School Schedules

It's that time of year! I've been to the revitalizing annual Childlight USA conference, we have had some lovely short vacation time and a break from structured schooling. The children finished up our combined and tweaked school year based on year 5 of amblesideonline, although a few term 3 books carried us into the summer months.

So now we begin afresh. There is something to the newness of creating a new schedule for a new year. Every year is different as each year the children have grown in different ways. This year Maura joins the big group. Last year was her first year of formal schooling and Kaley graciously tutored her for me in between her internship for most of the year. That gave me a chance to work with the 4 other children as a group and chase toddlers while Maura was able to receive lots of fairy tales and stories that are special to a first year of school. That worked well for us last year. I don't know that it will ever work out that way again. This year Max and Josiah are older and play more quietly while we are reading.

So this year I have modified year 6 of ambleside for 5 children ages 7-13. This will be a transition year for my 13yo. Each term he will be adding more independent work. Next year most of his history and literature will be separate from the younger children. There are certain subjects we will always do as a group, such as: Shakespeare, Plutarch, geography, poetry, nature study, composer and art study as well as some reading aloud.

I delight in getting books in the mail, hunting down used books and mapping out our days. I do tend to pile a lot on our plates and sometimes have to pare down. I think of the first schedule I make as my most optimistic attempt. If life flowed gently and easily this is what we would do. I try to hold it lightly in my grasp as I know some of it might not work or might need to be tweaked. That just has to be okay. I do feel it is important to have a broad liberal curriculum. Just as we need lots of variety of healthy foods for our bodies, our minds need lots of ideas to work on.

The most challenging thing for me about scheduling our year was not choosing books or deciding which subjects to teach but how to teach such a spread of ages without burning myself out. I appreciate Charlotte Mason saying how much easier it was to teach a class of children on the same level as a few children all at different ages and levels. The hardest thing for me is meeting everyone's needs and not wearing myself out. I love what I do! I don't want to get burnt out. I like to think of our home school as a one room school house. Because it is! But somehow that helps me plan it out a little better. Maybe I'm still pretending I'm Laura Ingalls...



Maybe more like this:



or this:



Minus the victorian clothes. If you stopped by, I'd probably be in capris and flip flops. With sumatra coffee in my hand. And I'd make you some, too.

Summer

Summer around here means lots of daddy time! We are doing a lot as a family and have had family in town. I have also been reflecting and gearing up for our new school year. The Childlight USA conference in June has given me many ideas to chew on. My biggest idea is remembering that my children are people, fully formed and Image bearers. That is such a big idea! It affects our whole family life and the spirits of our children greatly. Do we talk to them, treat them and act with them as people? Or are they less than? Second class? Of course they do not have equal privileges as adults but they are due respect as persons.

People are too apt to use children as counters in a game, to be moved hither and thither according to the whim of the moment. Our crying need to-day is less for a better method of education than for an adequate conception of children,––children, merely as human beings, whether brilliant or dull, precocious or backward. CM vol 6 ch 5

The second big idea was getting out of the way of ideas and the children. I know these things! But I desperately need to be reminded of them. The conference is rejuvenating for me every year in so many ways. For school but also for me spiritually. All these big ideas change me as a person as well.

"We hold that the child's mind is no mere sac to hold ideas but is rather, if the figure may be allowed, a 'spiritual organism' with an appetite for all knowledge. This is its proper diet with which it is prepared to deal and what it is able to digest and assimilate as the body does food-stuffs."
"Such a doctrine as the Herbartian, that the mind is a receptacle, lays the stress of education, the preparation of food in enticing morsels, duly ordered, upon the teacher. Children taught on this principle are in danger of receiving much teaching but little knowledge; the teacher's axiom being 'what a child learns matters less than how he learns it.'" CM vol 1 ch 7
I have been greatly enjoying a new water color set I bought for myself. It is a travel set and I can keep it in my purse or a backpack. I have done so many more dry brush paintings in my nature journal. I am slowly getting better. I would like to find one just a wee bit smaller for each of the children.
Here is mine


This is the one I am thinking about for the children

I am finding that having good quality supplies is so important to the way we not only feel about our work, but also how the children see that they are perceived. They feel valued and that I see their work as important when they have quality supplies. We also value their work more and are careful with it and save it. What treasures we are building!