Our Book Library

I have been slowly scanning in our library of books into an app that allows us to easily see the books we have and allows us to loan books while marking who we loaned the book to. It's a great way to share our resources we have been so blessed with over the years.

CJ earned Memory Master for Cycle 1!

We moved to Nairobi, Kenya in October 2016 where we continued homeschooling and using Classical Conversations. We knew there was a CC co-op that met weekly on Mondays and quickly became part of the group. I helped teach the afternoon Essentials portion, using the IEW Ancient Times themed book. CJ worked hard and mastered his Memory Master testing with the Director and Naomi joined in joyfully throughout weeks and weeks of memory work songs and repetition. CJ and Naomi also completed lapbooks corresponding to Cycle 1 made by "A Journey Through Learning". It has been an incredible year! We are gearing up for a very big change in our schooling as we have enrolled the kids at the International School of Kenya for the upcoming school year. We will take it one semester at a time, and continue reviewing the current CC cycle. CJ will be entering 4th grade and Naomi Kindergarten. It feels like homeschool is our "way of being" now that we're 5 years into it. Although we won't be full time homeschoolers starting in August, I hope to continue cultivating an environment where we enjoy learning, creating and playing together as a family.

Art

We love art. We've used private instructors, K12 art classes, a book entitled "Drawing with Children" and a set of wonderfully set up kits that guide the artist through replicating famous pieces of art. The kits are called "Master Kitz". CJ has completed 6 of them. Here are some of his finished pieces.

The trivium model through highschool

One thing I've learned in life is that planning ahead is good and necessary, but plans have to be fluid because life happens and if we don't allow ourselves some flexibility in our plans then we may miss out on some very important and life giving adventures. We've said from the very beginning of our homeschooling adventure that we are taking it one year at a time. I don't know how long we'll continue with homeschooling, but I wanted to figure out a "plan" that would take us through high school. I like having a road map. But I know that, at least in my life, road maps are often looked at once or twice and then tossed. We try and find our way and go towards other interesting things instead of following the "plan". I realize that we probably won't follow this plan exactly, but I put it together based on what I have seen work with other families and what I have read about in Susan Wise Bauer's book "A Well Trained Mind". This guide is based on CJ's current levels in Math and Reading, and could easily be adapted as needed for children at different levels. One reason the classical method has been really nice for me as I learn how to help my kids learn is that it divides learning into 3 phases which are roughly related to ages, as opposed to specific goals to be met at certain ages.

Classical Conversations at home

Since we have been living in Malawi, where there is no Classical Conversations community with which to do our community days we've been taking a slightly different approach to using it as a "spine" for our classical learning. We review Cycles 1-3 throughout the year (we already went through each Cycle while in a community back in North Carolina). I've put together a schedule that works for us.

We correspond our "read aloud" time to a different time period in history every day of the week. Here are some of the favorites:

Here is our current weekly schedule:

Curriculum and life update

We have been living in Malawi, Africa for over a year now!! My husband is working on a USAID contract working with early grade literacy in the country. We have continued using Classical Conversations at home, and enjoy a lovely home-school cooperative here in Lilongwe that meets once a month. I teach Spanish, writing and ballet classes to small groups. It has been a great adventure. CJ has a fabulous piano instructor that comes to the house 3 times per week, an art instructor that comes to the house once a week, swimming at our neighbors pool with an instructor and karate at a local school. We live on a compound with 6 other kids, so having other kids around to make forts with, build things, collect snails and lizards, climb trees and generally just be kids has not been a problem at all. The kids here on the compound mainly only speak Chichewa. CJ and Naomi only speak a little but they all somehow communicate flawlessly. I wanted to update this site with a curriculum guide I put together. We get an amazing education allowance through my husband's work, which has allowed me to buy materials we never could afford before. Our favorite part of the day continues to be an hour or more of me reading aloud to CJ and Naomi while they build with Legos, draw or just play quietly. We have a wonderful collection of books we have been able to buy with our education allowance, which is especially needed here as there are no libraries in Malawi. This is a very brief description of what we have used during the grammar stage with CJ since 2012: Curriculum Overview for the Grammar Stage of Learning (ages 4-9)

Spanish counting resource

I've been making lots of Spanish resources lately for some of the Spanish classes I teach and thought I'd share some of the links I have found useful. This link takes you to printable flashcards of numbers 1-100 (I printed and laminated them): http://www.easynotecards.com/print_cards/372.

The Classical model... a visual

This diagram helps visualize what the Classical Education model is. I liked this visual and got it from this post: http://family.yourway.net/what-is-a-classical-christian-education/ Here's a snip from her post: While the stages roughly conform to the elementary (grammar), middle school (dialectic) and high school (rhetoric) levels in the education model, we all actually progress through these three stages naturally whenever we want to master a new subject. For example, if you’re learning to cook, you must first define the kitchen tools, terms and measurements used in recipes. Then, you begin to gain an understanding for why recipes are written in certain orders — why we mix the dry ingredients separately from the wet ingredients when making muffins, for example. And finally, you’re able to create your own recipes and teach others to cook. For more details on the model of Classical education I'd recommend going to the link above because she does a great job explaining the stages and how it works in her home!

Bilingual Homeschool Group

I facilitated a Spanish geography class during the "Home-school Learning Lab" at our library today. What a great group! Seriously, we are lucky to have such a wonderful community right here. This super awesome library is Durham County East Regional and the Children's librarian, Tanika schedules and coordinates the Home-school Learning Lab. It is every Thursday 9:30-10:30. They have had classes on gardening, composting, fruit anatomy, Math riddles, library scavenger hunts and other fun things! I usually leave CJ in the group alone as I chase Naomi around the library during the hour. We usually have a little over a dozen students ranging from age 5 through high-school age. We had a lot of interest in starting a bilingual home-school group here in Durham, so I started a yahoo group just now called Bilingual Home-school and uploaded a few bilingual workbooks I've made you can access once you join the group :) If you would like to join the group and can't find it by searching yahoo groups: bilingual homeschool Durham NC, send me an email at otanna@gmail.com and I'll send you an invite!

