The Truth about Teaching our Children to Read {and 5 Simple Steps for Nurturing a Love of Books…}
A couple of days ago, I shared a special moment on The Unplugged Family Facebook page. My nine-year-old daughter had just finished reading through The Boxcar Children for the first time and was starting into the second book in the series. It was mid-morning and our home was peacefully quiet with children all engaged in their own activities. Audrey unfolded her legs and rose from the couch with a satisfied sigh. “Oh, Mama… I just couldn’t LIVE without reading,” her voice was whimsical and sing-song. I smiled and she continued, “Reading is just delicious.” Oh, my heart. Those four words will stay emblazoned in my soul forever. Reading Is…
The difference between a Schedule and a Rhythm (and how Rhythm brought Rest to our Homeschool)
Schedule A. a plan for carrying out a process or procedure, giving lists of intended events and times. B. to arrange or plan events to take place at a particular time. Rhythm A. a strong, regular pattern of movement or sound. B. a repeated pattern of events marked by natural flow and regular reoccurrence of certain activities. When I first started my Homeschooling journey, I tried desperately to create (and re-create) very specific Homeschool Schedules I wanted us to follow. These comprised of many boxes and many little increments of time, all filled in with exactly what we would do every second…
Our Choices for Individual Studies / Morning Rotation
So, last week I posted about our Morning Time and Family Loop plans for this year, Term 1. If you haven’t read that post and are genuinely interested in how our year ( or a creatively put-together, Charlotte Mason-inspired year ) looks like, I’d definitely start there. A huge part of our learning is covered in our Morning Time and Family Loop . Once we finish up Morning Time, the kids move into their Morning Rotations (Individual Work). This is where they are covering their Language Arts, Math, Notebooking, and Reading. This year Simon is our 6th grader (oh, my goodness!), Audrey is in 4th grade, and Alex…
Morning Time and Family Learning Plans
I’m super excited to share our plans for Morning Time and our Family Learning (which we are calling our Family Loop this year). It has been about 2 months now that I’ve been really in the reflecting, thinking, and planning process for the upcoming year. It is a lot of fun, but, as many of you know – a lot of hard work! I think I’m on information and decision making overload… but I’ll recover. *wink* I’m thankful to God for His guidance and the undeserved grace He continues to pour on me as I plan. I feel I have a good vision for the upcoming year and I’m…
Parables from Nature by Margaret Gatty – here is a FREE Download for you… to make printing this classic a little easier!
I love that so many classic (and old school!) books are available online for free. These are Public Domain books that are no longer copyrighted and are accessible to anyone and everyone by download. The problem is, so often the download versions only really work on Kindle or some screen-based reader. Or, they just don’t print well at all when you try to print them out and have them bound. This is a problem for me because I don’t love reading books on the iPad and when I print, I’m picky about how it looks. *sigh* This has motivated me to take the time to make certain downloads more…
Choosing Great Books for your Living Literature List – Help for creating an awesome read-aloud list and a FREE download.
Hello, dear friends!!! So, I have the privilege of talking to countless homeschool Moms. Especially Mamas who are all nervous and stressed out and just beginning their homeschool journey. Yep, just like I was 6 years ago… They talk about when to teach reading, how soon kids should write, how to do math, and if they are covering enough at age 4 (snicker). And I listen, smile, and try my hardest to be an encourager. I’m afraid though that I sound pretty much a broken record. Every single time I encourage a new homeschool Mama (or one who is overwhelmed!), I say, “take a deep breath and just READ…
Homeschool Planning – What’s in my Planning and Records Binder? (And a whole bunch of FREE downloads for planning!)
Only awesomely geeky homeschool Moms will ever read this post with interest, so let’s just all geek-out together and I’ll get all excited to share my organizational binder with you and you can at least pretend to be all excited along with me. *chuckle* No, honestly though, there are actually quite a few of you lovely Mamas who ask me about organizing our year and how I do it. Well, some of my organization changes over time but one thing remains – I ALWAYS have a Planning and Records Binder. In fact, I’ve saved mine from every year of our homeschool journey and they are such cool reminders of all…
Read the World – a few Living Books for North America
Hi friends, and happy weekend. It has been absolutely scorching here this week and will continue that way for the next several days. We have been SO blessed to swim in lots of friends’ pools! (Hooray for mooching everyone else’s backyard pools instead of having our own… ha!) So, we haven’t had tons of time for reading aloud, but we did fit in a few books this week for the North America week. I have to chuckle though because if I were to take photos of ALL the living books we’ve read set in North America – the post would be endless. We have read hundreds over the past couple…
Spiral Bound Notebooks VS. the Binder System
An entire post comparing Spiral Bound Notebooks to Binders might be a bit homeschool-geek-ish (at best) but, hey, it IS relevant. If you are going to commit to Notebooking, the style of Notebooking you use will make a huge difference on your year and potentially even on the success of the Notebooking itself. Often times methods gone wrong can kill the overall philosophy. (You know what I mean?) So, for those of you who have asked me what style of Notebooks I think is best – this post is for you. Well, actually, I don’t think I’ll answer which is best – I just plan to chat about the…
How we incorporated Notebooking into our Homeschool Year
I’m plugging away (just like so many of you, I’m sure) at planning for this coming year of homeschooling. *smile* And a BIG part of my planning has been contemplating how we will approach Notebooking this year. Notebooking has always been a part of our homeschool but in the past few years we have been much more intentional about it. Especially this past school year when we starting using Notebooking for a lot more of our ‘work’. To see what got us started last year, check out these – Here are some of my past Notebooking Posts: Simplifying and Enriching our Homeschool with Notebooking -Part 1 Simplifying…
