Waiting to finish...

I am half way expecting this up coming year to be a bit unpredicatable and in some places a tad bit crazy with the possibility of us moving in the middle of December and taking a new position at a new church in a new town and near family for the first time. All of those meshed together could cause some unknowns to occur for us, some good unknowns and some bad. I am planning for the whole month of December off in expectation of a move and little days off through out the rest of our year to make up for lost time and the fact that we will only be having 4 day weeks and 36 weeks to the whole year, or at least I am hoping for a 36 week year :0).

I am still waiting for some of my books to come in, a bit unpatiently might I add. They really should have already been here but all in His timing, all in His timing. When they do finally drive up my driveway I will greet them with an over-joyous and maybe a little obnoxious "HELLO" and then with out any manners at all sit down with them at my table and observe and give them the third degree of how they will serve us this year for hours just like I have all the others ;0) and I will love it. Can't wait to share all of my overly zealous plans for our, in 5 short days, upcoming year.

JOYfully in Him,
Kelli

Anxious yet Nervous

I am very anxious about beginning our new school year but also a little nervous. I have so many plans and expectations that I fear I will buckle under the pressure and constant demands. I struggle with giving ALL of me as I feel the natural pull of the rest of my house tugging at me and not to mention this world beyond the screen. I lack discipline and battle an emotional force with in me that tries to control where I move my hands in service causing me to take an easier path forsaking my priorities. I wonder if I am alone in this struggle. I long to have a strong accountability that reminds me daily of my God ordained Christ centered priorities as a stay at home mom who has taken her children's education under her wing.

With this idea of accountability this year I have decided for one to put my husband in his rightful place in our little schoolroom as Principal and with that, with him being my authority and and my kind of "accountability supporvisor" I will set out to turn in a weekly and monthly progress report to him, so that I will feel more responsible in my daily educating (as if the future of my children wasn't enough?) and so that he can feel assured of the things we are doing and the progress we are making. I think it will proove to be a blessing to all of us. Also with the reality that we will probably if it is the Lord's will be moving at the end of the year I will need the reports for when we get settled in our new place. (This is not for sure yet) I will also join the Weekly Reporters in my attempts to have more accountability.

I am currently working on our progress reports and praying that God will enable this mom to be 100% devoted to her children and their beautiful individual Growing Minds in our 2008/2009 homeschool year.

JOYfully in Him,
Kelli

After summer update!

I am so dissapointed in this summer! I had so many wonderful plans for our little homeschool but all were tharted due to our involvement with the youth group at our church. I am not complaining about being given the privilege of being the youth ministers for a few months during the summer, it was amazing but with the experience taking most of our time I had little time nor energy to do much else.

School will begin on September 7th for us. A little bit of a late start but I have some things that I must do in the whole month of August before we can begin our next year. I can not tell you how excited I am about our next semester! I completely re-organized and re-arranged our play/school room, it took me 2 fully devoted days and it was worth it. I am waiting on 1 piece to seal the re-do of the room and then I will post a picture. I desperately wanted to get some things organized and filter through some of the old things to make room for the new things coming.

I truly LOVE being able to stay home and teach my boys. What an amazing, truly humbleing and down right near impossibly hard experience as a mother. I am amazed at the amount of emotions I feel as I journey down this God ordained path of homeschooling, no one day is alike. I have those completely joy filled days and then I have those what am I doing days and then so many in betweens! I didnt' set out to homeschool, homeschool found me and it completely captured me in all of it's beauty. Later I found the struggles that came with it but the JOY and BEAUTY always overshadow them.

I will be taking the boys school shopping to get them excited about their upcoming year hopefully soon and I am planning on sitting down tonight or at least this week and ordering all of our 2008/2009 school books. I can't wait to get my hands on all of them and flip through each page anxiously awaiting each lesson. I am going to try some new things with my planning this year I hope and I am going to begin now to pray for my diligence and discipline as a teacher.

Stay tuned....

JOYfully in Him,
Kelli

I am still here!

Wow, so I have been really neglecting this place! We have been pretty relaxed with school right now which has been great for all of us. I enjoy both a very strict and structured format to our days but also a very relaxed and spontaneous format. A few weeks of the strictness and then a week or so of the relaxed keeps it fresh around here. Right now we are in the middle of studying birds still, also rocks which we are all very fascinated with. Tomorrow we will make a crystal garden and Friday we will possible make a volcano.

