Homeschooling Round 2.5. And Parenting School. For Me.

This year we will have two students in the house, and it’s both exciting and terrifying at the same time. School has officially begun!

We started our year the last week of August – 4 days after our whirlwind trip to Grasslands National Park, Yellowstone National Park, and Laramie, WY for the eclipse. OI VAY!

We are currently doing well, there are still some kinks in our scheduling that will need to be smoothed out, but we’re off to a much stronger start than last year. Last year our strong start didn’t happen until the end of November (but we still got through all our work – thanks goodness for flexibility!). I’ve learned a bit since then (the hard knocks school of parenting, perhaps), so I’m hoping this school year will be filled up better than last.

This year’s resources in school have been expanded.

Spencer, in Grade 2:

All About Reading Level 2

All About Spelling Level 1

Handwriting Without Tears Level 1/2

Math-U-See Level 2

Story of the World, Volume 1, workbook and we have the audio CDs as well.

We are using our library to learn about the human body this year for science. I have a bunch of books sitting on the shelf and we borrowed several educational kids DVDs on the subject too.

Canada: My Country by Donna Ward. My research seems to say that her books are the best well-structured Canadian social studies program out there for homeschoolers. I will be supplementing with aboriginal authors as well. I have a few on my shortlist that I need to see if our library has in its stacks.

The Canada Close Up Series is what we’re using for learning more about Canada in detail. We just finished the Saskatchewan book, and we’re about to start the British Columbia book next.

I’m continuing with the Home Art Studio art DVDs; we didn’t get through enough of the sessions last year and they were really enjoyable.

For faith, we will be creating a large saint calendar. I have a little woodwork to do before we can really get started, but we’re reading about different saints and, when possible, watching short documentaries about them. We’re also going through the Creed and discussing the main tenets of our faith.

Cassia, in Kindergarten:

All About Reading Pre-Reading She’s likely to start Level 1 this year too.

Handwriting Without Tears, cause I’m realising I should have started this earlier with Spencer.

Math-U-See Primer

And for faith, it’s the same as above.

And also reading lots of books 🙂

Also an important book that will be read over and over again this year is Good Pictures, Bad Pictures (primarily for Spencer, there is a preschool edition I would love but I cannot find it easily in Canada).

Online access to porn is super extensive. If your child has access to unfiltered and unsupervised devices, it will only be a matter of time before your child is exposed to porn. Perhaps the best way of phrasing it is that your child doesn’t go looking for porn – porn goes looking for your child. We just had Matt Fradd speaking in our Cathedral last week, and he shared that 1 out of 10 visitors to a porn site is a child. That is absolutely terrible! And we need to do all we can to protect our children from this devastating addiction and teaching them how to respond when exposed to it. It is possible. This book is a great start. There are other great resources out there, and Matt’s website is a good place to start.

Felicity:

She putters around and listens. Mostly draws on the chalk board or the easel. And gets mad at us when we interrupt her. Her school is one of play.

No biggie.

In the fitness category, Spencer is still in Karate twice a week, with an option of doing Jiu Jitsu Monday evenings if he wants (not sure if we’ll be up for that…)

Cassia has started gymnastics. We were late to her first class (as in, missed it by an hour), so it got off to an awkward start. The coaches let her join the next session with older kids and just modified what she did, but we’ll know for this week that it’s an hour earlier.

They also are outside nearly as much as I will let them be. They race from lamppost to lamppost and dig in the backyard or build ‘forts’ with leftover wood from projects. I’m not terribly worried about them moving enough. I, however, have work to do in that department.