Nature Study

This year, rather than doing a Sonlight Science, Annie is going to pursue nature study, recording her findings in a nature journal, doing a little research to find out more about our findings and then publishing her findings in her own nature blog.

We started last week by raising some monarch caterpillars. Today we went to a local park to see what we could find. Here are a few things:

A little tiny bug that looked like a leaf. We will try to identify it tomorrow. Annie sketched this in her notebook and tomorrow will also color it.

Millipede

White fuzzy looking fungus

Teeny frog. You can spot him on the right side of the light colored piece of bark by the green leaves.

Another fungus. Some type of mushroom?

First day of school!

Today was our official first day of school. We have a tradition of photographing the first day. Usually we gather all the kids together for a group shot. Since Tommy is now attending school and they started last week, he got his own picture (but won't let me post it). So I went ahead and shot the other two individual pictures as well. Here they are:

After spending much time designing schedules and courses of studiy we finally put it to the test! The hardest part was getting up at 8:00. Although one of the beauties of homeschooling is getting to sleep in, sleeping til 10:00 is not going to happen this year! I was tired of still schooling at 5:00 because we got started so late. So this year that's going to change. The other change is having an order to our day. In the past they could work on whatever they wanted to work on first but I found tthat we would "forget" to do things that way or "save" our least favorite things to the end of the day.

So the plan this year (so far, I'm sure we'll tweak it as the week progresses) is as follows [for Timothy. Annie's schedule is somewhat different]:

8:30 Bible, CC Review

9:00 Math

10:00 Writing/Grammar

11:00 History

11:30 Science

12:00 Lunch

1:00 Piano

1:30 Reading

2:00 Electives (Logic, Music & Art appreciation)

I made an excel spreadsheet for each child and it's in a page protector so they can check things off or at least refer to it. I'm trying to have them rely less on me and more on their own ability to self govern. Let's see how it goes!