Our Learning Spaces

It's School Room week at the iHomeschool Network Blog Hop!  So if you have come from there, thanks so much for stopping by!  I hope you enjoy taking a peak at where we do school in our home.

In years past we have kept most of our learning in just one room.  We live in a split level home that has a great space in the basement area for a school room.  Before we moved into this house 2 years ago we schooled in one of our three bedrooms turned into a school room.

This year I decided that I wanted a space where we could all sit and do our memory work, morning time and art projects together.  We had been given this old table from my husbands grandma when she passed away. Yes the chairs don't match, but the chairs that came with the table were not that great.  I had a friend that graciously gave me three of those chairs and the other one we already had.   So that is what we are now using as our together work space.  It is working wonderfully!!

Here is our table that we use, on the table I have a supply carousal which holds pencils, markers, and colored pencils.  On the floor on the left is my morning basket.

 

We will be using the whiteboard for our Classical Converstions memory work.  I have each subject label taped onto the board.  Hanging above the whiteboard is our timeline cards, I found those boards with clips in the Target dollar spot.  Something new that we will be doing this year is saying our pledges.  I found that poster from CBD and it has the American flag, the Bible and the Christian flag pledges on it.      

                        

On this bookcase are all the materials that my kids will use for morning time.  On the top shelf is our CD player, a basket with CD's and our Mystery of History memory card box.  The second shelf has a basket with dry erase markers (white), our CC memory cards (mint green), a box of crayons, and in the red basket are our map Trivium Tables, under the baskets are their map placemats.  On the third shelf is a box of play dough, and Elijah's morning basket.  On the bottom shelf is Zach's and Noah's morning baskets.  Each child has their own basket that holds their morning time binders, science binders and a small whiteboard.  In the green basket on the bottom are Elijah's books that he will be reading independently this year, he decided that that was a good place to put it.


We also still use our school room to do independent work.

This is Elijah's desk, in a little room off our our school room.

This is Noah's desk in the same room as Elijah's.

This is Zach's school area.  He has this little table, and the workboxes
behind it. 

A look at the big picture from the hallway.  

The room that Elijah and Noah work in is off to the left when you walk into our school room.  This room is quite spacious, and could hold everyones desks but I find that the older two get distracted when I am teaching Zach and they need a little bit of separation.

Here is where I keep all of our art supplies and curriculum that we aren't using
at the moment.  It is also a catch all sometimes!  This is the room that Elijah
and Noah's desks are in.

In our school room I have an Ikea Expedit shelving unit.  I love it!!  On that bookshelf I keep a lot of my current teachers manuals, early readers, and our read alouds that we will be using for the year.

We also have a bunch of manipulatives that we keep in the blue bins at the bottom.  We keep our dictionaries, encyclopedias, and atlases here as well.

On the other side of the Ikea Expedit is a space for our awesome beanbag chair and our whiteboard that we use for All About Reading and All About Spelling.

It is certainly not the most organized of spaces but it seems to be functioning well for us at the moment.  If you are interested in seeing other school room spaces then you should hop on over to the iHomeschool Networks Blog Hop, there are lots of different ideas just floating around there!

Daily Schedule 2016-17

I love schedules!  If you have read my blog ever you already know that.  So this year our schedule is a bit tricky.  Since we will be starting Classical Conversations for the first time, I am not too sure what our final schedule will look like, but here is what we are working with right now.