Learning to Spell through Copywork, has anyone had any experience with this program? I was able to flip the the pages of it this weekend and really like the looks of it but would love some thoughts of a user. I have decided on Simply Grammar after looking at it. History is still undecided for me, I was thinking of continueing Story of the World by Susan Wise Bauer but have been thinking about All Through the Ages by Christine Miller. I like the idea of getting the cd for SOTW and listening to it together each week.

Well it is pouring outside and my boys just woke up ready to eat and start the day! Have a great day! Things will start back in order around here soon.

JOYfully in Him,
Kelli

Let's sign and learn

I have decided to begin signing with all of my littles. I feel that this will be a good way for us to communicate with eachother in quiet places and it will help my little Butterfly express to us what she is wanting when she can't yet say it, such as Momma. She can not say Momma yet. She says many other words, dog, duck, dinosaur, bird, baby, ba-ba, da-da and diaper and thank you, there it is, that and others but she is unable to pronounce certain sounds. I found the perfect site, Born to Sign, a few years ago that I enjoyed and began doing some of it with Superman then 4 and he just revealed to me some of the signs that he remembered from then.

I am really excited about doing this. Also, I am going to really try to encourage T-Rex to enjoy some kind of learning. I do not want to push him but I really want to do some things with him. He refuses to do anything with me! Even fun things, all he wants to do is play. Thinking of the CM method I know not to push him and that it is not all that important to be formally teaching him at this point, he is only 3 nearly 4 (3 months). I have been trying to read with him and creatively disguise learning into games. He calls me out sometimes and escapes. One thing I did with him that he really loved was put 5 little orange squares on his desk each numbered 1-5 and then had 5 more bigger squares numbered 1-5 for him to match and then count. He loved it and did it over and over again. Another thing I did was play cars with him and snuck in some counting, he didn't seem to notice. I think I am going to pick up some from Letter of the Week until the end of the semester to releave some of my guilt of not doing anything with him, that is if he will entertain me with it.

2 Week Family Excursion :0)

Today was our first day back from a 2-week long Spring break! Did you hear that... 2 weeks! This was not really in my plans, I had us set out to go full speed through the end of our year but life presented the opportunity to just enjoy time and so we accepted. I have been researching so many curriculums that I feel would fit us this next year. I have decided to kind of slide Superman into the "third grade" according to curriculum, I feel he is able to very easily go right into it and in some areas he is already there so it will be a very smooth transition. We will continue to use God's Design for Science along with Nature Study and Horizons for Math along with more living math books.

We jumped back into our typical day give or take a few things here and there. It is always such a struggle to get back into our habits when we have neglected them for so long. Some habits I had just started to inforce around here and now must start all over again. It was a really good day! We enjoyed ourselves dispite the obstacles we were forced to climb over and we actually accomplished everything that was set out in my mind to accomplish. I am about to visit Barb to see about our Green Hour Challenge for this week and hope that the rain will stop so that we can venture outside to enjoy His creation.

I do have a lot of pictures to share of some Nature walks we were blessed to take and some observations from Maw Maw and Be Be's houses.

Thinking thoughts

I am wondering where we are going here... my mind is in some kind of catastrophic phase of thinking that is terrorizing the interior walls of my brain and I have lost complete control. Okay so it isn't that severe but I really can not seem to stop thinking about all of the different ideas I have chasing eachother. I will reveal something about myself. When I become overtakened by an idea I enjoy "thinking" and fantasizing about it for a long time but lack the skills in going much further than that mostly because I am a copier, a follower and not a leader. Something here that I am trying to stray away from is conforming to other peoples molds of how they have chosen to use the CM style. I want us to create our own unique mold that fits us. I am so amazed at how hard it is for me to organize all of the things that I am learningn even with the amount of motivation and enthusiasm I have stored up with in me. I think that I struggle with the fear of not doing it correctly and some how failing completely at my attempt to create the perfect school of "delightful" learning molded just for us, is that possible?

I also fear that I am not capable of the path I am begining to walk down because I feel it is one that requires a lot from me. I feel like this path isn't exactly marked out for me so that I can "follow" and instead I am having to "make" our own path but then isn't that kind of what I wanted to do in the first place, create my own mold? I guess what I am understanding now as I type this is that I am having a difficult time stepping outside of my comfort zone with following the well marked out path and setting out my own. So, are you as confused as I am? :0)

To be continued...

