Welcome back to our Homeschooling 101 series. Today’s installment is our final one in the series, and we’ll talk about planning your weeks. If you haven’t read our previous posts in this series, you might want to catch them first:

Step 1: Pray It Up
Step 2: Choosing Your Curriculum and Extra-Curricular Activities
Step 3: Planning Your Year

Once you’ve planned out your year, planning your weeks should be fairly simple. At this point, you should already have your extra-curricular activities in your planner, including all field trips, sports, ballet, art lessons, foreign language tutoring, etc. You should also have an idea of how many chapters/lessons, etc. you need to cover in each subject on a weekly basis. The next step is getting it all written down in your weekly planner.

Here’s a little secret about homeschooling: As long as you get the work done, it’s up to you as to what you do when. If you want to spend all day Monday knocking out your math for the week, go ahead. If you have a lot of extra-curricular activities on Thursday, by all means get your book work done earlier in the week. If you need to leave home early on Wednesday nights for church, just do four subjects that day. If you’d really just like to do grammar on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, have at it. As long as you get it all done, you are free to set your own schedule. As you can see above, I do write it all down on specific days (my daughter actually wrote that week – my handwriting is a little better:) but if we do six lessons of math on Monday, I mark off that many and we move onto something else the next day. The only subjects I enforce the schedule with are the ones where we have a test coming up and I don’t want MA to wait too late to begin, which would throw off our test schedule. For example, we do history and spelling tests every Friday, so we’ll start those early in the week and not wait until Wednesday, to give her time to learn the material before the test. Clear as mud?

The beauty of homeschooling is that you have the freedom to plan your days in ways that best suit your family. If your kiddos are night owls who can concentrate on spelling words at 9:00 pm, then by all means do your spelling when they’re best ready to learn. In our house, we like to knock out the work early in the morning so we can finish by mid-afternoon. That’s what works best for us, so we stick to it. But you have the flexibility to choose for yourself. Our fall is usually a pretty busy time with soccer, ballet, and church activities starting again, so we sometimes lighten our book work load in fall and just make it up in winter. That works well for us. As you begin to get a little experience with homeschooling, you will discover a flow that works best for you. Go with it.

I hope this series has been helpful for you. If so, please feel free to share it with others that it might encourage.

All the best from our homeschool to yours!

Welcome back to part three of our homeschooling series! If you missed the first two segments, you can catch Part 1 (Pray It Up) here and Part 2 (Choosing Curriculum and Extra-Curricular Activities) here.

If you’re a planner like me, Part 3 (Planning Your Year) will be fun. This is the part where you gather all of your books from all of your subjects and lay them out on the table. You flip through each one checking to see how many lessons/chapters are in each subject, and you divide up the work for the year. For this task, you are going to need some kind of school planner. There are planners available online. You can make your own on Excel or Word. I use a regular teacher planner from the parent/teacher store, a Ward #18 to be exact.

Take a field trip to your local teacher supply store and look through their books to get a feel for what will work best for you. Many of my homeschooling friends use an Excel spreadsheet to get their plans on paper and then ring them and put them in a binder that they’ve put together. Whatever works best for you will be just fine.

Next you need to fill in the dates and subjects titles. Go ahead and do it for the whole year, or at least the first semester.

Next you are going to add in all those field trips you committed to. Write them all down on the proper day and in the proper subject. If a field trip will cover several subjects, write it down in all that apply.
Next add in all those extra-curricular activities that you’ve scheduled. If you have ballet lessons, write it down in PE and fine arts. If you signed your kiddo up for art lessons, write it down in fine arts. If you hired a Latin tutor, write it down on his/her assigned day. Write it all down so that you don’t overschedule your bookwork on those days.

Now you’re ready to divide up the bookwork so that you’ll know roughly how much you need to cover each week. This doesn’t have to be exact, but if you see that you have 140 math lessons to cover, then you know you better be covering 4-5 lessons each week. If you plan on doing all 42 history chapters, you must cover roughly one each week, leaving breaks for Christmas, Thanksgiving, spring break, etc. By the way, go ahead and pencil in any breaks you know you are going to be taking like vacations, holiday breaks, family weddings, whatever. Write it down so that you’ll remember not to load up on school work that week.

At this point you should have a framework for what you’ll be doing each week. Come back next week and we’ll discuss the last segment of our series, Planning Your Week. We’ll dive a little further into the specifics of planning what you do each day.

