flynn011

My previous post was about the morning schedule I've devised in order to juggle the homeschooling of my four children, aged 12 to 5. Now I'm going to look at some afternoon schedules.  One thing to notice is that I have more time with my Year 7 Ambleside Online student, that I've scheduled in some free time for the younger ones, and that we have instituted a new 4 o'clock tea-time session, where we share a pot of hot tea, some cookies, and a low-key learning experience like music appreciation or picture study. All this is based on the Charlotte Mason method of education, and one which suits my humanities background really well. First, let me show you the afternoon schedule for my Year 7 student. Afternoon Schedule for Phoenix (Ambleside Online Year 7) One-on-One with Eldest Child You will see that, after lunch and violin practice (and some chores which I haven't indicated), I spend some time reading with her.  She is someone who has always relished the chance to sit...

We have come back to our school this week and are trying out our new-and-improved schedule based on Ambleside Online. My eldest is tackling Year 7. My younger ones are doing versions of Year 2, with my 9-year-old boy wanting to have the Year 5 reading list. I say "whatever".  AO is a tool and not a prescription, so I've always juggled things to make it work for me (being ever-so-grateful that the Advisory has offered this foundation from which I can build). First, I'm looking in this post about my basic building-block, the three segments to our morning school time. You will notice I have only a 4-day schedule.  We meet every-other week with a group families for a history co-op, and we have morning swimming one day a week, so Mondays and Fridays have to blend into each other to form a single day.  Having a 4-day schedule also lets me do things like skip a whole day for an amazing homeschoolers' discount at Legoland, or go on amazing field trips to places like Stone...

Some people love Christmas.  Some people love Spring.  I love the weeks just before the new school year, when I call up my spreadsheets and download all my book lists and sort out the schedule for the kids. I'm nearing completion on Phoenix's weekly schedule.  Hers is the most complicated because she is going to start Ambleside Online for Year 7.  It looks pretty challenging, but the best fit to go along with our fortnightly history co-op that's studying Our Island Story. Yr 7 is great for this because it looks at the Middle Ages in greater depth than Our Island Story, so she'll be reading books by Churchill about the Birth of Britain, selections from the Venerable Bede, and lots of mediaeval literature, amongst many, many others. She's even got readings from Charlotte Mason herself: character study in Ms Mason's book "Ourselves". Exciting, therefore, that the new CM Live! on-line co-op class is going to allow her to discuss these challenging works w...

I'm very excited to announce that my daughter, pseudonymously (is that word???) known as Ellie Firestone, has published her second book about Super Sporty on Kindle. Do have a look.  Do buy it.  Do review it and tweet about it, etc.  I think it's super funny, well written, and her blog can link you to all kinds of fun games related to it (such as, Baby Sporty and her dirty diapers as a lethal weapon against Blarg and Splatt!).

I've just done something very dramatic.  I spent six days away from the children. Wow. I haven't been away from them for more than 2 nights since my eldest was born a dozen years ago. After an advocate for the child sponsor charity called Compassion UK (with whom I sponsor a boy from Uganda) had pulled out from a major Christian youth festival called Soul Survivor , I volunteered to join the team on their stand and promote this worthwhile cause. In the meantime, I learned to camp.  I learned to take sponge baths in the tent instead of queue up for the showers. I learned to knock the slugs off my wellie-boots before slipping them on in the mornings. I enjoyed some of the most awesome charismatic ministry and worship, some thought-provoking seminars, and endured some food that started off tasting pretty good, but by the end of the week, I couldn't face anymore Thai curry and finished up by eating a lot of granola cereal. When I finally came home today, I couldn't believ...

Someone posted a link recently to this blog which satires the position of the Local Authority when it comes to their approach to home educators in England. If you're not au fait with what Local Authority means (as some in the US, for example, won't be), they're the county-level bureaucrats who are mainly in charge of truants and other children who are missing from education, but who, for some reason, think home educators fall under this category (although the law patently says that they don't) and try to hunt down every HE child in their jurisdiction for purposes, they say, of "safeguarding". It's another word for "monitoring", but that word's a no-no since it's been proved over and over that it's not in their remit. I encourage you to go to the link and read the whole article, but here's a snippet: The notion of EHE policy being based on  bias towards school, erroneous conflation of education and welfare, and  a complete misunde...

Killer is my oldest boy; he's 9.  He follows the Ambleside Online curriculum (sort of) and, as it adheres to the Charlotte Mason method, he has a daily expectation that he does something called copywork. In a nutshell, copywork is copying down an extract from another source, such as a good poem or a selection from a book or even from the Bible.  The idea is that a child can practice writing neatly, can learn from a good example about punctuation, spelling, and grammar, and can do so in context (in other words, in a realistic setting and not as a list of random words, or as a fill-in-the-blank workbook). Recently, a friend of mine with a boy the same age was asking me about how much should be expected of her son, as she and her husband were nearly coming to blows about the number of words they were making the child write down every day, and the child was coming unglued because it seemed too much for him. Try to make writing a pleasant experience Just before I "reveal" my a...