Tag: homeschool

Year Round Schooling?

~ wattlesandcombsfarm ~ Leave a comment

It’s that time of year again. Planning for the upcoming school year is in full swing. I’ve been looking into curriculum for weeks now, but the task at hand is deciding on our schedule for the year. One of the big benefits of homeschooling is you can really make your schedule be whatever you need it to be. In years past I’ve tried the six weeks on and one week off schedule, but that hasn’t really worked for us. We inevitably get off schedule for one reason or another, and end up having to take no breaks in order to finish the school year at a decent time. I don’t like the idea of following the school system schedule either. This has never really appealed to me. I typically like to start sooner than the schools do and finish sooner than the schools do. So this year I am playing around with a few different ideas.

Required number of days

First, let’s talk about what is needed for a school year. I know each state has their own guidelines, some like you to hit a certain amount of hours, but most I have seen recommend 180 days. That is a typical length for an academic year. If you break that down the way the public school system does it equals 36 weeks, or four 9-week semesters. That really makes it easy to plan your year. Breaking down the work to be done for the year becomes pretty simple when you can see the chunks that you have to work with. It also gives you a good idea of where to stop and sort of evaluate everything to see how it’s going. I usually like to do that each semester, and if I miss that mile marker at least at the halfway point. Whatever schedule I use I have that 180-day requirement in the back of my mind. Then I look at a calendar and figure out when I would like to finish and count backward from there. This also includes time off that I would like to take and holiday breaks. We like to finish in mid-May, plus have plenty of breaks, so I typically start school much sooner than the public school system does. This is where I am stuck currently. I have a few ideas playing around in my head and I can’t quite pick which one I want to follow.

(School year calendar https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/2023-2024-School-Year-Calendar-9745675)

Four-day school week?

The idea that I am thinking about this school year is a four-day school week. Monday through Thursday with every Friday off. A couple of programs, including BookShark have schedules for a four-day week. Most of those however still consider Friday a school day, but use it as a make-up day or a “fun Friday”. Meaning you do your co-op, field trips, or fun subjects like art on Friday. We have used that schedule in the past, especially when we used BookShark curriculum, but for me, fun Fridays always ended up being nothing Fridays. I would start the school year off strong but over time we ended up needing the break and sort of let Fridays slip. So, the idea that I am playing with for this year is actually taking every Friday off completely. We wouldn’t use it as anything other than a rest day. Obviously, if we needed to use it as a make-up day we could, or take a field trip, but mostly it would just be a down day. A day during the week to sort of re-group, run errands, put the house back together, or get done anything else that we need for the week. The problem with doing this type of schedule is figuring out how to make it work best. I still need to get those 180 days of school done. In my mind, I have two options to make this work. First, is to make our school days longer. If you get five days of work done, in four days, you have to do more work each day. I don’t love this idea, because who really wants to school longer each day. Our school days are typically done by 2pm and I really like that. I don’t know how well my kids would handle adding another hour or two of school each day. I know that sounds like an early school day if you are used to public school, but homeschooling gets more done in less hours because we don’t have to switch classes, or wait on other people. So, having them school longer would actually be asking quite a bit more of them school work wise. In theory, it would be ok since they would be getting a full week-day off, but I don’t love this option. Where I am leaning is schooling for 45 weeks instead of 36. 180 days divided by 4 means 45 weeks of school. This is quite a bit longer of a school year, and would essentially put us in a year-round school schedule. I like the idea of this, so does my son, but that would mean we have to start school in the next couple of weeks. No-one likes that idea. However, being done by 2pm means they wouldn’t miss much of the summer anyway. There would still be plenty of time to hang out with friends and play outside. If we do decide on this schedule I really need to get in gear with curriculum ordering. We have enough on hand to start the school year and be fine, but I do have a few things I need to order. Typically the media shipping that curriculum uses takes a while to arrive, so I need to get that done now. Either way, whatever we decide, the school year is a lot closer than I am ready for. Like the kids, I also enjoy summer break. It gives my brain time to relax and get re-motivated for the task ahead. That’s where we are at right now. Still enjoying our time off, but getting ready for what’s ahead, whichever schedule we choose.

