A Joyful Keeper

At the beginning of last week, we decided to do an experiment. We wrote down the reading on our electricity meter, and then used all our appliances as per usual. We left on our computers, had tvs, etc, on standby, switched on lights like we normally do. It was a relatively normal week.

This week, we are going to do things a little differently. We are not going to go without power entirely… phew! But we are going to try to do without it as much as possible. We are going to turn all the appliances off at the power point. We won’t leave the computers running all day or on overnight. We will make a conscious effort to turn off all lights as we leave the rooms.

We were going to have a “harsher” non-electricity week, but dh said he wanted us to compare with doing these small changes first. So, we will put that off to another week. I’d say the week after, but my parents are coming to visit and I don’t think they will appreciate only having candle light in the evenings - lol! What we did last time we studied the Middle Ages was go an entire day without electricity. That was fun! We might do that again instead of a whole week.

So, next week - I will check my mail in the morning and then switch off my computer. I will check it again in the evening, and then switch it off. I will not be blogging and I won’t be checking other blogs! Don’t worry, I’ll catch up with all of you the week after! I’m sure it will be fun. The reason I will not be using the internet other than for emails, is because I am banning the kids from using computers too next week, and it isn’t fair if I am on it all the time. Besides, I want to use the time to spend with them, either playing board games, doing puzzles, or other non-electricity activities.

We will check the meter reading tomorrow morning and write it down. The Monday after it will be interesting to see what difference our electricity savings week has made…

Have a great week everyone, and I’ll update you in a week and tell you how we went!

Oh, by the way, it is Spring down here!!!

to Tiany and all the sponsors of the Homeschool Open House 2007! It was so much fun! I haven’t quite made it to everyone’s house yet, so I am glad that Tiany is keeping the links up permanently. Every now and then I will grab a cuppa, have a break and visit someone else’s home….

I was one of the first 100 on the list, so I got to sign up for 3 free issues of the Homeschooling Today Magazine! I hope they will be able to send it to Australia because I would love to see a *real* homeschooling magazine, LOL! It will probably tempt me to get a subscription… So, thank you to Homeschooling Today Magazine for being so generous to us!

Also a big thank you to Crystal from Biblical Womanhood for donating her latest ebook to ALL of us who participated! I’ve had a quick look through it and it looks fantastic. Thanks Crystal!

Don’t forget my ebook with simple notebooking pages for use in your homeschool. It is free to EVERYONE, not just those who participated in the Open House, so tell your friends

Go HERE to download it!

Tiany is going to have a Christmas Open House later on this year, so make sure you check back at her site from time to time. I’m sure it is going to be great fun!

As I have mentioned before, we started on Latin this year. For some strange reason I have always wanted to learn Latin! Must be the romantic in me…. oh, and yes, I am a linguist… that might explain some of it. Anyway, when we had our first lesson a few weeks ago, I was trying to explain to the children why we were going to learn Latin - a dead language. I had trouble explaining this, and they wouldn’t accept the main reason I had: “It will be fun!!!” My idea of fun and theirs’ is vastly different!

I was very pleased, therefore, to come across all these wonderful reasons for learning Latin on Carla’s blog. Go and check it out HERE!

I feel so much better now :), I’ve got 14 reasons to tell my children why we are learning Latin!

(#14 is my addition: “IT’S FUN!!!!”)

Hosted by Biblical Womanhood

Sometimes I think we make life so complicated, at least I know I do! Even with school….. it is so easy to get caught up in all the curriculum that is available and spend a lot of money on things that we sometimes don’t even end up using. I know I have done this. There is often trial and error because I have not been able to look at the item beforehand, ie I’ve bought it on the internet. Not all homeschooling suppliers let you send it back if it is not what you expected. There are some out there that do have that policy, and that is a great help. I don’t mind if I get some things wrong, but I prefer that not to happen too often!

