First Day of School (Follow-up Post)

Just in case I left some of you wondering what I was talking about in my previous post "First Day of School" when I said that I would be making some changes in our homeschool. Here it is:

First of all, I want the Bible to be the center of our curriculum. Now that does not mean I will not have a heavy focus on academics, but rather Bible will be front and center. I don't have all the details of this worked out just yet, but I am trusting God to teach me and give me direction a little at a time. I do know these things. I will start the day with prayer requests and prayer, reading scripture, discussing and repeating scripture, and including the Pledge to the Bible and the Pledge to the Christian flag. I know if my kids can say a pledge to the U.S. flag they should be pledging their allegiance to God's Word and Christianity. I know that I will teach academics from a biblically based perspective. I started out focused on academics, but somewhere along the way you start to realize that the two can not be seperate.

One thing I will do is have the kids write Bible verses for copywork and make scripture memorization a part of our schooling.

We will sing hymns and children's Bible songs, as well as, introduce them to a variety of Christian music. We have realized recently that my husband and I grew up listening to a lot of music, but we are not surrounding our own kids with music. If you asked them their favorite song I really do no think they would have an opinion about it. That troubles me, so I intend to change that. And if I am going to put music in their heads well it might as well be Christian. Of course, we will still sing Mary Had a Little Lamb and "clean" secular music. Looking back most of the music I grew up on was just not "clean".

We will end by lunch unless we just want to continue with something the kids are wanting to do.

We will work at their pace, but during the allotted time for an assignment (i.e. Math, etc.) once the time runs out we will put the assignment back in their folder. They will be allowed to complete uncomplete assignments during a "Seatwork Time". I can already see this will help us stay on schedule for ending at lunch.

I am not going to be a slave to curricula. Phonetics/Grammar and Math build on each other, but I am not going to try to "do it all". As long as they master the concepts we are not going to make ourselves crazy trying to complete everything. By the way, I like teach using a Content Mastery approach. If they know "x" information, then we move on. From time to time we can review it to make sure they know it. If they do not know "x" information we are going to stop right there and learn it. That might just mess up our lesson numbers, but oh well. The whole point is to learn, right!

I want to do less textbook stuff and more hands-on. Instead of doing patterns on a worksheet we will do patterns with our Lego's, etc..

Afternoons are not going to be for TV time and DS games, etc.. (Well, maybe some..., but I want them to enjoy the things we are doing so much that they want to spend the whole day doing it.... uh... we'll see how that goes) I do want them to be kids, but I do not want them missing out on life because they are vegging out in from of a TV, etc.. I want them to learn to enjoy other things more than normal kids of today.

We are going rise early, get dressed, have breakfast, and start our school day by approximately 8:00 a.m. daily.

Okay, so that is some of what I meant by the changes we are making in our homeschool. So, what are you doing different this year?