Hey, Guys and Gals! I know I’ve kind of been on a soapbox lately about homeschooling and reading and learning, but I wanted to let you all know about a fabulous opportunity I came across this morning in case some of you are interested in joining us. The fabulous Edie at Life In Grace is starting a book club called “Read Well, Live Well“. Now, if you know Edie, you know we won’t be reading the most current novel on the market. This book club will be for those interested in reading the classics. We’ll be starting with The Odyssey and reading our way through history. She even lists a great junior version, which I’ll be reading aloud to my little one. If you are interested in learning how to read and understand classical literature, this is a great opportunity to do it with a group. And since it’s an online book club, you don’t even ave to get dressed up or leave the house. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, hop over to Life In Grace and let Edie know you are joining the group. I’ll see you there!

Linking up with:
Read Aloud Thursdays

We’re about to kick off the school year here at The Hill Preparatory Academy for Girls. While the summer has been fun and relaxing, we are definitely missing our routine. The girls and I have actually been ready for school to start for a couple of weeks 🙂 I know… we’re big nerds. We own it.

This year our curriculum choices aren’t much different than last year. It seems like we’ve hit on a good collection of curricula that we feel like teaches what we want in a way that fits Mary Anneliese’s learning style. We’ve sort of hit our stride. So here’s what we’re doing this year…

Math: Big shout out to Saxon, which we have used since the very beginning of our homeschooling journey. We love, love, love the repetitiveness of it, as MA needs that for it to stick in her mind. We’ll be on books 6/5 this year, and we’re hoping to cover two years of math this year. It’s a tall order, and I really won’t be upset if we don’t finish it. But I do know that if we don’t set the goal, we won’t be motivated to push ourselves.

Bible: We’ve been reading through the Bible since we started homeschooling. We started in first grade with Genesis and ended fourth grade in Ecclesiastes. I can’t decide whether to begin this year with Song of Solomon or skip it and go straight to Isaiah. Not sure I’m ready to discuss the content of Song of Solomon with my ten year old. Then again, maybe it’s a good place to start with those BIG discussions. Hmm, still need to consider what to do on that one. But wherever we begin, we will read through the text, usually 1-2 chapters at a time, and discuss it as we go. I don’t use a formal Bible curricula. We simply read and discuss and talk about life lessons and how the stories fit into the big picture of God’s history. Reading the Bible like this has been one of my very favorite parts of homeschooling. Both MA and I have learned so much about God’s Word as she reads aloud and I provide commentary.

Last fall our church began a three year study of the Bible, which includes Sunday school lessons that start at Genesis and go straight through to Revelation. Our pastor is preaching his way through the Bible in conjunction with the Sunday school lessons. We are currently in 1 Kings. This study has piggy-backed what we’ve been reading at home and has provided fabulous additional insight into the passages we’re reading. Every Monday morning, MA’s Sunday school teacher sends out a five-day devotional that goes along with the passage they will be covering in Sunday school that week. She reads these each morning as her daily devotional.

We will continue to memorize scripture, both single verses and longer passages. I have talked about WHY we memorize scripture here and HOW we memorize it here. We continue to review previous years’ memory verses, so at this point, Mary Anneliese knows a LOT of scripture.

Science: Last year we hit on a science curriculum that we really want to stick with. Jeannie Fulbright has a wonderful creation-based science curriculum called Exploring God’s Creation, which correspond with the days of creation. This year we will do the second book, Botany. We will definitely throw in lots of field trips to the Birmingham Botanical Gardens and Aldridge Gardens. We’ve never done a lot of nature study before, but I think we this year will be a good year to start. We’ll keep a nature journal with notes and sketches. As there are only 14 chapters in this series of books (and we’ve studies a lot about plant life in previous years), I think we can finish this one by Christmas. Then we’ll move on to Zoology after our Christmas break.

Grammar: Rod and Staff is our curriculum of choice for grammar, and this year we will be in their fifth grade book. I’m hoping that we will be wrapping up our study of grammar and move into more writing this year. You now, at some point you have to put all those parts of speech into use.

Spelling: We liked All About Spelling last year, so we’re sticking with it this year. I like how they teach the rules of spelling and why words are spelled the way they are. We’ll be in their fourth book this year. We’ll continue to learn commonly used words and words from our history and science texts for our weekly spelling tests.

Reading: Great classic literature is the backbone of our homeschool. We won’t change that this year. We’ll read literature. Lots and lots of great literature.

