Homeschooling

2015 Fall Arts and Crafts Fair

We have been homeschooling since 2012. Our first three years was through the public school system locally, using Calvert as it's curricula. And while that was not a bad thing, we decided starting in the fall of 2015 to leap out on our own. We have been very very happy with our choice, even though it was scary at first.

My husband, Vincent, and I have three children at this time. A daughter Lela (2006), a daughter Belle (2010), and a son Raphael (2011).

I will be blogging and vlogging as much as I can about homeschooling and our journey. My main agenda will be showing and helping fellow Jehovah's Witnesses homeschooling, inexpensively, yet have a complete and quality education, Of course centering around our Great God Jehovah!

Our day begins in "circle" time, where we go over the Daily Text, and sing a children's song from JW.org , we focus on one song monthly. Then Lela begins math, while I read a Kindergarten Story to the littles, from a public domain book, In the Child's World: Morning Talks and Stories for Kindergartens, Primary Schools and Homes. I printed it and had Office Max bind it.

You can see I put a hedgehog sticker over

what ever graphic was originally there

Then Belle starts Calendar time, which we use this Calendar Workbook, I printed it and put it in page protectors from Dollar Tree inside a binder, we use dry erase crayons on it. I used it with Lela and now am using it with Belle. For the holiday graphics, I just used stickers I had on hand and put over the graphics... no one is any the wiser! haha

The direction we are going in at this time, is we use Ray's Arithmetic for math, it can be free online, and you can print and bind it yourself. For us we bought the Mott's version very inexpensively, because it also comes with a parent/teacher guide.

What we mainly use for Language Arts

For Language Arts we use McGuffey Readers, again they are free online, but we bought Motts for the parent/teacher guide written by Ruth Beechick. We also use Primary and Secondary Language Lessons by Emma Serl. This year (2015) we are using Christian Light Education for learning script/cursive handwriting, next year we are looking into Pen Time or Spencerian. Then we read quality secular books as we can. I get a lot of ideas from OldFashionedEducation.com , I LOVE her science book suggestions, and Amblesideonline.org . I do not use ALL the books suggested by these two sites, as some go against my Christian conscience, but that doesn't mean you should follow my conscience, use your own Bible trained conscience on what you feel comfortable with or not. Many books though suggested by both these sites are just fine in my opinion for most Christians to read and enjoy. For the littles, we use 100 Easy Lessons to Teach Your Child to Read, and good quality secular story books-Richard Scarry, Beatrix Potter, McCloskey, etc etc etc. With Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, people either love it or hate it. My advice is, ask your local congregations literature counter for Learn to Read and Write booklet. The booklet will not be enough to teach your child completely how to read, but it does teach reading and writing in the same format as Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. So you can give our own booklet a test run to see if that would help your child or not. Just remember all children are different, and learn differently and at different ages. We love Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, but I take a very laid back approach and do not expect my children to be able to blend words on their own.. not for a very long time. We are well past lesson 50 and I still help blend and sound out a LOT. And that is ok. If we go through the entire book and they still can not read by themselves, we can go back either to the beginning or the first lesson where they need review and go back through the book all over again. You just have to be very patient with some children, and know learning to read will happen, it just may not be on your time table, really either way. My oldest taught herself to read with out any help at all from me! My two younger ones need my extra help. But, they are both coming along and eventually will be reading on their own when they are ready, and not a day sooner!

We have a few other secular books, for Science we like Berenstain Bears Big Book of Science, and Science in a Nutshell, as well as the books that OldFashionedEducation.com suggest. We just love the living books she suggest for science so far. We also like to observe nature as Amblesideonline.org suggest.

We use Rod and Staff for music right now. It is a Mennonite based curricula, so far in the music (and we are using the very basic elementary ones right now because I myself do not know music well and am learning along with my children) has not had any kind of religious doctrine inserted. We also pick and choose out of their, Rod and Staff, Health curricula.

Fruitage of the Spirit program

Other then that we use the broad range of materials that the Faithful and Discreet Slave provide for free to all of us.