Required Reading 2023-2024

~ wattlesandcombsfarm ~ Leave a comment

Books are the most important thing in our homeschool. For me raising kids who read well, and love to read, has always been a top priority. I am a firm believer that if you can read, you can learn. Sadly statistics show that most people do not pick up a book again after high school. There are many many adults out there who chose to never read again. This is heartbreaking to me because I LOVE a good book. I have learned so much as an adult from the books I read. When I wanted to homeschool the kids, I read books for homeschoolers. I’ve read parenting books, gardening books, marriage books, all kinds of non-fiction books, and of course fiction. There is so much to learn and reading has helped me get there. This is something I want to instill in my children. Because of this, I try really hard every year to make sure we have really good books on hand. If I know my kids have an interest in a topic, I will spend hours researching books for them that include that topic. I am not always successful, but over the years we have read quite a few books that we still talk about today. Those books will stay with us for a long time, hopefully forever. With that in mind, I have started picking out our required reading for next year. I like to give them a few books that I want them to read over the school year, and then leave room for interest lead reading. I went to my bookshelf this morning and pulled four books each for my kids, as well as four for our read alouds. We will finish quite a few more than that, and I may add more as assigned reading, but this felt like a good place to start.

School Year Read Alouds

There are a few books that I have been wanting to get to for a couple of years and we just haven’t been able to get them read. The problem with great books is there are tons of them and you can’t read them all. So, this year I have added The War that Saved My Life and Esperonza Rising to our required reading lists. I have heard about both these books for the past few years and it’s time we make room for them. Every review I have seen about either of these books has been incredibly positive and they seem to come highly recommended. Thirst and Hello Universe are newer ones to me. I have recently seen both recommended on Booktube videos. Again, they got really great reviews. I have a ton of other books in mind for read alouds, but these four are going to be made a priority for our upcoming school year.

Esperanza Rising https://a.co/d/0goi7tm

The War that Saved My Life . https://a.co/d/caeRQQc

Thirst https://a.co/d/hSHdlFA

Hello Universe https://a.co/d/gniS7uo

7th Grade Required Reading

My son will be going into 7th grade this year. His main interests these days are space and video games. These can be tricky topics to find books on, or at least hard to find good quality books on. I did find a few good ones this past year, but he went through those pretty quickly. I do know he also tends to like things that are more realistic, almost like non-fiction, so I tried to keep that in mind for his choices. I also get suggestions from Read Aloud Revival and their book lists by age and gender. Here are his current four for the upcoming school year.

Edge of Extinction. He tried this once a few years back, but didn’t get into it. I want him to try again. https://a.co/d/dL2t6cL

Gone to the Woods. I read this and it was really good. I think he will enjoy it. https://a.co/d/9wpPyEN

Glitch https://a.co/d/2mSVl2k

The Jupiter Pirates https://a.co/d/49i2fQ2

5th Grade Required Reading

My daugher will be going into 5th grade this year, and she loves books that have animals in them. Last year she read Crenshaw and loved it. One of her other all-time favorites is Mr. Poppers Penguins. I kept that in mind when pulling books for her, but I also chose ones that I want her to read. A few of them are classics that are recommended on every list I have ever seen for children’s literature.

Caddie Woodlawn https://a.co/d/axGDuFk

Song for a Whale https://a.co/d/dk4ZcQS

The Trumpet of the Swan https://a.co/d/aX58sp1

Artermis Fowl (her request) https://a.co/d/0f0NPzy

Sourcing Books

Even though I added Amazon links, I do not tend to buy my books from Amazon. Where we lived previously, we participated in a homeschool program that gave us money each year for supplies, and I used that to fund quite a bit of our homeschool library. A lot of our original books came from our Bookshark curriculum and the others mostly from Barnes and Noble. That program also gave me a card saying I was a homeschool teacher which Barnes and Noble offers a teacher discount for. I no longer have that card, but I have seen that you can make one somehow. I may have to look into that for the future. Currently I order almost all my books from BookOutlet. You can’t always find everything you want, but they do have a really good selection most of the time. I get most of my classic books there, as well as some books that are newer on the recommendation lists. I do have a referal link that will get you $5 off, and me as well, if anyone would like to give them a try. They offer this referral code to everyone with an account. I am not working with them in any way. https://bookoutlet.com/loyalty/referral/N4bee5V5?c=url. Other than that I try and use our local library. I love having a good home library built up, but that can get pretty expensive. The library is a great option to help with that.

Recommendations

There are a few places that I get book recommendations. First is from the lists on Read Aloud Revivlas website https://readaloudrevival.com/recommends/. Sarah Mackenzie is the author of the Read Aloud Handbook and her entire website is dedicated to books. This is a great starting place if you need book options. Second I watch YouTube. My kids are mostly in the middle school years, so the videos about MiddleGrade March are really helpful to me. However, there are homeschool moms who make book videos, book influencers, and all kinds of options. I just find a few people I like and that seem to have similar tastes and values in books, and use those for recommendations. When I see a book recommended in multiple places I tend to try and find that one for our home library.

