Bible, History (and all the subjects mentioned above that go with the TOG curriculum), Science, English, Reading, Math, Spelling, Writing (with a Writeshop Curriculum that I am Beta testing for release!), and Handwriting. He is handling it all so well and today, came out and asked when we could start school - talk about a milestone!

Third, I am back to full teaching and planning for all 3 of them. Last year, with my dad recovering here from his heart operation, I did not do as much as I like to do to be hands on with them and we really just made it through the year. I am happily back to doing what I love most - teaching and interacting with my children full time!

This is a challenging year for the girls. They have a lot of upper level reading, discussion questions as well as all of their other subjects. However, so far so good! They are both doing all of the History mentioned above, Science (Biology for MaKenna and Marine Biology for Holly), Math (Geometry for M and Algebra 2 for H), PE, Music (Violin for M and Piano for H), Foreign Language (Sign Language and some Latin), and Writeshop 2 - I think that's it! Whew - can you tell that we are going to be very busy this year? But what an incredible honor and blessing it continues to be to homeschool my children - even in the midst of the busy-ness it is worth it all.

That's it for us! Here's to the best school year ever - no matter what yours looks like!