There is also a tendency to think we HAVE to buy things. There are a lot of resources available on the internet for free. Many of these are high quality and I am trying to incorporate them into our homeschool more and more each year. Some of my favorite sites for free homeschooling resources are:

http://amblesideonline.org/

http://oldfashionededucation.com/index.html

http://www.easyfunschool.com/

http://www.splashesfromtheriver.com/spelling/index.htm

http://www.learningpage.com/

I’d like to encourage you to use more of these resources in your homeschool. It will be much easier on your pocket book and your children will still receive a quality education. Oh, and don’t forget to download my Back to School Notebooking Pages Ebook, it is FREE!!!

When Tiany started hosting the Homeschool Open House 2007 , I was so excited to see how many people were giving away freebies to bless other homeschoolers. I wanted in on this too I have started on many ebooks, but not finished any. This Open House really pushed me to actually make a simple ebook and finish it! Thanks Tiany for the motivation!

You can go HERE to download the ebook.

Thanks again to Tiany and all those who participated in the Open House. I have been really blessed by the ones I have read so far (still working on that list!). Can’t wait till next year’s! LOL!

Yesterday we had a great day together. School flowed just nicely, and we all did some work in the kitchen.

We had been given a huge jar of chocolate mousse mix a while ago, and I decided to ask Daniel to work out how to make it. He looked at the instructions on the back and managed to make a HUGE batch of it! LOL! That’s what I get for letting him make it independently Still, it was good because we have enough for a few days of desserts and gave a few servings away too! The kids all decided it was absolutely yummy!

Elizabeth made sugar cookies. She is getting quite good at that. She does it all except put them in and out of the oven. She also taught Matthew how to make Hot Chocolate Mix. Matt’s been asking when he gets to be in charge of a recipe, so I thought this was a good one to start him with. He has to learn to measure, mix and sift ingredients. No chopping or cooking involved He decided it was really hard work! LOL! Wait till he learns a harder recipe!

The boys have been unloading the dishwasher for years now, as on of their daily morning chores. Yesterday I started teaching Elizabeth to load it. I rinsed and showed her where to put the dishes. She was pleased that she was helping me out in the kitchen.

Our children often like to help us out, especially the younger ones. When they get older they might be less willing to help out. Little ones love to follow us around and copy us. We need to take advantage of this eagerness! I know I haven’t taken advantage of it enough in the past. Often it was just much quicker for me to do something than to train one of my children. And yet now I can see the training is paying off as the children are able to do more and more things on their own. I want to build on that training slowly, because I know there are way more things they can do to help around the house.

I don’t just want to train them for my sake, but also for their own. It is part of their education. They need to have practical skills as well as academic ones.

I’d love to hear about how you train your children in your home. If you have any blog entries or articles you have written, please leave a comment and a link to them. I’d love to read them and I’m sure others would too

Tiany’s Homeschool Open House is going sooooo well! She has more than 100 people participating! I don’t know about you, but I’ve been looking at lots of blogs and leaving as many comments as I can! This is so much fun!

I just love to hear about how other homeschoolers plan their year. I love to pick up ideas from them. That is the best part of this Open House. Just at a click of my mouse, I can have a peek into over 100 homeschools and see what God is doing in their lives. I’ve already picked up quite a few ideas that I want to try. I keep telling myself to write down where I got the ideas from, but of course I’ve looked at so many blogs the past few days that I have forgotten! Oops!

I’ve also had confirmation of what we are doing…. that we are not the only ones with our particular style of learning! It is always nice to know that you are not alone in this world! LOL!

Thanks to all of you who have visited my blog in the last couple of days, I’m so glad you were able to drop in! Thanks to all of you who left comments. If you asked questions, I answered in the comments section. And thanks again to Tiany for hosting this wonderful event!!! Oh - and if you haven’t joined in yet, you still can!!! The Homeschool Open House is still on till the 15th!

