For my seventh grade son, I spent time researching curriculum options and ideas on simplycharlottemason.com. I found this site to be very helpful and their free curriculum guide on the site is terrific. The Charlotte Mason Method focuses on living books. The goal is to have the child read well written books on a subject or a person instead of text books or abstracts.
I have ordered the books, but now I just need to work with him on focusing and on documenting his work. I also need to work on documentation myself.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Returning to Homeschooling
Wow, I have really neglected this blog. At the start of this school year, all three children were back in school, as in public school. The older kids were at a charter school. Well, the two older ones decided to return to homeschooling, so we did.
Yasmeen is in 9th grade and Liam is in 7th grade. The youngest started kindergarten this year and she will continue in public school at least until the end of her kindergarten year.
I've been searching the web to decide how I best wanted to go about homeschooling the older two. One option was an online school called Florida Virtual School. I'm sure it is a wonderful option for many families, but just not for ours. One of Yasmeen's friends from school asked how she was being homeschooled if she wasn't doing it online. I loved her response of, "My mom's really good at this sort of thing." (Thank you sweetie!)
In my homeschool research, I decided to read more about the Charlotte Mason Method. Initially, I had been turned off by all of the mentions of Christianity. This method does seem to be one of the darlings of he Conservative Christian homeschool world. However, after researching Waldorf and being encouraged to keep an open mind, I resolved to reconsider Charlotte Mason Method and see it through my humanist, liberal lenses. Once I did that, I fell in love! This does seem to be a nice middle ground between Waldorf and Classical. In fact it was so similiar to Waldorf in many ways, that I began to wonder if others combined the two and yes many do! I found some beautiful blogs by mothers who combine these methods. My two favorites are serendipity.com and irienarrowpath.com
I will admit that serendipity.com is very, very Catholic and not my type of Catholic. My mother is very liberal in her politics and is a Mass going Catholic. So I was raised with a progressive interpretation of the Catholic faith. I left the faith as a child. It wasn't logical. However, I have lately enjoyed going to Mass with my oldest daughter, the atheist. She says she enjoys Mass too. We missed it this week though.
Yasmeen is in 9th grade and Liam is in 7th grade. The youngest started kindergarten this year and she will continue in public school at least until the end of her kindergarten year.
I've been searching the web to decide how I best wanted to go about homeschooling the older two. One option was an online school called Florida Virtual School. I'm sure it is a wonderful option for many families, but just not for ours. One of Yasmeen's friends from school asked how she was being homeschooled if she wasn't doing it online. I loved her response of, "My mom's really good at this sort of thing." (Thank you sweetie!)
In my homeschool research, I decided to read more about the Charlotte Mason Method. Initially, I had been turned off by all of the mentions of Christianity. This method does seem to be one of the darlings of he Conservative Christian homeschool world. However, after researching Waldorf and being encouraged to keep an open mind, I resolved to reconsider Charlotte Mason Method and see it through my humanist, liberal lenses. Once I did that, I fell in love! This does seem to be a nice middle ground between Waldorf and Classical. In fact it was so similiar to Waldorf in many ways, that I began to wonder if others combined the two and yes many do! I found some beautiful blogs by mothers who combine these methods. My two favorites are serendipity.com and irienarrowpath.com
I will admit that serendipity.com is very, very Catholic and not my type of Catholic. My mother is very liberal in her politics and is a Mass going Catholic. So I was raised with a progressive interpretation of the Catholic faith. I left the faith as a child. It wasn't logical. However, I have lately enjoyed going to Mass with my oldest daughter, the atheist. She says she enjoys Mass too. We missed it this week though.
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