Recovering

So my husband, the Pastor, is on his way to becoming the Reverend, and we all had to endure another extended absence for school stuff.  Well, the children and I had to endure - he got to stay at a luxury retreat centre and phone me periodically to tell me about the deer walking across the lawn and the geese on the secluded pond.  The family who stayed home and kept the fires burning ate a lot of prepared meals from the freezer and dealt with several days of no internet, but at least we didn't have a baby with the chickenpox like the last time he went away for school.

Small mercies.

Anyway, he came back safely to us and that's the last 'away for school' trip!  Now all of his work can get done at home.

Pretty much as soon as he returned I needed a break.  There's something about not sleeping well when your partner is absent while also parenting that drains you in a way nothing else does.  I feel as if only now, a few weeks later, I'm really rested and recovered.  Now it's sort of spring.  Sort of.  There are bulbs up in my new garden bed and garlic poking through the ground in one of the raised beds.  A new chipmunk has moved in to the yard, heedless of the fate of his predecessor.  I'm sure the cats will enjoy that.  The snow is melting and showcasing all the toys children brought outside to play with over the past months.  I spend a significant amount of time picking up garbage outside the other day - as soon as the snow starts to go you see all sorts of bits of things on the lawn.

Anyway.  Yay, it's spring.  And here we are, starting to get ready for ordination.

Minimalist Homeschool

We weren't sure what to do with the boy.  Our homeschool was still technically in kindergarten and he was liking that, but he seemed ready for more.  For one thing, he was asking a lot of questions about spelling and letters and writing, and he has always been interested in science and math.  I just felt like we could give him more.  And so we jump started our grade one plans, but first we had to make them.

I thought I would go for a curriculum in a box.  I'm not a huge fan of planning out every detail because so many things look good to me and I don't know if I'm picking the BEST book.  But the curricula are expensive, so I kept looking.

What did we need to have?  I kept paring down until I developed the minimalist homeschool.  It consists of a phonics program, a math program and a history/geography program.  For phonics I chose Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons.  Simple.  Long lasting.  Can be used with more children.  Then for history and geography we picked Story of the World.  One book, don't need to do crafts.  Math is Abeka.

These three things are the core of our homeschool right now.  We decided to introduce one at a time and we started with phonics.  After a few weeks of that we added history.  We have yet to add math.  It's going really well.  The boy loves both of the books; we do phonics first and try to do a lesson a day and then we read a section of Story of the World and talk about it.  If there is an easy activity I might do that.  We probably spend about half an hour on it right now but once we add math who knows.