Our Homeschool Year 2018-2019

Sooo, since we just finished up our school year, I suddenly have more time to write, and I have homeschooling on the brain (can’t wait to start planning next year, anyone with me??). So you might just see lots of posts on the topic for a few days. Or maybe just this one and the last one and then I’ll burn out and go into hibernation again for another five months. Time will tell.

Anyway, looking back on our school year, I’m feeling pretty good about what we did. We got into a good groove and learned a lot. We have stumbled into the classical method of homeschooling, and we memorized the heck out of stuff this year!! We did quite a bit of poetry memorization and John 1, along with lots of memory work from our co-op. Here’s how our year went, in a nutshell:

We participated in a Catholic Schoolhouse (CSH) co-op again this year. We found this co-op halfway through the year last year, and immediately switched from our local Classical Conversations group to the farther-away-but-so-worth-the-drive CSH, which is also a classical program. We did the whole year with CSH this year and I absolutely loved it. It’s great for the kids to be able to be in a classroom with other kids and be taught by other adults for one day a week. They have music instruction (chorus and recorder this year), art class, and science class, so even if I’m not on the ball and putting together art projects and science experiments at home, I know they will at least get to have these things at co-op. The history focus this year was ancients through the Middle Ages and the girls memorized a lot of stuff for our timeline. They even memorized all the books of the Bible, including which councils determined which testaments and in what years.  I learned so much with them, and we had lots of fun. CSH has a program where the kids who memorize all of the memory work for the year (they get tested quarterly by one of the tutors) get named “Super Scholars,” get recognized at the end of year show, and get a t-shirt and a trophy. My girls worked hard to earn the honor!

Here are a few other CSH moments from the year:

^^End-of-year rocket launch^^

Every Tuesday we drove an hour to our CSH co-op, then did a Latin class afterwards (we used Our Roman Roots this year), taught by another mom, then would do some sort of field trip or play time with some friends in between Latin class and our parish’s catechism classes (our parish is in the same town as our CSH co-op). We have lots of great memories of these Tuesday afternoons.

At home, we continued with some of the same things that had been working in previous years, such as Catholic Heritage Curricula for spelling, Singapore for math, and All About Reading for reading. The older girls read great books like Mara, Daughter of the Nile, The Hobbit, The Golden Goblet, Because of Winn Dixie, and many others. We did lots of read alouds too, most recently Snow and Rose and  the Wilderking Trilogy (which was amazing!!).

We sometimes added in extra worksheets with fun themes for practice. Math facts are a frequent focus for extra practice for us, so an under-the-sea themed multiplication worksheet from Education.com was fun to do after we got back from our trip to Florida and Sea World as a nice little way to ease back into school, and math in particular, after a vacation. (There is a link to the worksheet we used below, and you can check out their other multiplication games and resources here. I think we’ll be using some of them for summer practice.)

multiplication_under the sea

Some things were different than in years past.

We started a weekly holy hour, where I alternated taking one girl with me and then taking her out to lunch afterwards. It was a wonderful chance to spend some on-on-one time with each of them.

Curriculum changes this year included using The Story of Civilization from Tan Books for our history spine. We really loved it. It matched up well with the history work we did in CSH. Previously we had used The Story of the World, but we like TSoC much better. We used lots of mix and match living books for science to cover the topics of botany, chemistry, astronomy, and light and sound. We got a couple of boxes from MEL Science when we were doing our chemistry quarter, and had fun doing some of those experiments.

We went back to Seton for handwriting/cursive (we’ve switched around with other handwriting books for the past few years). I added in IEW for writing and The Good and the Beautiful for creative writing and typing for Miss. We used Seton and the Baltimore Catechism for religion. Sis used St. Joseph First Communion Catechism to prepare for her First Holy Communion.

We studied Europe and Asia in geography. I forgot about our fun with Draw the USA last year, so we didn’t do Draw Europe until the end of the school year and didn’t have time to draw Asia. But Europe was fun and turned out great!

We learned a lot about various European and Asian countries (and memorized all of them). I really think geography is my favorite subject to teach. We had cooking projects to go along with our geography studies too:

^Slovakian Bryndzové halušky – potato dumplings with sheep cheese and roasted bacon^

^Making traditional Hungarian goulash^

^French Croque Monsieur and Niçoise salad (from her Raddish box)^ 

We did art projects:

We went on field trips:

My husband taught gym class:

The girls did piano, ballet and tap, and knitting as extracurricular activities:

We did some other random stuff too. We had poetry tea times, took nature walks, and played board games (yes, during school time!).

^We did a bit of ice dancing during this nature walk^

We even dissected owl pellets:

And that’s snapshot into what we did this year.

Of course, I’m not showing you the photos of the days that we all melted down, no one wanted to work, the girls whined, and I was a jerk. I actually don’t generally take photos of those days, I guess. We did have those too. Sometimes homeschooling is hard. BUT, it is my fervent hope (and firm belief!) that these moments here, the photo-worthy together-times, will be the more memorable ones. We seem to have more of these anyway.

It was a really good year.