A tiny glimpse of our home school

I haven't written too many things about the way we home school but I am planning on writing a lot more about it this year. I am VERY passionate about Charlotte Mason. Her philosophy on life and education is one that speaks directly to my heart. What she says makes so much sense to me and just seems so natural and good. So we mostly apply her philosophy to our days but in a very eclectic way. I don't follow any one curriculum or program. I haven't found the perfect curriculum yet and I am pretty sure there is no such thing, so I just use what I like best from a variety of sources. For example, I use Ambleside as a resource for picture study and music study and I use Simply CM's Shakespeare schedule. I pull my literature selections from Sonlight and Ambleside, but only use what I think will really interest my children. We use Math-U-See and love it and I really want to use Beautiful Feet for History but haven't had the money to buy the packages, so I look for the books at used book stores and the library and have had great success finding the books for very little money. I use Queen Homeschool's Language Arts for the Very Young along with English For the Thoughtful Child for an intro to grammar, but I am also going to look into Emma Serl's grammar books. We use the McGuffey Readers and love those so much. They are very old, but full of beautiful language and pictures. I try to mix up copywork everyday. Sometimes we do Draw Write Now, letters to friends or family, scripture, poetry, literature selections etc. We do a lot of nature journaling and nature walks for science and I adore the The Nature Study Handbook- it is a true treasure. Every now and then I do a unit study from KONOS because that curriculum is so fun and easy to use for all ages and they always LOVE doing the projects because they are so hands-on. I know I am leaving lots of things out, but that is basically the core combination of resources that I use and I can't wait to expand more on these things in future posts.




These pictures are from the unit study we are doing right now on Native Americans. We used Konos and they made their own Native American shirt (brown paper bag) and found symbols that they liked and painted them on the front. They learned Native American sign language, made tomahawks and a drum, studied the crops that we got from Native Americans. Most importantly, we read numerous books about Native Americans such as Sitting Bull, Pocahantas, Sacajawea, and Squanto just to name a few.