We use our magazines particularly Awake for science, and health. We will use the evolution/creation book also for Science, as well as the video on creation. There is also health brochures like the Blood brochure and videos, creation/evolution brochure, etc etc that can also be used for health and science.

We also use our magazines like Awake and Watchtower for geography-look up on a globe or map any and all of the places mentioned. Of course you can also use the Goodlands booklet for geography as well. And we use these magazines for our Social Studies, as well as our year book, again the year book can really be Social Studies, Geography, and History all wrapped up in one study.

We use the Watchtower for History and Social Studies and Geography.

Bible Reading Schedule Year 2

We use the music on JW.org for teaching music and even other languages, like Spanish, by learning the simple children's songs in other languages.

I also have developed my own daily Bible reading program for the average first grade through around 6th or 7th grader. It has all the references cited that is on JW.org for songs, activities, and so forth for the children's section of JW.org. It is written to be completed in three years, and cycled through twice. (1st -6th grade) And then I plan on making something similar for teens hopefully. Which again would cite all the songs, activities and so forth on JW.org for teens to go along with the entire Bible reading, and be also in a 3 year cycle to be done twice, 7th-12th grade. I share this for free with any one who would like it. The only hang up is, I made it with freeware, called Kingsoft, and it will only open correctly using Kingsoft. I plan on buying a different program soon so I can create pdf's that any one can download and open. Then hopefully it will be more easy to share and more of you can use it.

I use the My Book of Bible Stories, Teach Your Children, My Bible Lessons, and Listen to God brochures and books directly for my younger children.

I also made a chart that we use to study the Fruitages of the Spirit. We focus on one Fruit of the Spirit each month. We read a scripture referring to the fruit, as well as sing a Kingdom song that goes along with the Fruit. In my planner pages you will see that referred to as FoS. It was also made and designed using Kingsoft, but I am always happy to share that for free as well.

Front cover of my 7 Step Planner

I plan our days using Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus free 7 step planner. I did create some of my own pages, such as my 2 page spread for daily lesson plans. Again though I used Kingsoft, any one who would like them, I will gladly send them to you. I also did make up a similar one page planning page for those with only one child. However, I will try to do them with a better program later as well. A side note to this, Tina is also a fellow sister.

I use what is commonly referred to as a loop scheduling system. So while some subjects are covered daily, others are in a loop, today I will do art, tomorrow I will do music, today we will make sure to do a Bible Lesson from the Brochure, and tomorrow we will do a lesson from the Listen to God Brochure. Today Lela may do a lesson from Emma Serl's Primary Language Lessons, and tomorrow could be a lesson from a McGuffey Reader. However, I do read daily to Belle and RJ from the My Book of Bible Stories, and I do daily Bible reading with Lela. Daily Text and our children's kingdom song every day. Much of the other material can change on a dime and is not required daily in my schedule, but more of we aim for the subject or text to be used at least weekly or more depending.

For now, in my endeavor to help others learn and gain confidence to homeschool themselves, I will be posting our daily planner photos. You will notice in my first photos, the before the day was complete and after the day was complete, in those photos you will see that we do not always do EVERY thing that I planned. I use Frixion pens to erase what doesn't end up happening. and I sometimes ADD things that we decided to just do with out planning. I do not fill in the date at the top of each page til we are actually sitting down to accomplish the days lessons. That way, if things can change where we may not get to school that day, I don't want to feel like we have to make it up or that we are behind etc. So this gives you a basic run down of what you may be reading regarding homeschooling in our life.

My hopes are that this can encourage you, that you too can give a quality education, with in a reasonable budget, with theocratic education as the center of your teaching and learning. If you are a fellow Witness with a blog or vlog about homeschooling that you think my readers could benefit from, please share and I will review and add to my blog/vlog list of resources. You may also follow my youtube.com channel, I will have some of my own videos there, which will hopefully start to be updated more soon, as well as being subscribed to other vloggers that I feel are beneficial. I try to keep my subscriptions on youtube.com mainly towards other sisters (JW) who homeschool. I named my youtube channel, Golden Prairie Academy, because in Kansas when you register to homeschool, you are actually registering as a legal unaccredited private school, which requires a name. So after much thought, Golden Prairie Academy was settled on as the name.