I hope this helps give you a few ideas for the upcoming school year, and encourages you to read and to get your children reading. It is a game changer for everyone when they find that first book that makes them fall in love with reading.

Science Curriculum

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Science curriculum seems to be one of the hardest things to choose when it comes to homeschooling. Every page I have ever been part of is full of people looking for a good science curriculum. Maybe it’s because there are so many options for curriculum, but also the tons of options for the kind of science you want to study. Some people swear by nature study, others by unit studies, and some prefer the typical textbook-style learning. I love the idea of nature study, and we have done this to some point just naturally, but for me it isn’t enough for our homeschool. My oldest especially is interested in space, and even more interested in things like black holes. I can’t really teach him that through nature study. He has taught himself quite a bit through youtube videos and what we like to call “smart shows”. I did get to take him this last school year to a talk to a scientist day. He was able to sit and talk to a scientist who fully understood what he was asking and had a conversation with him about all kinds of topics that were a bit over my head. I would love to be able to do that more often, and we will try to get that done, but that also can’t be our main science curriculum. So, once again I am on the hunt for a science curriculum for the upcoming school year. Right now I am looking at Noeo Science https://noeoscience.com/ and Elemental Science https://elementalscience.com/. I have used Elemental Science in the past and didn’t really care for it, but I think that issue has been fixed. One of the main books they were using in previous years was out of print, so I had it on the iPad, and it just didn’t work well at all. With the middle school years all the books look great. My concern with Elemental Science is that it’s a lot of workbooking. I hate anything that feels like busy work. I understand science has a lot of record keeping and you need to know how to fill out a lab report, but I get really nervous when it comes to a lot of note pages and vocabulary forms. Basically when it has a ton of writing. That seems to be the thing that can bog kids down. They don’t mind learning the information but filling out multiple worksheets for every subject gets tedious over time. This was something I wanted to avoid in homeschooling in the first place. There is no real need for busy work in homeschool. We have the time to sit around and chat and really divine into something so there is no need to keep anyone busy. On the other hand, Elemental Science has gotten good reviews in multiple places that I have checked. I even read one page where people said it was better than Noeo in their opinion. So, for now, this is the way I am leaning. We will be getting experiment kits as well, just to add to the whole learning process. Even though I am leaning toward Elemental Science, Noeo is still in the running. Noeo Science has a lot of experiments, which I know my kids will appreciate. It also uses a bunch of books rather than one textbook. I really liked the way it looks online, but I have never been able to see it in person. Both curriculums are on the Cathy Duffy Reviews as recommended options. I don’t think I can really go wrong either way, but I am not sure what’s going to be the better fit for our family. If I am still on the fence I may go with Elemental Science for one simple reason, it’s much more affordable. I just hope whichever one I choose works well for us this upcoming school year.

Summer Break

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Thank goodness for summer break! I haven’t written in a while because, at the end of the school year, the kids and I were all so burnt out. I was finishing up some college classes, we were finishing up our school year, and we all needed this break desperately. It’s amazing what a little time off can do. I feel excited again for the upcoming school year and truly enjoy the process of researching and planning. Most of what we are doing next year will be the same as this past year but I am looking to make a few changes. I will be researching some new math options for a start. I have decided, my daughter, especially needs a program with more of a hands-off approach for me. We do very well together for every subject except math. I can’t blame her, I always hated math too. So I am in the process of finding something that will work a bit better for us this year. That is something that I love about homeschooling, especially homeschooling now. Every year more and more options become available. It’s almost overwhelming the amount of curriculum choices that are available. However your child learns best there is going to be an option for that. We just have to find it. I’m pretty excited and hopeful that I can find what we need and make this upcoming school year run even smoother than it ever has before.

On the other hand, we are sitting back and enjoying summertime. I have a real garden for the first time in my life and am just thrilled with everything growing in it. My daughter has her own little bed of flowers that are growing and I can’t wait to see them bloom. The sun is out and the weather is getting warm and it feels so good to my soul. I really thrive on sunshine and right now our days are long. I love it. So although I am in planning mode a little, I am in no hurry to get the next school year going. I do try and get our choices made early enough to order before the big school rush, but this year I feel like I may take a little extra time. I want to enjoy this break and take full advantage of the rest time. I want to walk around the garden, breathe the fresh air, and just relax.