Time	Mom	Zach	Noah	Elijah
7:00	Wake up, prepare for the day	Sleep	Sleep	Sleep
7:30	Wake up, prepare for the day	Wake Up, morning check list	Wake Up, morning check list	Wake Up, morning check list
8:00- 9:00	Breakfast/chores	Breakfast/chores	Breakfast/chores	Breakfast/chores
9:00- 11:30 Morning Time/ Memory Work	Bible Memory Work: Vocabulary Latin Science History  Read Aloud Music/Art	Bible Memory Work: Vocabulary Latin Science History  Read Aloud Music/Art	Bible Memory Work: Vocabulary Latin Science History  Read Aloud Music/Art	Bible Memory Work: Vocabulary Latin Science History  Read Aloud Music/Art
11:30	Lunch/ afternoon chores	Lunch/ afternoon chores	Lunch/ afternoon chores	Lunch/ afternoon chores
12:15	Sustained Silent Reading	Sustained Silent Reading	Sustained Silent Reading	Sustained Silent Reading
12:30- 1:45	Kindergarten Reading Math  Handwriting	Kindergarten Reading Math  Handwriting	Math  handwriting Typing/Coding	Math IEW Writing Grammar Typing/ Coding
1:45	Reading Spelling	Free Play	Reading Spelling	math IEW Writing Grammar Typing/ Coding
2:15	Writing	Free Play	Writing	math IEW Writing Grammar Typing/ Coding
2:45	Reading to Noah	Free Play	Reading with Mom	math IEW Writing Grammar Typing/ Coding
3:00	Quiet Time	Free Play	Free Play	Free Play

Our morning time will cover a lot of ground for us this year.  We will be including all memory work, read alouds, history, and science.  So far that is working really well for us.  

After lunch we will dive into our independent subjects, this is totally new for us this year.  Typically we would do our independent things in the morning, and then do together subjects in the afternoon.  I always wanted to get math and reading out of the way while their brains were fresh, but I think this will work well doing it after lunch.  

As you can see Elijah has a big block of subjects and basically when he is done with those he is done with his school day.  While I am working with Zach, Noah will be doing what he can on his own.  Then once Zach is done I will move on to teaching Noah.  

Keep in mind that the times posted are just approximate, we don't stick too closely to those.  I really like to have an idea of when things should happen to keep me on track with our day.  

Curriculum Choices for the 2016- 2017 School Year

Well it's that time of year again, back to school!  Every year I enjoy the iHomeschool Networks  back to school blog hop!  I figured that even though my blog has sat extinct for the past, I don't know how many months, I still wanted to contribute.  To kick off this month long event it is Curriculum Week!

Today I will be sharing what we will be using for our curriculum this year.  Just to catch you up a bit, this year, 2016-2017, I will have a 6th grader, a 3rd grader and a Pre-K 5/ Kindergartener. We began our school year on August 15, so we are about 4 weeks in right now.

Something new that we will be participating in this year is Classical Conversations.  I am so excited! Our community has not started yet, so I have no idea how this will alter the choices I have made.  I have tried not to add too much more than what was already provided through Classical Conversations.

All three of my boys will be participating in the Foundations program through Classical Conversations which meets one morning a week from 9:00-12:00.  This includes Grammar, Science, Math Facts, Latin, Fine Arts, History/Timeline, and Bible.

All Together Subjects:

History:  

I know that Classical Conversations does  timeline and history sentences, but last year we worked through The Mystery of History Vol. 1 and absolutely LOVED it!  So I wanted to continue on using it, and it just so happens that we will be in the same time period as CC.  We will be using The Mystery of History Vol. 2 which covers the early church and the Middle Ages.  Along with the textbook, I am adding in notebooking pages, coloring pages and timeline figures from Homeschool in the Woods.

Morning Time:  

Another new thing we are adding in this year is morning time. In the spring of last year I began reading Teaching From Rest by Sarah Makenzie, that book totally changed how I thought about our homeschooling. From there I found Pam Barnhill and her idea of morning time. The ideas I gathered from both of them led me to a desire to implement a time into our day for truth, goodness and beauty. For our morning times we will be doing quite a variety of things. We will be using the book The Ology for the first quarter, this is a great book that is teaching us simple principles from Scripture. We are also learning The Gettysburg Address, The Nicene Creed, and the hymn How Great Thou Art. We will also be using our morning time to review our memory work from last year (Scripture passages that we learned), our CC memory work, science, history and doing our read aloud during this time.

Read Alouds:

This year we will be doing a few different groups of read aloud books.  One group will go along with our history lessons, and the other is just a group of books that I am wanting to read to the boys.

Group of fun read aloud books!

History Read Aloud Group

Elijah- 6th Grade

Math: Teaching Textbooks Math 6

I love Teaching Textbooks!  This has totally transformed math in our home!  My favorite part about this program is the self grading aspect!  I used to get so behind in grading math papers and not catching mistakes until it was too late.  This has absolutely solved this problem!

