I'm a bad, bad blogger

I'm soooo not tech savvy so I'm handing over 50% of the reins to John who is a much funnier writer than I am. I have not blogged since we moved. We moved a whole whopping ONE MILE from our old house to a house which was our rental home. This home needs cosmetic work but the yard, sunroom, and dock make up for it. I'm going for a whole Beach Cottage look in this house. Our kids are too small and ruin things too often so I think the whole cottage look works for us, at least until they're older.

But since I'm here now... homeschooing is going well. We have routine of C getting up first (he's the earlybird), waking his Dad and out to the dock they go. After about 45 min of fishing he comes and then our morning starts: breakfast, chores, get dressed, start homeschool. At the moment Cam is using: Horizons Maths 2nd grade, Story of the World for History, Spelling Workout B for Spelling, piano practice (we were using Themes to Remember as well until a little 2 yo stepped on the Cd), a mishmash of Language Arts 2nd grade workbooks with First Language Lessons as our Language Arts Spine, lots of reading, and for science we changed to Evan Moor's Read and Understand Science which he likes. He also has SOTW copywork to do weekly, daily journal writing using a different daily writing prompt (this is quite a challenge for Cam since he lacks abstract thinking) and we use Daily Paragraph Editing 2nd grade.

Jules is using Explode the Code 3 for phonics, Singapaore Math 1a, and right now she's doing daily copywork (a sentence daily) on birds.
We also started to plan our Nature table now that we're officially homeschooling 2 kids. We started collecting items for it last night.

I've tried to schedule things on different days..some have stuck, some haven't. MWF is History. T and Th is Science. Daily Math, Language Arts and Writing. We JUST started (now that Jules is home) doing: Person of the Week and Country of the Week. Monday- Person of the week
Tuesday- Country of the week
Wednesday - Craft (tea and craft for J and Mommy)
Thursday- baking day
Friday- Poetry Friday.

Our method is a secularized version of Classical Homeschooling trivium and Charlotte Mason. But we don't have a method. We use what works for now.

In the fall the goal is to get the kids into a homeschool private school which will be 2 days classroom time/1 day classroom GameDay (using critical thinking skills) and 2 days homeschool. That's the goal for now. We're not happy with our local feeder school and the nearest private school we like is a bit of a drive and pricey. We're trying to just navigate through the next year then move out of Daytona.

I think the only thing we'll miss is this house we JUST moved into... the kids love the lake out back, the dock, and the sunroom is VERY large which makes a great playroom and classroom.

Phew...well that was a mouthful.