A Chosen Path
Aug 12th, 2006 by lvbirders
After much thought and soul searching, lots of erasing and moving around on paper, I have chosen a path to follow as we begin our more formal studies at the end of the month. As Josh’s older sister is a junior at a local high school, it is easier to work the same time frame for our studies to coordinate with her schedule.
During the summer learning still goes on but in a more relaxed way. This summer Josh has been having fun with a computer game he has had for awhile called The Age of Empires, The Conquerers. We have been doing much discussion about various civilizations, military campaigns, famous people etc. He has also been following many current events stories which has led to much discussion. And as I have mentioned in previous posts, we had our Weekly Wall for the beginning part of the summer.
As Josh is 12 now, I have been focusing moving him to working more independently during our formal/organized time periods. He is a very independent learner when it comes to following his own interests during his own free time, so hopefully it will be a smooth transition.
I have broken up his fields of study into two daily categories, Discipline and Discovery. I read these terms a few years ago from a post by Willa of Every Waking Hour and felt they were perfect for what I was envisioning.
Discipline will include Math, English, Myths/Bible (MB), Citizenship/Values/Character (CVC)
Discovery will include Science, History - American/World, Current Events, Geography, Foreign Language
He will have Conference Studies with me first thing which will include his Discipline Fields. He will then move on to his Scholar Studies directly after where he will focus on his Discovery Fields independently.
I have also broken things down into a 5 day schedule. We generally take time off for birding in the fall and I often feel something gets lost or off track. This should help as we will just pick up on the next day from wherever we left off. Daily schedules will look something like this:
Conference Studies-
Day 1
Math - skills, biography of a mathematician
English - Copywork, dictation/spelling
CVC and MB
Day 2
Math - skills, How Math Works
English - dictation/grammar
CVC and MB
Day 3
Math - skills, economics
English - dictation/diagramming
CVC and MB
Day 4
Math - skills, picture books, fiction novel
English - writing process
CVC and MB
Scholar Studies
Days 1-4
- Science and American/World History he will do daily and rotate through writing written narrations on one each day.
- Foreign Language - vocab written, 3-5 new words
daily using them throughout the day.
- Current Events - oral discussion
Written narration ideas -
- timelines
- stating a question reading brought to mind
- answering a question (mom’s or your own - see previous post)
- written documentation page
- paragraph retelling what read in your own words
- images/pictures with a sentence or two caption
- narrations grouped for the week in a “newspaper” format or as a power point presentation
Lunch We will rotate reading poetry and listening to composer music daily during this time.
Afternoon will be time for our Literature Read Aloud as well as picture books in connection with Discovery Studies and will also include his own free time.
Day 5
Fine Arts Day
CVC and MB
Shakespeare, Plutarch, Composer, Artist, Nature Study, Recorder/Hymn/Folksong
For Composer and Artist we tend to follow Ambleside Online. Poetry we will pick on our own. For Poetry and Artist he will pick a poem and a painting each week. He will do written narration on the artist and poet for each term as well as oral narrations of the weekly paintings and poems. He will memorize a poem per term and use his weekly poem for copywork one day. For Composer I will be having him start a notebook which will be divided into periods; ie Baroque, Romantic. Some things to include will be: dates (birth/death), important places (maps), notes from lsitening selections, photos/sketches, quotes, biography, poetry, listing of works etc.
For Plutarch he will be completing a timeline of Plutarch’s Lives listing for each man we study: name, time period/dates, Greek/Roman etc
This schedule I hope will allow us a combination of freedom and structure that seems to work for us.
In my next post I’ll tell you about some of the books and such we have chosen to use as well as what I decided to do about our Weekly Wall.
That sounds like a great plan. I like the idea of discipline/discovery and conference/scolar time. We are doing some similar things, just not quite as well delineated as you guys have it. This year, with JBug starting K and with an infant and 2.5yo to deal with, it should be quite diffent, to say the least!
I am fascinated by the way you conceptualize your home schooling. This is terrific.:-)
Thanks for your comment. I don’t know the variety of the sunflowers Little Man planted. I think it’s a common variety, which did well because we’ve been getting so much rain.
Good grief, I think I should spell-check my comments before I post them. Yes, I is a homeschool teachur. LOL!
[…] Our homeschool studies are going very well. Our Chosen Path is working out so well for both Josh and I. He is doing his “independent studies” (he prefered this name to scholar studies lol) after we have finished our discipline subjects (english, math and character/virtue). He read/studied about The Byzantine Empire with Constantine for World History and has now moved on to Russian History. For American History he is reading about the period of the 1960s as he is interested in the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and JFK. For science I found this great biology site as Josh is contemplating studying Wildlife Biology in college. For english we are using an old Voyages to English textbook we had to further knowledge in grammar and diagramming. Math has been fun as each day he practices skills but we also add “living math” in the form of fiction books (right now we are reading The Phantom Tollbooth), bios, and life skills. For read aloud, we just finished, The Master Puppeteer by Katherine Paterson. What a fantastic book! Josh begged me each day to keep reading and thought I was an ogre to prolong it out to “savor” the story lol. Our character/virtue studies have been going so well I am glad I added them in. We are using The Book of Virtues by William J. Bennet as well as reading myths and Bible stories. We decided to study the Shakespeare play, Twelfth Night, as my daughter’s high school will be performing it this fall. After reading a retelling of it in our favorite book, Tales from Shakespeare by Tina Packer, we are really looking forward to seeing this play and anticipating the humor that is involved. […]
I love the discipline/discovery idea. We are only at first grade, but I think that this could apply! I am going to think on this and see how I can make it work even for us.
Could I post a link to this on my blog? It is an awesome idea and I would love to share it.
~christa~
Christa,
Thanks for visiting. Yes please do share a link to the post. That’s why I blog. Maybe something we do will help another homeschooler in some way. I know I get some of my own come ideas from reading other homeschooling moms’ blogs. As I mentioned in the post about the discipline/discovery, I read those terms from another mom and adapted them to our sutdies just as you are thinking of doing. Your own blog is wonderful. I loved your graphics!