Read Aloud

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There are so many things I feel I’ve gotten wrong in homeschooling, but one I know I’ve gotten right is that we read aloud all the time. It is one of my favorite parts of school, and my kids seem to love it too. Lately, I have been reading aloud at bedtime as well as during school. Currently, we are reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and even my husband has been enjoying it. Reading aloud can really be a whole family activity. The benefits of reading aloud are numerous. It improves things like language skills and general learning ability. There really is no downside to reading out loud to your family. One of my favorite resources for learning about the benefits of reading out loud is the book The Read-Aloud Family by Sarah MacKenzie. Andrew Pudewa from IEW also has tons of discussion of the benefits of reading aloud, and that information can be found on the IEW website under their blog and during his talks. If you are someone who doesn’t feel like they are very good at reading aloud or don’t want to, don’t worry; according to many sources, using audiobooks has the same benefits as doing the reading yourself. Also, don’t stop reading to your kids when they reach the age where they can read themselves. Read to your kids or family as long as you can. The benefits don’t stop when the kids get older. Not to mention all the memories you will make. My kids will randomly start talking about a book we’ve read. I love having conversations that start with ” Hey do you remember……?” Our favorite books stick with us for a long time and become part of the memories of childhood. My kids may forget many things, but I know they will remember the books we read together while growing up.

On my favorites tab is a list of some of our favorite read-alouds.

Printer Paper

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This is going to be a quick post. One small thing you can do to bring a little fun into your homeschool is print on colored paper. I am in love with Astro Brights printer paper, which comes in many fun colors. It’s really simple but it does bring a bit of a fun aspect to our weekly worksheets. Plus the kids can pick their favorite colors.

Homeschool Planner

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Like so many of you, I have spent a lot of time trying to find that perfect homeschool planner. I have watched tons of videos and spent hours researching the best planner, hoping that it will finally help me get my homeschool organized and on track. I start every school year with the intention of keeping a really well-done planner so we have records, and every year I fail. In the past, I have tried every kind of paper planner out there. I have had Erin Condren planners, Happy Planners, and every other version you can imagine. None of them worked for very long or consistently. I would always get off track and find myself weeks later trying to remember what we did so I could write it down. I guess now would be the time to mention that I am more of a write it down after than a plan beforehand kind of person. I don’t have any crazy curriculum that needs a ton of planning. Mostly we just do the next lesson so I don’t really need a ton of pre-planning. After many years of failing with paper planners, I started this year out looking for an online planner. I was hoping an online planner would work for me since the paper ones were not. After a little looking around I settled on the Well Planned Gal’s online homeschool planner. It is a subscription-based planner, but it is worth it for me. I have to say so far I LOVE it! If you are the kind of person who likes to pre-plan everything and have a full schedule to follow this planner works for that. This planner also works great for people like me who like to sort of plan from behind or keep track of what was done. I will say there was a bit of a learning curve and I made a few adjustments to make it fit what I needed, but now that I have it tweaked I think it’s great. I added all of our courses for the year, told it how many times a week we wanted to do them, and then I simply check them off for the day. You can print off a schedule for your students for the week, and one for yourself with all the assignments if that is something you want to do. One of the best parts is that it tracks other things for me, like attendance. If we check all of our boxes for the day it counts that as a school day and I have an attendance tracker without having to remember to fill out another form. There is also a place to easily add grades and then it will make me a progress report. On Fridays, after we have finished school I can sit down and make sure everything is checked off for the week and then print out a schedule of everything we did for our records. I put this printout in our binders with our weekly saved work. It’s really easy to go back into the program and add things like field trips, changes to assignments, and even notes on exactly what we did. It is pretty customizable to what you need or want it to be. The Well Planned Gal online planner has been one of the best changes I have made to our homeschool ever. I don’t see this being something that changes anytime soon. If you want to check it out here is the link to the website https://sso.wellplannedgal.com/login-in-mwpd.php?act=hedua&trail=1. They even have a 30-day free trial if you want to try it out. Now I just need a version of this for my everyday life!