Tiany, over at Less of Me ~ More Of Him, is hosting a Homeschool Open House! It sounded like so much fun, I just had to join in I can’t wait to read what others are doing in their homeschool because I know that I will learn something from them.

I have written about our homeschool before, and you can look at various articles I have written if you click on the Homeschool link on the side bar of this website. There you can read about how we started homeschooling 7 years ago, what kind of curriculum we use, and a bit more detail of what we were doing last year. I thought for the Homeschool Open House I would write a bit about what we have been doing this year, 2007.

This year has been a really unsettled year in which I have almost come to believe that I am an unschooler! Thank goodness there are so many different methods of education and we don’t have to be rigid in sticking to only one! I do believe God calls us to use different curricula and methods at different stages of our homeschool journey.

For those of you who are new here, I have three children - Daniel 13, Elizabeth 11 and Matthew 9. We live in Australia right now, but have been in the Middle East for the past two and a half years. The past three months we have been settling back into life here, which has had its ups and downs Our school year goes from January to December and we take breaks whenever we need them - not when the public schools have their holidays, so I guess you could say that we school year round.

This year we made a few changes in our basic curriculum. I like to make sure the children get the “basics” in every day - ie the three R’s : reading, writing and ‘rithmetic As I have mentioned before, as soon as we hit the Middle School years, we have struggled with finding a good Math curriculum that suits us. This year I found one! Yay! Daniel started using Teaching Textbooks Pre-Algebra when we got back to Australia. I love it and so does he, which is the main thing of course!! I have ordered the Grade 6 one for Elizabeth which we will start with slowly (she is in Grade 5 and struggles a bit with Math). At the moment I am concentrating with her learning her Math facts well. Matthew is still doing basic Math with various workbooks that we already had.

The children have been doing a lot of copywork for English this year. I have been using The Harp and the Laurel Wreath by Laura Berquist which has great selections of poetry and other copywork just ready to go. I also pick up things along the way, like the plaque at a caravan park we went to that said:

All was Beauty Here…

Come friend, enjoy your picnic at your ease

Beside the creek beneath the spreading trees

But leave no traces of your wayside meal-

No empty bags, nor scattered orange peel

No broken bottles littered through the grass

Others may view this with distaste - and pass

So let it not be said, and to your shame,

That all was beauty here - until you came.

Other copywork could include Daniel writing “I will not steal Na, I will not steal Na…” twenty times (”Na” is Matt’s cuddly sheep that he sleeps with and that Daniel loves to pinch and hide just to be annoying…..).

Reading is something I can’t stop the children from doing. They are always asking to go to the library, and read and re-read the books we have here at home. At times we go through spurts of reading certain series - last month it was all our Trixie Beldens… This week Elizabeth has started on the Boxcar children. Daniel always reaches for the Hardy Boys when he has run out of things to read. Robyn gave me hardcover books of the Bobbsey Twins which Daniel devoured in no time. I truly believe that as long as the children are reading, they are learning.

A few weeks ago they were playing Junior Trivial Pursuit, and Elizabeth came running in to me, saying:

“Oh, thanks Mum, for making me read about the Wright brothers! Because I read it, I got this answer right!!”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t often get my children running in and thanking me for making them learn something, so I was quite amused!

On top of the basics I am trying to get in Art, Science, History and languages other than English. We are going to start Latin (I say this every week..!). Art mostly comes in the form of making lapbooks and doing projects. We are doing the second book of Story of the World for History. We’ve just done the chapter on China and we opened our Ancient China Treasure Chest that we got from Sonlight. We had lots of fun with that!

For Science Daniel is doing Apologia 7 and Elizabeth and Matthew are doing Exploring Creation with Astronomy . We are really enjoying both of these Science books as they fit in well with our notebooking way of learning. We do some narration, some copywork, and some project work.

We haven’t started any sports yet since we’ve been back. We were doing a lot of swimming while we were overseas, but we need to wait till we have a car before we can get involved in something here.