English/Spanish World Map

We do geography on a weekly basis through Classical Conversations. One thing we try and incorporate to our home-school days is tracing and free-hand drawing the world map. I just made a Spanish version of the world map we've been using and am super excited about it. I also made a blank template with just the latitude lines for practice drawing the map free-hand in the correct placement on the map. Here is a picture of the Spanish map. I uploaded the pdf file to Teachers pay Teachers thinking many other educators may find this helpful in their classrooms/homes. I have the maps in sheet protectors on our school desk for tracing with white board crayons. I am so excited about this :)

Quizlet

Quizlet.com is an amazing resource. It is a place to search for and make your own virtual flashcards. You can then play speed games and/or just use the cards like flashcards to learn the material. I've been translating the cycle 2 memory work for English, Latin and Science for this school year and have been putting the sets on Quizlet. CJ's profile name is warriorknights.

CC Cycle 2 Spanish- Bilingual Reading Comprehension

In effort to blend our Spanish learning with the weekly CC memory work, I have matched pages from our "Bilingual Reading Comprehension" workbook with corresponding topics from each week for cycle 2. I'll be using this with our CC community class I'll be teaching in the afternoon session after our Foundations morning.

CC Cycle 2 week #	CC subject that the reading comprehension worksheet loosely relates to for the week	Title of worksheet/pg numbers	Page number English/Spanish
1	Science	Deserts	145/146
2	Geography	The Earth, land and water	141/142
3	Science	We eat leaves	79/80
4	English	Names	53/54
5	Science	Monarch Butterflies	95/96
6	English	Who lives in your house?	97/98
7	Science	Stars	113/114
8	Science	A Fall Day	65/66
9	English	Our Community	105/106
10	Science	Months of the Year	83/84
11	Science	Pilots	129/130
12	English	Taking Turns	109/110

Curriculum 2013-2014

Our curriculum for the upcoming school year, 2013-2014 includes:

The guide for Classical Conversations. This is our "CC" work. CJ memorized a huge portion of the memory work last year, I was amazed to say the least.  It is exciting to learn so much right alongside him.  We are part of the North Raleigh Community, this will be our second year with the group. We definitely wouldn't be homeschooling right now if it wasn't for the CC community. Our highlights from last year were the weekly presentations. CJ presented on a variety of topics from "how to make a paper airplane" (his very first presentation in class) to a story he wrote about "Wormy", a little inch worm that lived a very short but eventful life with CJ. CC officially takes up 24 weeks of the year, all the work is divided up into the 24 weeks.

We will try and read through this novel before September since the history covered in this book overlaps with history we learned in Cycle 1 of CC.

This book will bring us through the same time period of history we'll be studying in Cycle 2 of CC.

This version of The Odyssey is right at CJ's reading level. The writing is size 14 or 16 font, it looks to me and there is a nice space between lines so it's not too daunting for CJ. Right now we're reading it during family story time in the evenings.
 
The past year I did a lot of printing math from edhelper.com and by February he was already adding double digits with carrying and subtracting with borrowing. He got really good at general addition and subtraction problems and started memorizing skip counting songs through CC.  Then I got scared we were moving "too fast" with math and wanted to make sure I wasn't missing "lessons" I should be doing. I got the Saxon Math 1 and 2 student workbooks and plan on going through them with CJ to make sure we haven't "missed" any essential math lessons. It will give me peace of mind that he is grasping the concepts and if he speeds through these great and if we have to take our time with them, that is fine too. Saxon has a lot of repetition to make sure they've mastered the task and has a formal assessment, with recording form for every lesson. This past year we used some Singapore Math workbooks level 1b and some Math U See. We'll see how he likes Saxon, we may go back to Singapore if it's not a good fit.

We did a few lessons from this book last year. Each lesson is simple and quick (can complete in a few minutes a day).  Many of CJ's friends from CC use this book as well and have memorized the poems in the lessons, so CJ asked me to get this book so he could be like his friends who knew all the cool poems :)

CJ completed the student book level 3 this past year using Jolly Phonics. He loved the student book and the fun characters. So I'm going to get the grammar workbook and got this dictionary for his desk.



We started this book this past year but didn't get very far in it. We'll continue it and use bilingual books, songs and flashcards as our Spanish for the year.

We've been reading this Bible first thing in school since Easter 2013, when we gave this to CJ.

We got this book last year and found it very user-friendly and a nice reference for the history and geography covered in CC.
CJ has a blank journal with drawing and writing space, I plan on having him write entries weekly.
For Cursive practice he'll be completing his second Prescripts workbook, writing words and sentences this year (last year he completed the letters/drawing lessons Prescripts workbook).

We'll try and keep a field trip journal/log and start a science experiment log.

Ready for a great year!!!!

Field trip to Mexico

We spent the month of May in California with Grandma, Grandpa and Uncle Dan. One of CJ's highlights was spending a day in second grade with his buddy Chad. We help support Chad's education throughout the year and CJ and Chad have been exchanging letters this past year. CJ also gave a presentations IN SPANISH to his class, showing them how to make paper airplanes.

Cycle 1 End of the Year Museum

We turned the school room into a little museum to show Daddy everything we learned during the CC school year. CJ completed 4 lapbooks, made his own "sistene chapel" under a table and had lots of art to share.