Taking a break...

We are officially...

We'll start back up Monday, January 3rd. I received all our new coloring and activity books from Amazon, and the kids have thumbed through them with glee - I am thankful I have a scanner so I can make copies of desirable coloring pages for both of them.

Over the past week, we have painted wooden Nutcracker music boxes from the craft store, decorated our tree and house with lights, cleaned all the family areas of the home (bedrooms can wait until the week after Christmas!), read from A Christmas Carol and various Christmas stories - old favorites and a few new - continued with The Saturdays, and started on The Moon of the Winter Bird. We listened to our collection of classic Christmas songs. The kids made and decorated gingerbread cookies with my mom and sister, and in the upcoming week we're going to make little tins of fudge as gifts from the kids. We're enjoying the relaxation, even as we go from activity to activity, since recovering from last week's horrible bout with the flu.

I'm going to use this week to finish getting the house ready for Christmas Eve company, making fudge and other handmade trinkets, and then the week after I plan to get everything ready for a fresh start in homeschooling. We're going to study chemistry (since the kids are getting a really cool-looking chem kit for XMas) and early American history.

Until then, I wish you all...

Just some updated things...

We're starting back up with official homeschooling January 3rd, so I have updated our Current Curricular Choices and my American History booklist. I went ahead and ordered a few more craft/maps/etc. books, and a bunch of coloring books to go with our history studies. I also read through a number of posts on a couple of homeschooling message boards, and decided that if Cyrus is going to use Saxon Math, he could use a small whiteboard to do the problems on, rather than paper. I don't need page after page of his math work lying around! Cassia's Saxon Math 2 is in workbook format, so she'll continue with that. I am toying with the idea of making Saxon Math 5/4 worksheets on my computer, but Cyrus's eyes lit up at the whiteboard idea, and I already go through a lot of ink and paper, so probably not. He's currently debating Writing Tales and Intermediate Language Lessons - I told him the choice is all his!

In the meanwhile, we're reading Christmas stories, and enjoying the season. Our house is getting cleaner by the day (part of my deal with them for taking the rest of the month off from formal homeschooling), and we are reading through The Tarantula in My Purse for science. The kids are watching every Christmas movie they can get ahold of, and we are really looking forward to seeing Voyage of the Dawn Treader for my birthday next week! We finally got back ahold of Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets from our library and are enjoying that as well.

Plans for the next couple of weeks include:
Finishing cleaning
Baking gingerbread cookies, which the kids love to decorate
Making some gifts for relatives
Decorating the tree
Going ice skating
Reading more seasonal books
Participating in the pageant at church (yes, we recently started attending church)
Having relatives over on Christmas Eve
Enjoying a lazy Christmas Day all to ourselves

I am excited about the gifts we have chosen for the kids this year. Jessica, over at Foursquare Schoolhouse, has an excellent post on really listening to people, to find out what they really want, versus asking for lists, and so forth. I have tried to do that with my kids and husband this year, and can't wait to see if I was successful! I requested Christmas Eve off to reduce my own pressure load, and it was approved. We're closed Christmas Day at work, so I know I have at least those days off to enjoy my family.

Hope you're all having happy holidays as well!

Back to Charlotte Mason...

It turns out that we miss the routine of sitting down to "do school" more than we thought we would. I have been browsing through my collection of Charlotte Mason books late at night, and decided that Catherine Levison was right when she wrote that following the CM method allows plenty of time for children to explore their own interests, since lessons are kept short and sweet. My children also adore being read to, which fits right in. So next week we're going back to CM until we feel the need to unschool again! I also want to blend in some Oak Meadow (semi-Waldorf) approaches. I want to get some nice notebooks/main lesson books, like these.

My plans include:

Saxon Math or Math Mammoth for both - they can choose which each day as long as they do one or the other.

Writing Tales for Cyrus, maybe. We barely put a dent in this book last year, and he is perfectly willing to give it another go. He also like Intermediate Language Lessons, so I think I'll give him a choice, and/or we could do some language arts ala Oak Meadow. He reads, writes something about what he has read in a main lesson book, and adds a drawing... hmmmmm.

The Reading Lesson, guided reading, and some copywork (Oak Meadow) for Cassia. She is really showing some progress reading, and I want to keep the momentum going.

Reading through American history with books I am compiling from various living book history lists. We're starting with Leif the Lucky and the D'Aulaires Norse Myths. Then we'll move into other early explorers.

Weekly nature walks (with journals, or at least the camera and a journal later), along with living books on science. Since my last posting I have found a few good lists! I plan to start The Tarantula in My Purse, and then go from there.

For art studies and music, I am not yet sure...

In geography, we have started participating in a postcard exchange and got our first one yesterday, from Michigan. We'll keep a notebook with a state map printout and some basic info.

I'm thinking about a book of centuries, or something similar.

We're reading, for pleasure, The Saturdays, Little House in the Big Woods, and Cyrus is reading How to Train Your Dragon, book 1. I want to read aloud A Christmas Carol, and some other Christmassy books.

So there are my ramblings for the day!