I think that sums up how we are doing so far this year! If you have any questions about any of the things I have written, don’t hesitate to ask. And don’t forget to join in on the Homeschool Open House yourself! There are prizes to be won, and lots of things to learn, so check it out here:

Homeschool Open House 2007

Term 3 is about to start where we live, and while I haven’t been sticking to term dates as such, now that we are back I have decided to fall back in line with the school terms… at least loosely. DH will start work on Monday, so it seems sensible that we start a new Term on Monday too

I have been trying to plan the term without going completely overboard like I tend to sometimes. I have made an outline for the first four weeks and then I’ll revisit it and see how it is going. I have looked at our daily schedule and changed it around a bit. This is what I have come up with : Our Daily Schedule

Then I have been playing with my checklists and routines, and the children’s as well. Again, after a few weeks I will reasses and see if they are working. Here are our basic routines:

My Daily Routine

Dan’s Checklist

Beth’s Checklist

Matt’s Checklist

I have to admit I was getting a little stressed while I was planning, because I always want to do it all and have it perfect No one else out there like that, is there?! As I look around the house, it has come a long way, but there are still sooo many things I want to do. I have to discipline myself next week, however, to tackle things bit by bit. I need to put a priority on school and my daily routines, or else we will never get on track! There will always be things I want to sort and deep clean and all of that, but I can do that bit by bit on top of my daily tasks, and eventually it will all be running like a well oiled machine (ever optimistic, I am!).

So, as I was getting stressed, I thought - “Let me write down everything I am getting stressed about still having to do, and divide it up over the next weeks.” So this is exactly what I am going to do. Write the list of things I want to organize better and then take one week for each thing. For example, I still want to go through all of our clothes. I have decided this is fairly important and want to do that this week. But I am only going to work on the clothes once school and daily chores are done. I need to sort through what each of us has, see if there is anything too small that can be given away, see what else might be needed or mended, etc. And if I don’t get it done in a week? Then I will spend another week on it. But I do think that it will be surprising how far I get if I am only concentrating on that one “major task” for the week.

I still want to write out a menu plan for this week and do my grocery shopping tonight, so I’d better go and do that now!

I hope you are all having a great weekend

You would think that I would be used to unsettled schooling since we have moved about 14 times in the last, er, 14 years…. however, I have been finding it hard to get back into a routine. So have the kids. They would much rather continue with their unschooling - ie playing…. Mind you, we have had some sort of routine. Have breakfast, read, do maths, read, do copywork, have lunch, have rest time, read,…. We have been doing the basics. But that is it.

Two days ago I decided that since the kids were doing so well with independent learning at the moment ~smile~ I would cave in and order some….. Lifepacs! Yes, I am going to give my children a Lifepac for each subject for the next month. I know that once our stuff arrives the house is going to be bedlam. I know that once the playstation is unpacked….. I won’t see the boys again for months. So, I ordered the Lifepacs and got them this morning!

The kids thought it was wonderful. First of all a parcel arrives at the door. Then mum tells them they can open it They rip off the brown paper to find…. newspaper! Pass the Parcel! We all start humming “Deck the Halls” (don’t ask me why) while they play pass the parcel. There were just enough layers to each have a turn

More excitement when I tell them this is new school stuff to do on their own.

“Yay!” says Elizabeth, “I like doing stuff on our own. It usually means it is easy!”

Hmmm, yes, well, I guess that is the idea - go and learn something while Mum takes care of more important things like getting some order in the house when you have just moved from another country.

Thankfully I have learned from the past that even filling in the blanks teaches children something. I am particularly excited about the Bible lifepacs. Since we were in the Middle East and it was extremely hard to smuggle in Christian material, it is so wonderful to be able to order these Lifepacs and not have to hide them in a dark place. There was so much more I wanted to do with the kids in the area of Bible Study, and I know they will learn from these. I might even get more of them, you never know!