Spelling:  Phonetic Zoo Level A

Last year we abandoned our All About Spelling program because I didn't feel like it was working for him.  What I learned from that was that this kid still needs a spelling program.  So we will be adding Phonetic Zoo level A from IEW.  What I like about this program is that it is self taught, he listens to the CD and takes his test.  With All About Spelling, although I loved that program, it got to be a little too teacher intensive.

Grammar:  Essentials, IEW, Fix It! Grammar

Along with doing the Foundations program of Classical Conversations he will be doing the Essentials program that meets during the afternoon of our community day from 1:00-3:00 pm.  This is a program that is intended for 4th through 6th graders and they cover the same information every year.  Since he will only be getting one year of it I expect that this will be a challenging year for him.  This program includes Grammar such as diagramming sentences, Math games to practice speed, and Writing.  The writing program that he will use is IEW's  Medieval History Based Writing Lessons.
We will also be adding in Fix It! Grammar from IEW, in this program he will work on editing one sentence a day.

Reading:  

Elijah will be reading a selection of books this year.  I have chosen the books for him but am letting him choose when he reads them.  His first choice is A Wrinkle in Time, sorry I didn't get that added to the picture.  *sigh*

Handwriting:  Prescripts History Sentences

We will be using Classical Conversations Prescripts program, where he will be copying the history sentence each week.

Typing/Coding:  

This is an area that usually gets lost in the shuffle as the year goes on.  I am really hoping to push it this year.  Since he will be doing a LOT of writing I think learning to type proficiently will really help him. We use Typing Instructor which is downloaded onto the boys computer.    I am also very interested in my boys learning simple computer programming skills, so we will add in some of that as well.  Along with this book for coding we use a variety of different websites that offer coding lessons for free.

Noah- 3rd Grade

Math: Teaching Textbooks Math 3 

 *see explanation above as to why we love this program!* He began this last year, and was about 14 lessons in. So he will most likely finish it before the end of our school year. In that case we will just move right along to Math 4.

                                            

Reading:  All About Reading Levels 2 and 3  

He has just recently finished level 2 and so we have begun level 3.  In April of last year we had him diagnosed with Dyslexia, and have been working SUPER hard to remediate this.  We worked all spring and summer with a program called Lexercise, where we had a meeting via web video once a week and worked on skills through out the rest of the week.  He made massive improvements!  As of right now we are taking a small break and will begin again in the middle of October for another month.

Spelling:  All About Spelling Level 1  

We began this towards the end of last year (before we realized he was dyslexic) so we will finish this up this year.  If we finish we will move on to level 2 of All About Spelling.

Handwriting:  

Classical Conversations has a handwriting program called Prescripts, basically is uses the history sentences for copy work.  He will work through this as he feels like it.  Our main handwriting program will be Logic of English cursive.  We have the workbook and the tactile cards.  So far its been a really hard thing for him to pick up on, so we will see if I stick with it.  I have heard that cursive is a great thing for dyslexics because there are no letters that can be reversed!   So I really want to push cursive with him.

Typing/ Coding:

Noah will also be using the same typing program and coding book and websites.

Zach- Pre-K 5/ Kindergarten

Zach is a newly turned 5 year old and ALL BOY!  His attention span is not that great, but on the other hand he is super smart!  So this year we will be working on his Classical Conversations memory work, math, handwriting, and reading.

Math:  Saxon K  

I have never used Saxon before but I really like that its not a workbook and uses manipulatives instead.  So far he is really enjoying it.

Handwriting:  

We will be using the Italics handwriting Book A.  I like the idea of teaching an italics version first which will lead nicely into learning cursive later on.

Reading:  All About Reading Level 1  

We will take this program SUPER slow!  Once again this kid is super smart, but also super wiggly getting him to sit and listen to a lesson or read some words is proving to be quite a challenge!  So we will take this as his interest allows, I really am not too concerned if he learns to read this year or not.  I think by the middle of January or February he will be mature enough to really catch on to these concepts.

Well that just about sums up what we will be doing this year!  Be sure to hop on over to the iHomeschool Network and see what others are using this year for their curriculum!