Circling Through This Life

It's Thursday!  Thankful Thursday and day 4 of the Back to School 5 Days of Encouragement Blog hop hosted by the Homeschool Review Crew! Today's post is simple and to the point. I am grateful for the Homeschool Review Crew.  I started as crew member in June 2010  which was the start of Year 3. I've been serving on the crew since then coming back for Year 4, the short transitional 2012 and continuing with 2013, 2014 and 2015.  In 2016 I stepped up into the role of Crew Leader. Through the Crew I have made some fabulous friends.  I've been introduced to vendors I never would have known about and tried products that I never knew i needed until I reviewed them. Money has been tight. Some years more tight than others.  God certainly used the Homeschool Review Crew to provide curriculum that I might not have been able to afford otherwise. Because of the Crew I've had a change to try different reading and math programs with Supergirl and really ge...

Today's theme for the Back to School 5 Days of Homeschool Encouragement  is Work It In Wednesday! Today I want to share about how homeschooling isn't just form of education but a way of life.  One of my big goals for home education was to instill a love of life long learning in my children.  Just because it isn't a school day or we are on vacation doesn't mean that education doesn't happen. We live in a state that requires instructional hours.  Something equivalent to 5.5 "instructional" hours a day for 180 days.  Thankfully my state recognizes that home education can be more efficient than classroom education in a public school. We tended to do 'year round' schooling taking breaks as life thew its punches.  During the summer we did more "fun" school like hands on science but my favorite thing about "homeschool as a lifestyle" is that going on vacation didn't mean a break from learning.  It meant a break from forma...

I think the greatest lesson I have learned as a homeschooling mama is to be flexible.  Being flexible isn't easy for me.  I don't like change.  I like having my road maps (i.e. lessons plans laid out for me) but I learned to love the detours. Having a "game plan" or a "road map" at the beginning of the year, meant that I knew where I wanted to go even if we didn't finish in June.  We always schooled year around with doing more "hands on" and "fun" schooling during the summer so I gave up early on trying to squeeze 36 weeks or 1100 hours of education between September and June. In today's Take a Look Tuesday post which is part of the Back to School  5 Days of Homeschool Encouragement Blog Hop hosted by the Homeschool Review Crew I am going to share my general road map for studying American History for the 2018-2019 school year for Supergirl. If you're you're hopping over form another Crew member blog, let me br...

As I said earlier this week, we have tended towards a year-round/take-as-much-time as-we-need approach to home schooling when the girls were younger. There is just something about taking a least a couple of weeks off at the end of summer before beginning a new school year. We’re odd ducks here because I call it the first day of school and it is the start of a new school calendar but we might not actually be starting new curriculum. We might just be picking up where we left off. (For Turtlegirl, especially, we are not really starting anything new in September.)  But I want there to be something different.  Something special.  Something that marks the changing of one school year to another. One thing that I have always done was, to quote Turtlegirl, “pass out pretty new school supplies like new pencils and notebooks.  That’s always my favorite.”  BooBear remembers that back when we used Sonlight I would often save “Box Day,” the opening of the box with all the ...

**Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. Thank you for your support!** For the last three days I’ve talked about planning. When I plan, I start with determining my school calendar and then I begin figuring out my course of study .  Yesterday I talked about types of planners . Since I’m working through our course of study I have lots of curriculum on my mind.  Because we get to review so much great stuff we often set aside a  program and then come back to it. Some of the curriculum listed is “in progress” and we want to finish it. Turtlegirl’s Course of Study Math:   She’ll finish up CTC Math Geometry and then go back to VideoText Algebra. She is nearly 1/2 way through both but might not finish both before the end of the year.  That’s OK. When all is said and done she’ll have 1 Credit Algebra 1 (already has that), 1 Credit Algebra 2 and 1 credit Geometry. English: We’ll start with High School Essay Intensive from Institute for Excellence in Wri...

**Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. Thank you for your support!** I love planners.  A couple of weekends ago I was on a date with Honeybear and we stopped in an office supply store. He left me behind in the planner and office supply section.  He wandered over someplace else because he knew I had found a bit of my heaven. When I say planners I don’t just mean lesson planners or homeschool planners. I love home management planners and meal planners and plain calendar collections. I have digital planners, paper planners, planning software and even a planner based in Excel! Just last week I received the 7 Minute Life Daily Planner to review. (Look for the review Mid-September!) On Monday I talked about Planning: The School Calendar .  I use the School Year Calendar tool in Homeschool Tracker Plus (HST + )to create the school calendar. This is a downloadable software. Unfortunately, it is no longer being offered but Homeschool Tracker does offer Homeschool Tr...

**Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. Thank you for your support!** Before I can make lesson plans or create assignment sheets I must know what we are actually studying. My two favorite planners for planning our courses is the Course of Study page from the TOS Schoolhouse Digital Planner . Did you know that if you purchase a membership to SchoolhouseTeachers.com you get access to all of the TOS Digital Planners ? I know I digress but tomorrow I’ll be talking more about the different planners available from The Old Schoolhouse . Yes, it’s a digital planner but what does that mean?  It means that it is a PDF. It is not software like Homeschool Tracker Plus or Homeschool Tracker Online. But the TOS Planners can be printed out or you can just type right into the planner. You can use the SAVE AS to create a planner for each of your children. When I first start to plan the courses I print out a copy for each of my students. This is like a scratch copy or rough draft. I ...

I am a planner.  I mean I like to have things planned out. I don’t have to be locked into the plans and the plans frequently change but I need to have structure. I need to have a frame or map to get me started.  As part of the Back to Homeschool Blog Hop I am doing a series of posts about planning.  What do I plan before we head Back to Homeschool: planning the calendar , planning our course of study , and using both paper and digital planners . When the girls were very small I didn’t stress too much about calendars. We have have always leaned more towards a year-round approach taking time off as needed. We would just start the next math book or the next level of whatever subject when we finished the first one. I did take the time to put in specific breaks such as federal holidays that Honeybear is off and scheduled breaks at Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter.  Our first day of School would be in late August or early September and we would aim to be finished by Me...