On a journey to: Perfect Harmony

I read an article this morning on Homeschool Methods titled "Planting Your Garden" by the Parker Family. It basically dicusses 2 methods, the Classical and Charlotte Mason, and how they can ultimately be harmonized. It was very encouraging for me as I think through these 2 styles of education. I am in love with Charlotte but still cling to the Classical. I feel a kindred spirit with Charlotte Mason and a noble companionship with Classical Education.

Harmonized... "Both Charlotte Mason and Classical methods of instruction have the capacity to be the flame that ignites a love of learning and kindles the essence of a true liberal education;we believe that if we keep their common goal in view,we can more surely hit the mark with techniques drawn from both camps." Parker Family

As of right now I am describing our Homeschool like this: We are Growing Minds of Wisdom down the flourishing path of Classical Education walking closely in communion with Charlotte Mason as we are daily guided by the Light.

Just thought you might want to know :0).

Reforming the reality of Education

Education, you know it, it lives and breathes in your home on a daily basis. Education is something that we can not escape no matter how hard we run and the darkess corner can not hide the light of it's reality, of it being a life. Education is not limited to a desk, to the moving of a pencil, in the pages of a book it happens in the mind as we experience life and when I say book what I mean is a textbook not a "living book". It is such a common misunderstanding or ignorance to understand education in this way, that is that if the child or adult is not knee deep in a dry textbook and busy work then knowledge is not being obtained, that it can only come through at a desk, table or floor with a book and a worksheet in an atmosphere of serious rigidness. Basically the idea that knowledge can only be found in the formal way of learning, this is a disillusionment passed down from many generations through the govermental public school system. Children"are in danger of recieving much teaching with little knowledge"* in the hands of this type of education. Now I have to be honest, I have been guilty of this idea of education! This has been our habit of learning over the past couple of years and it was the path we were continueing to tred until CM stopped us dead in our tracks and pointed out to us, me, that education is much more than that, simply "Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life."* What a profound thought, no what a profound reality!

Life being a continual never ceasing experience of learning is the mother of all lessons! Life is full of lessons that God has put in our path to challenge us to grow in a life of transformation to the image of His Son. I challenge you to view education as a life experience of growing in the knowledge of Him.... challenge the norm, challenge the traditional way of education, experience education in the way God meant it to be... a daily experience through not only our lessons but also through His creation and with grace, with hope, with love, with joy, with liberation and with a lens of it being an amazing way for us to come closer to Him uniting us closer as a unit, a family.

I am in the process of transforming Growing Minds of Wisdom to this reality of education. I must express my thoughts as to the struggles going on within me. I know that CM's philosophy of education is dead on but my "old" mind is having a hard time agreeing with my "new" mind. The fact that education for my child does not have to be a tormenting experience constantly interrupting life is almost unreal to me, that I can actually lead my children's minds down a delighted path of learning!

My thoughts this morning were dug up after reading this quote:

“The difference between school and life? In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson.”
~Tom Bodett

I wasn't posting this to enter but if the shoe fits....find more dug up thoughts at the Heart of the Matter.

* Charlotte Mason's words found in her Original Homeschooling Series.

The Beginning of my CM Evolution

I have become engrossed in the philosophy of Charlotte Mason and I have only barely begun to reach in and unwind. I can hardly put down For the Children's Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay it keeps drawing me in with the intent for more, more, more. I have a feeling that my ideas or direction of my teaching in some subjects and the way of each day are going to change slightly as I continue to be drawn in more and more into her passion and life. I have very naively adapted some of our education to follow her ideas but not with out a full understanding, now I will not stop until I understand her ideas more clearly for myself and that of my children.

I think it would very benificial for every school teacher to read her thoughts on education, on teaching, on life and on the personhood of each child. I think that one of the huge downfalls in the school system is the fact that most authorities in the walls of education lack the vital importance of understanding all of these factors, those of CM, and implementing them in their methods of teaching. They only see a class of children, desks filled, rather than a class of individual "persons" and I realize the enormous incapability to achieve this at its full capacity but even if the idea, the passion the understanding were there... then the heart of education would be, or possible could be.. found.