Traveling the United States, we’ve visited many different areas and ecosystems. Beaches, forests, swamps, and mountains are all different and provide many learning opportunities. Many of the National Park sites we’ve visited have well-stocked gift shops with relevant books about the area. One of my favorite series of books for the kids are The Cat…
Wow. Its January. You mean most people don’t post their new curriculum halfway through the year? Whoops. To tell you the truth our curriculum is so fluid that half the time I don’t know when one year stops and another begins. Finish 3rd grade writing? Move on to 4th. Still haven’t finished up math for…
We’ve had some problems lately in the home school department. Our road schooling/home schooling curriculum is fairly lax. We don’t have a strict schedule, and will often have more field trips than book days. Since I absolutely loved field trips as a kid, my kids learn the best with hands on exploration, and there is…
Hello, we are hoping to be a fulltime family next spring/summer. We have been homeschoolers for 2 years. When my oldest now 9 was in 1st grade ( 2 years ago) in a catholic school she was in the habit of getting up early. When we moved her to homeschool she would still get up early. I would leave self guided assignments out for her and she would do them sometimes.
For better or worse both of her parents have relaxed work hours. In fact the only reason we used to have to get up was to get her to school. Now we, her parents, still stay up late 1am-2am, for lots of reasons, work, fun, undisciplined Netflix binging. Our kids go to sleep about 9pm or 10pm. They sleep till about 9 or 10am (about 11 hours of sleep) and play or have their time in the morning. They have the ability to make breakfast but rarely do. Our first meal is brunch. I laughed when you said you said that your school stared at 9ish our usually doesn’t start till noon.
I hate to admit it but it is not productive to start at noon. We sometime have school till 6pm if it is a full day and I am strict about the curriculum. Some of our more productive days are field trip days. I am forced to set up the day before hand to make sure we set our at a reasonable hour. I will set up the assignments they can do themselves and leave them out for them to do in the morning before I get up. Of course with the stipulation, “Once your morning work is done, we can leave.”. I usually also get a wake up call.
As alway with homeschool, I find your final line to ring most true, “I definitely have some scheduling that I still need to work out for me!”. Isn’t that always true.
I like the Magic School Fairy, I don’t think I could pull it off, but I am glad it works for you.ReplyCancel
Thanks! We have a Verizon MiFi device. We stumbled onto an unlimited data plan about a year ago and its been fantastic. Before that we had a Millencom account (since put out of business by Verizon) that was about 20GB for $100/month. Not too crazy and we generally made it work since most of our school is offline. There just wasn’t a whole lot of streaming from Hulu or Netflix. 🙂 Check out Technomadia.com as they literally wrote the book on Mobile Internet.ReplyCancel
While we would have loved to received free stuff to review, we actually spent money to purchase both our Kindles and the books. However, this post does contain Amazon affiliate links which help to fund the blog in a small, small way. Thanks for helping us out! My kids are avid readers. I love this about…
Over the last few weeks I’ve watched on social media as various friends around the country go back to school. I’ve seen various comments from my mom friends – some are happy to be sending their kids back so they can have a little more breathing room. Others are sad summer as come to an…
i was homeschooled and i LOVED it! i actually loved to learn and read! the public school system squashes curiosity and manages to make learning a chore….i definitely want to homeschool my kids if i can swing it someday.
side note about why homeschooling is great: your kids are free to be KIDS! i love that your eldest daughter is still a kid, and not going to justin beiber concerts and wearing tiny shorts like some of these kids. you guys are such an inspirational family of the kind of family i want to have someday 🙂ReplyCancel
I was reading this and was happy to see I am doing all of the same grades that you are! Ha! I have a bit more space for books though 🙂 My boys have used Handwriting without Tears(It has not been totally without them though) since prek and they are nearing the end of the program! They never liked the printing books but they jumped at cursive. Even though my boys are different grades they do the same work. My youngest boy seems ok with that and does not have difficulty keeping up. In fact his handwriting is better than his brothers. Because we started fostercare this year my curriculum list never made it online. Ha! I have 5 kids now and they are teaching me to schedule my time! Thanks for sharing! I loved looking at what you were using.
Foster care, huh? That is awesome!! We’ve often talked about doing that, though obviously not while we are traveling. 🙂 There’s a time and a season for everything so just keep doing good things and your time for travel will come!
Thanks for sharing! This was helpful as I’m looking into homeschool with our upcoming move. I have some questions….. The Spelling Power book…is it just the one teacher manual for both of your kids and then the student books? How do you lesson plan? How do you know that you’re covering everything you need to cover for each child? What other math programs have you seen that you would also be interested in using? How much do you do online? I have been told about Kahn Academy and that it’s free, but it’s all online. Do you avoid online to save your usage? Just a few questions for you!! Oh, and what do you do when they don’t listen to you? Sometimes we have the hardest time getting focused and staying on task to do homework…which isn’t as much as they’re accomplishing at school. I’m drawn to homeschool for being together and not having to run out the door every morning. I’m scared of homeschool because of the unknown…which is what we’re always scared of with new things, right?!