Have you been gearing back for the new homeschooling year?  We school relaxedly almost year-round with breaks for traveling and visiting, but we too are preparing to do some more intensive work.

Until the end of August CurrClick.com is having a HUGE Back to Homeschool Sale with savings of up to 75% on all of their homeschooling downloadables including lapbooks, unit studies, and yes – copywork!

All of our Bogart Family Resources titles are on sale for 20% of as well, so if there’s a title you missed when it was initially released, or one you need for the upcoming school year, now’s your chance to stock up and save!

Do check it out, and enjoy the great savings!

After our official speech therapy assessment with our four-year-old daughter last week, we had our very first speech therapy appointment this morning.  She had a great time, and is SO excited to have official homework to do before her next appointment.  We are working on ‘f’ to start with, and she’s already making very good progress.

This is a part of educating our little ones that I didn’t think we’d need to pursue, but despite our very relaxed ‘wait and see’ approach, and faith that time would help everything progress, it has become clear that not everything has been progressing as it should be.  So – it’s been off to tackle some articulation delays at the therapist, and I’m very thankful that our therapist is dedicated to teaching me what to do at home with our little one to help her on a daily basis.

If there’s something that I can say about homeschooling, it’s that it will make you flexible. I’m the type who likes to do a lot of research, and before our children were school aged I’d researched, planned, formulated, you get the idea. In any case, I had so many idealistic, formalized ideas about what our lives as homeschoolers would be like. What our educational philosophy would look like. What we’d allow and wouldn’t allow.

Isn’t life funny though? Homeschooling has stretched me and made me more flexible. Part of it is obviously that the ideas I’d picked up weren’t true convictions, but were rather external philosophies I adopted and tried to make my own. Other times I realized that my children needed something different than I thought they would, they turned out to have different needs, and be different people than I thought they would be.

We were never going to use ‘readers’, we’d go straight to reading ‘real books’.  We were never going to use computer software to supplement one-on-one teaching, it was going to be all Mom, all the time.  And we were definitely never going to watch silly cartoon movies on DVD, we would be media-free.

I’m not saying that we’ll always do these things (life changes, and we have more children coming up the pipe), but yes – we do them sometimes, we do them…often.  And that’s okay.

I was talking to my daughter late last night (her favorite time for spiritual conversations), and she was telling me how much she wished that she could read better so that she could dig into a real Bible for herself and find the answers to her questions in God’s Word.

We’ve been reading together through The Beginner’s Bible on a near-daily basis, and she’s doing really well, she only needs help with a word or two on each page.  I’m hoping that with some more practice she can move to an NIrV in the near future.  We have one picked out already (larger font, grade 3 reading level), we’re just waiting for some more reading readiness .

I just had to share because one of my big milestones for educating my children is to get them reading their own Bibles on a regular basis .  It’s exciting to see her enthusiasm to dig into the Word for herself!

Yesterday my husband Larry did a couple of subjects in Kaelynn’s homeschooling with her while I was putting my two little girls down for a nap (I’ll admit – I had one too!)  After that she asked me if Daddy could do all of her homeschooling with her!  I asked him if he’d like to try it (we’re really only doing core subjects right now), and I showed him what to do today, and I think they had a great time together.

I think he has less of a tendency to get stressed out than I do, so it was more enjoyable for everyone.  I did “preschool” with my little girls for the hour and a half that they were doing their work.  Larry’s never really done any of the homeschooling before so it was very interesting to see him working with Kaelynn – he did a great job!

I love you Larry!

Most of us have heard of The Old Schoolhouse’s Download ‘N Go e-book unit studies, created by Amanda Bennett, and I recently had the chance to review one of them.  This was my first experience with the series, and I was pleasantly surprised!  The Download ‘N Go series is designed to work through one unit a week (5 days), and it provides MORE content than you can use during that time with all of the sites provided – really, there is a lot packed into each study.

Our family chose to work through Whale Tales, and at first I wasn’t too sure how these internet integrated unit studies would work for us (because we have bandwidth limitations).  However, I was really pleased!  The video links and other content pages (for research, data gathering, Bible integration) that the unit study linked up to didn’t suck up all of our bandwidth, though not all of the videos loaded for us (this is a common problem that seems to come from using a Mac, still I was able to find many of them on YouTube from the titles given).