Organization

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Years ago when I first started homeschooling I scoured the internet for all the homeschool organization tips. After all, homeschooling does tend to come with a lot of paper. I found a blog where the writer used a plastic crate with hanging folders to organize each week of the year and the worksheets needed. We used this system for a couple of years and then stepped away from it for a while. This year we went back to that system and I fell in love with it all over again. I have 36 hanging folders in a crate and each kid has a folder for each corresponding week. At the beginning of the year, I sat down and tore apart the math notebooks, printed off the worksheets, and put everything the kids need for the week inside the folders. Now, on Monday they go grab the folder for the week and it has what they need. It also helps keep them organized. Whatever they finish goes right back into the folder and not all over the house. There are a few things that we don’t put into the folder, like Fix-It-Grammar. That comes in a spiral-bound notebook so I just leave those there, but everything that could easily get put into a folder gets put into them. At the end of the week, I throw away what we aren’t keeping and file what we are. I keep things like Math tests, note pages, and our schedule. Those all go into our binders to keep as a record of sorts for the year. The folders just get tucked into the back of the crate for use next year. If you’re looking for an easy way to organize all those worksheets for the year give this a try. It takes a couple hours before the school year starts and then it’s all taken care of and ready to go. This is one of the changes we made that will be sticking around for a while.

What a Week

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This last week wiped us all out. As I sit here typing this post my 11-year-old, who never takes a rest, is laying down for a nap. Like many people around the country, we got a lot of bad weather last week. For us, it was snow and about four days of constant wind. We have 5ft. tall snow drifts in our backyard and our poor neighbor had her entire garage and front door blocked off. For most of the week, it wasn’t safe to leave our house. The wind caused whiteout conditions and the roads around us shut down due to safety. Because we homeschool this shouldn’t have been a big deal but on top of the bad weather, we also had the crud making the rounds in our house. Tuesday morning my oldest woke up and didn’t feel well and then was down and out for the next 2.5 days. I don’t actually know if he had the flu or just a simple bug, either way, he did not feel well. Of course, as soon as he got over it my youngest came down with the same thing. She always gets it a bit worse and had a high fever for an entire day before it broke. I was hoping to get a good week of school done this week to make up for the last one, but it looks like we are going to need at least another day of rest. Mostly because no one has slept well in days. (I just took a break to go check on my son and turns out he has a fever again. So I guess here we go with round #2.) All of that to say we are once again off schedule for schooling. It’s beginning to look like we may end up needing to take the entire month of December off since Christmas will be here before we know it. Later today I am going to sit down with a yearly calendar and take another look at our homeschool schedule. At the beginning of the year I had planned for us to use a six-week on and one-week off schedule. This means there was plenty of time off worked into the year. We even started a few weeks early to help this schedule work. So, although we are off schedule we are not in any trouble for the school year. This is once again one of the benefits of homeschooling. A typical school year is 180 days of school but I get to decide how and when we use them. We can start early or go year round if we want to as long as we get our days in. It’s nice not having to rush through sick days or push too hard. Even though I don’t want to take this time off, and I feel a little stressed about having too much time off at once, it isn’t a big deal. I am going to use the rest of our sick time, however long that may be, to take care of the kiddos, our home, and rest. At least the weather is better than last week.

Time to Reflect

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As we get nearer to our halfway point for this school year I find it’s time to sit down and evaluate how we’ve done. Sometimes it helps to be a little honest with yourself and really discover what is working for your homeschool and what maybe needs to be thrown out. It could be something as simple as re-working your schedule or as complicated as needing a new curriculum. For us, the things that are working are things that have been working for years. I’ve mentioned it a few times, but we have found a couple of companies that we are sticking with for the long haul. Our Language Arts, Math, and Spelling don’t need any changes. (You can check out my post on my favorite curriculum if you would like more info on that) However, not everything is working as I would like. I still haven’t found a great science curriculum and so far my trying to make unit studies isn’t working. So here in the next few weeks, I need to find something and get it ordered. Especially right now when so many companies are running great curriculum sales. I may end up going back to BookShark for science. I liked their science enough to know that it would at least work well and we would get it done. Or, I have always wanted to try Apologia Science but sometimes their lessons look very overwhelming and LONG. I guess there is a bit more research for me in the near future. History is another subject I’m not entirely happy with either. We are currently working through an Usborne Encylopedia about the World Wars. It’s working but it’s not exactly great as a main spine. I feel like I need a bit more. I would love to go back to BookShark for history because I have always loved their book selection, but it ends up being way too much reading out loud on my part. Maybe if I just use their main spines and worksheets. Once again, there are a few decisions to make. Other than that our school is ok. We could do a bit better with our time usage but I feel like everyone could say that. Overall I am pretty happy with how things are going. Most importantly I can see my kids are learning and growing. That is the main goal anyways right? To see our kids learn and make progress. One of the biggest benefits to being a homeschool mom is that I am the one that gets to watch them progress and grow, and I wouldn’t change that for anything.

Here is the link to the Evaluation pages I made if you would like your own copy. https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Homeschool-Evaluation-Form-8886267