History: Last year we finished Story of the World, which completed our four-year history cycle. We’ll begin again this year with the ancient civilizations, using the same curriculum, but delving deeper into it with additional reading and research. MA is really looking forward to diving back into the ancient people groups, which seems to be one of her favorite historical eras. Weird homeschooled kid.

Latin: We will be using a combination of Latina Christiana and Visual Latin. We are at the point where we need to read books in Latin, as opposed to just doing worksheets and vocabulary. Visual Latin has some interesting Latin primers on their site, which I’m sure we’ll be downloading. I also found Latin copies of Ferdinand the Bull and other classic children’s stories which will be extremely helpful!

Fine Arts: We’ll be back for year number 7!!! of the Briarwood Ballet. She’ll take two classes weekly at an hour and a half each. Through our homeschool group, we’ll attend several plays at the Birmingham Children’s Theater. On Wednesday nights, we’ll participate in choir with our church. And as part of our nature study, we’ll do a ton of drawing and painting. I’m holding out for piano lessons at some point, but I’m really not sure how we’d fit it in, much less practice time. Maybe one day.

PE: Between the six hours of soccer each week and three hours of ballet, I do believe we have PE covered. We’ll throw in playing on the church playground on Sunday nights and Wednesdays after church just for fun.

Little Pitter Patter will go to preschool three days a week this year. She loves time with her friends, and is really looking forward to the year with her new class and new teacher. We are going to miss her so much, but know that she will be having a great time.

That’s it, folks. We’re ambitious and like to load up our schedule, but if we don’t we get grumpy and bored. So it works for us. Hope you find a style of learning that works for your kiddos, too!

Welcome back for session two in our Homeschooling 101 series. If you missed last week’s discussion about Praying It Up, you can find it here.

Even though this series is intended to give you some basics on getting started homeschooling, I will not cover specific homeschooling laws. As homeschooling laws vary from state to state, please be sure you check with your state’s homeschooling association to square away any legal paperwork or requirements for your state. For example, I live in Alabama and our state is pretty homeschool-friendly, but we do have to be a part of a cover school which collects our grades and attendance. The cover school provides us with an official letter to send to our local public school board to prove that we are, in fact, legally registered with a cover school and therefore not truant. Your state’s laws may be different than in Alabama, so your state’s homeschooling association is a great place to learn about requirements. Now onto step two…

Once you have prayed over your decision and you are confident that God is urging you down the homeschooling path you are ready to move into another round of decision-making, which will also require a lot of prayer and listening to God’s direction – that of selecting your curriculum and extra-curricular activities. Your state might have a core curriculum that they require you to cover (ours does) that include the basics like math, science, language arts, etc. Usually these are subjects that you want to cover anyway, so it’s not a huge burden to meet their requirements on these. You do, however, get to decide how you teach them and which curricula you use. As you begin to decide which subjects to cover, I would suggest you start with the core subjects, and then add to that load as you see God leading. In our homeschool, that means we do math, science, grammar, reading, spelling and history to meet core requirements, but because I want to incorporate more than that I add Latin, fine arts, Bible, PE, and last year, a unit called Intro to Classical Studies.

As you will soon discover, there are a thousand great curriculum choices. You can choose an all-inclusive curriculum, where your whole year’s worth of work comes in one box as a set, or you can choose individual subjects from different publishers. I do the latter because it gives me the freedom to purchase materials from publishers who specialize in that subject. If you are a little shaky about choosing that many different curricula, then a box set might work better for you. The good news is that with homeschooling, you have the freedom to do whichever you want. It can, however, be overwhelming to sort through the many choices in search of THE right ones for your student. It can be difficult to “look” through a curriculum online and truly get a feel for whether it’s what you want. My advice on this is to ask around to some of your homeschooling friends, read through homeschooling blogs that you trust, and narrow down your choices to a few in each subject. Then visit a homeschooling convention in your area and spend time in their vendor hall looking over your choices. Visit the booths of your top choices and look through the textbooks, talk with their representatives about their product, and get an overall feel for how well their curriculum will work for your student. This is your opportunity to discuss any challenges your student may have with reps from the company and get their input on how to modify their programs for your situation. You can also get some pretty sweet deals if you purchase at the convention. Just don’t get too excited and overbuy!! There is SO MUCH good material that it can be tempting to buy a ton of stuff that you never have time to complete.

