September

"Let them have tales of the imagination, scenes laid out in other lands and other times, heroic adventures, hairbreadth escapes, delicious fairy tales in which they are never roughly pulled up by the impossible--even where all is impossible, and they know it, and yet believe."

-Charlotte Mason

As you can tell, we are squeezing out the very last drops of summer. We finally finished our lovely tissue paper lanterns that we will use for our Christmas Lantern Walk around Green Lake in Seattle. If anyone is interested in the instructions for this pretty lantern click here. I'll post some more pictures of the lantern on my Flickr account (on my sidebar) in case you might like to see it a little better. It was so easy for Havah to make, (a little time consuming), and brings her little "fairy self "out in full force. Just add a flowy gown and voila. Isn't it sad how camera shy she is? Poor thing.

So we are starting school today and our classroom is ready and waiting. For anyone who might be curious as to what we are using for our curriculum this year, here is a brief rundown.

Sonlight Introduction to World History, Year 2, which includes Bible and literature study.

For character development we will be using Character Sketches.

For Science we will use Sonlight's Science Program for years Pre-K and 2 and Steve Spangler's Science Experiments.

Language arts program is a combination of Sonlight's Year 2 Language Arts as well as a Daily Oral Language program from Frank Schaffer. Henry will continue with Explode the Code - Books A, B and C as well as "Day by Day Pre-School".

Horizon's Spelling and Vocabulary year 2 and Spell Quizzer

Horizon's Math year 2 and Math Forum for Pre-Kindergarten

For our art study we will use Drawing with Children.

On another note, Jon and I are slowly learning more about the Charlotte Mason method of homeschooling, which in a nutshell is the method of teaching based on the Liberal Arts. Her goal being to bring a wide variety of meaningful subjects to the children via literature, masterpiece artwork, poetry, and various other humanities. Along with these inspirational additions the core subjects are in no way neglected but are approached in a way that will nurture their love of learning. I am slowly learning more about this one-hundred-plus year old method of teaching, and this year we will be adopting a few of her methods into our classroom.

One of the things that first grabbed my attention was wasting our childrens' time with "Twaddle". An example of this could be anything from second rate literature to highly spiced adventures of poor quality. It is also defined as "undervaluing the intelligence of a child". {{This is me, cringing.}}

One of my favorite quotes from Charlotte Mason: “Children must grow up upon the best. There must never be a period in their lives when they are allowed to read or listen to twaddle or reading-made-easy. There is never a time when they are unequal to worthy thoughts, well put; inspiring tales, well told.”

There are countless blogs and websites devoted to this method of learning. I am finding this, this, this and this website so very helpful, in case anyone is interested.

We are excited about being back in school and after the initial period of rediscovering our routine and study habits, we are looking forward to a wonderful year of learning together.

I hope your September is off to a wonderful start!