There are lapbooking components (my daughter really loves these), fill in the blank elements, lots of room for discussion, and a suggested reading list.  Now, if you want to use the suggested books you’ll either need a very well-stocked library OR a HUGE home library if you really want to “Download ‘N Go” right away, so we just dug through our bookshelves and found some whale-related books to read with the children and look through.

I must admit, that though I was skeptical about the whole ‘internet-linked’ concept, my family was REALLY into this study.  They would all gather around the computer (7, 4, and 2 year old) and ‘ooh and aah’ at the whale footage.  We printed off a copy (I like to have something in my hands), and also had it open on the computer to click on the links as we progressed through the book.

There are new units in development ALL the time, and until TODAY – hurry, hurry – you can enter to win a huge package, including the full Fall line-up of Download ‘N Go unit studies (if you live in the US).  Go do that here before midnight!

ALSO, if you order before midnight, there’s a huge sale going on.  Normally these units cost $7.95, but there are HUGE discounts on bundled packages, AND, you can receive an extra 20% off on any Download ‘N Go package with this special code

DNG20PKS

You can find everything Download ‘N Go here, to see all the bundled and individual options.  This is a GREAT option for eclectic homeschoolers, and those who use delight directed approaches, just grab the titles that interest your children, and away you go!  These are good for children in grades K-4, for your younger children you can do a lot verbally and just write in their answers (that’s what we’re doing).  Definitely a fun supplement to your core, skills-based curriculum, this is a really fun way to dig into some knowledge based topics with your children.

If you think this approach would work for your family, I definitely recommend you pick up at least one title to try out, I know my children thought it was super-neat!

AAAH!  Our spelling lessons for today have been curtailed!  Yesterday we discovered that after a week-off of homeschooling (sicky times and trip to the city), our All About Spelling index card box was missing!  We pressed on…without it.  But today when we prepared to do our spelling…the All About Spelling Level One book was missing!  NOOOOOOOOOOO!

How, oh how can we spell without you?  I was certain I took you back to the spelling bin when we were done yesterday!  SOB!  Is the distance between the living room and the office so great that I could have somehow misplaced you so badly that now I cannot find you!

Sniff.

Prayers are appreciated for the safe recovery of All About Spelling Level One!  It must be here somewhere!

Well, we’ve been needing to take a trip up to our farm for a while, and now it’s becoming desperate. Kaelynn only has one day left in Math-U-See Primer, and our Alpha books is up there….I think. There are a few more things we need to retrieve. I need to do a search and rescue mission of our Peterson book for K (for Rose who is desperately trying to teach herself to print), Larry wants to hunt for software, and we need the dog brush!

The only question is the issue of mud – it did rain yesterday.

To go, or not to go? We’ll have to see.

Yay!  Our second facilitator visit has just been completed for this year.  I don’t know why I ever worry or get nervous about these visits!  They are really so laid back and are basically just sharing verbally some of the educational things we’ve done throughout the year, and listening to our facilitator chat Kaelynn up to sort of informally assess her educational progress .

So, it’s all good again, we’re registered for next year with the same board (they made it so easy for us!) and we’ll just keep on trucking!  We plan to stick to our relaxed, basics-only in the morning with optional child-led hands-on/reading etc. in the afternoon year round because it lets us take time off for sick days and visits to the city, and other things that come up!

So, again – yay!  See you next year facilitator! (The girls love her!)

Well, tomorrow is  big day, and I’ve been clearing off flat surfaces in preparation for our homeschooling facilitator meeting.  I’ve already picked up the floor several times, but it’s really not much use until tomorrow, the kids just keep throwing their play jewelry on the floor.  Really, I think I’m the only one getting ready around here yet, but that’s okay, maybe tomorrow the cleaning bug will kick in.  If you don’t hear from me until tomorrow night you’ll know why!

Actually, our facilitator is pretty low key, so there’s no real anxiety in the air – and that’s a good thing!