Once you have your curriculum chosen, you can see how much time you will have for extra-curricular activities. We were surprised our first year at how much time we had to participate in outside activities. We finished our school work in a few hours, so we had several hours each day to fill up with other activities. We listed out all our possibilities for extra activities, church activities, sports, ballet lessons, music lessons, gymnastics, art lessons, field trips, children’s theater productions, library productions, etc. We prayed over each one, asking God whether to plan it or ditch it, and came up with a list we felt comfortable with. I didn’t want to over-schedule, but I sure wanted to have enough planned that we were sitting around bored with nothing to do either. We ended up choosing church activities (of course), ballet, gymnastics, and children’s theater productions. This might sound like a lot, but when school only takes a couple of hours each day (for first grade) then you have a lot of time for fun activities.

One word of caution: Each year we have found that our school workload increases and we have to concentrate our extra-curricular activities to one or two that we really enjoy and want to pursue. This gets even crazier as you add more children to the mix. Your schedule must be one that your entire family can live with – not just what’s best for one child. Prayer can help you determine what that balance needs to be 🙂

Come back next week for part three in this series, Planning Your Year.

We live in an area that has great schools. We have wonderful public schools, as well as an abundance of private school choices. After looking at the pros and cons of each one, our family has made the decision to continue homeschooling for another year. This decision always brings with it a lot of discussion from others, some positive and some negative and some just curious to learn more. When people learn that we homeschool, there are always tons of questions about the how-to, what we do everyday, what curriculum we choose, etc. Many people have considered homeschooling, but just don’t know how to get started. Many have never considered it because they have already decided it would be too difficult for them, but they are not pleased with their school options and just feel stuck. So I thought it time to do a blog series answering the most often-asked questions in hopes that if you too are considering homeschool, or are just curious of it could work for your family, you can have a little direction in how to get started.

Step Number 1: Pray It Up

This might be the most obvious step in the entire homeschooling process, but it is the most important and, for me sometimes, the most often neglected. There are times I jump out ahead of God, and my guess is that I’m not the only one. (Proverbs 19:21, anyone?) If you’re wondering whether homeschooling is for you, the best place to start is by asking God whether it’s what He wants. And no, the answer may not be the same for everyone. Some of you live in a fabulous public school system where your children are excelling academically, socially, and even spiritually. Your answer from Him might be to stay the course. Some are in a wonderful private school where your children are excelling, but it’s causing such a financial strain that both husband and wife are affected by the stress. Your answer from Him might be that your marriage is important enough to give up that wonderful school and choose homeschooling instead. I don’t know how He will direct you as you spend time seeking Him on this issue, and I’m certainly not setting myself up as the judge as to what method of education is best for your family. Whether you choose public, private, or home school, God can use each one to minister to your home. I am encouraging you, however, to spend time with God getting this issue clear with Him, hearing Him direct you, and then having you walk in obedience.

As you pray about your homeschooling decision, seek godly counsel from trusted Christian friends (Proverbs 15:22). Search the scriptures, asking the Holy Spirit to speak to you on this issue (Psalm 119:105). Get online and look around for reputable Christian homeschooling blogs and articles to aid you in the decision-making process (Proverbs 15:14). And above all, make sure you and your spouse are in agreement about your decision (Ephesians 5:22-28).

Once you (and I) hear from Him that homeschooling is our direction for the year, start praying through the details. There are lots of details and choices involved in homeschooling and the old saying that “the devil is in the details” certainly holds true in a homeschooling life.

Which curriculum will you use? Ask Him to show you.

How many extra-curricular activities should you participate in? Ask for His direction.

Are you lacking in confidence or patience regarding your homeschooling? Ask Him to grant it, build it, uncover it – whatever it takes for you to succeed in the task He has given you.

Pray about your relationship with your child – that you would model Christ to them and that they would learn to walk in His ways.

Get out your calendar and pray that He would direct the ways you fill it.

Walk through your home and pray that it would be a place of safety, peace, and joy where learners can thrive.

Pray for God to help you put to death the sins of the flesh like impatience, frustration, and perfectionism.

In case no one has told you this little secret, let me break it to you. Nothing will reveal your own sins quite like seeing them reflected in your children. Pray for God’s grace to flow in and through you when you see yourself in them.

Pray, pray, pray, pray, pray. And pray again.

Listen, God may not make every single step of your path completely clear from day one. Sometimes all He will reveal is the next step. Hear me on this – TAKE THE STEP HE MAKES CLEAR TO YOU. And then wait on Him for the next move. Often He gives us clear direction from the very beginning, and often He gives us only enough info for the next move. Go with whatever He reveals to you, having full confidence that He will guide you in your next steps.

When you feel like you have a good handle on what He wants you to do, you’re ready for Step Number 2: Choosing Your Curriculum. Come back next week for a full description of how I work through that process.

As a homeschooling mama, I am constantly browsing the internet for fun art project ideas that my girls can do at home. Pinterest and art blogs have proven INVALUABLE in giving us the great inspiration, but also the step-by-step instructions. A couple of my go-to sites are Art Projects for Kids and Deep Space Sparkle. These ladies are art teachers, and their ideas are so fabulously creative and colorful and art-educationy.

Summer is the perfect time to get outside, breathe fresh air, and work on art projects, so I’ve compiled a few projects that we’d like to complete over the next couple of weeks.

I’ve had two prints of Gustav Klimt’s work hanging in my bathroom since I was a single girl right out of Auburn University. My girls will definitely be doing this recreation of his Tree of Life on Art Projects for Kids. Love the step-by-step instructions!

This owl project from Make It… A Wonderful Life is a great way to teach that kids can use all kinds of materials to create art – even aluminum foil, glue, and shoe polish.

These pencil drawing of bird cages may not technically qualify as a how-to, but what a great study in line drawings!

My girls favorite medium is watercolor, so this experiment in watercolor texture techniques by deviantART will be great for them. It’s fun to learn new techniques that we can use in other projects.

My children are VERY into begin green and recycling. I think this rainbow collage by Art Projects for Kids could be a nice way to turn trash into art.

My big girl is crazy over scrapbooking papers. She has made cards, notebooks, and various and sundry other patterned paper projects. I thought this item I found on Etsy would be a really cute project for her. And she could choose any Bible verse she wanted.

We’ll be studying Ancient history again in the fall, and I thought this Ancient Greece Mural by Deep Space Sparkle was a brilliant way to teach art and history at one time. I probably wouldn’t use clay tiles, as we don’t have a spot to display/store something that heavy, but we could use any other medium – maybe even more of that scrapbook paper my girl is so cuckoo about – to create something like this. Or perhaps each tile could be a different medium. You could really use a lot of creativity on this one!

For my little sweet potato, this Thanksgiving Turkey on www.reading-with-kids.com is a fun way to teach reading, following instructions, and art at once. There are other holidays available as well. We could use markers, crayons, watercolor, or even oil pastels on this piece.

Both of my girls would enjoy making these really cute butterflies from toilet paper rolls. They could use scrapbooking paper or wrapping paper and foam shape stickers. I think we would add a magnet to the back and make them into refrigerator magnets. This would be a cute gift for my girls to make for their grandmothers.

Since Eric Carle is one of our best-loved children’s’ authors around here, I think this painted paper elephant in his style would be cool to do. I might even try to create other animals and hang them on the awl in our playroom. This idea comes from Deep Space Sparkle.

Want to see more of our art project ideas? Click HERE to see our next series.

Do you have a favorite website for art ideas? A Pinterest board of great art projects you’ve pinned? Posts on your own blog of great pieces your kiddos have completed? Leave a link in the comments so we can all check them out!

I have several items from our homeschool stash on sale on eBay. If you are looking for used (cheaper) copies of textbooks, workbooks, or other homeschooling materials, please check back as I will update this post as more items go up for auction.

Story of the World Volume 2: The Middle Ages

Story of the World Volume 3: Early Modern Times

Story of the World Volume 3: Early Modern Times

Story of the World Volume 4: The Modern Age

Story of the World Volume 4: The Modern Age Activity Book

All About Spelling Level 1 Teacher’s Guide

All About Spelling Level 3 Teacher’s Guide

All About Spelling The Basic Phonograms CD-ROM

Saxon Math 3, Homeschooling Edition, Teacher’s Guide

Do you have homeschool materials you’d like to sell? Please leave us the info in the comments!

We’ve been doing a little informal poll over on The Hill Hangout’s Facebook page as to which books you’d recommend for a summer reading list. We have a list for the adults (you’ll notice that my baby brother thinks he is VERY funny!) and a list for the kiddos. Make your way over there and list your favorites. Be sure to browse the list to see if there is anything that you’d like to read.