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What is A Beautiful Homeschool, Anyway?

As I've embraced organization, scheduling and discipline over the last couple of years, I've found that the pendulum had swung too far away from joy. My heart's desire for our home, and our education, is for there to be Beauty:  unity, love, joy, peace, and, of course, a striving for acedemic excellence. I want to see my kids inspired to keep learning and exploring outside of appointed "learning times", I want them to grow closer to the Lord Jesus, to their parents, and to each-other as they grow into young adults.

In the spirit of unity, and to promote more joy in learning, I've decided to combine my older kids history, science and literature curricula into one.  I find that my kids are happier when they study and learn together. 

One program that fosters this perfectly, is the Sonlight program. It is very similar to the Amblesideonline Curriculum I've used for the past two years, but  Sonlight offers easier to follow teacher's guides,  and gives me the option of buying all the literature books I'll need at once, with free shipping, so I can just have them on hand(Ambleside had a lot of online books, and then I had to piece together what I needed from bookstores and the library.)

Sonlight has developed a core curriculum at stair-step levels, which can be taught(and modified) to as wide a spectrum of ages as 4 years apart, in each level. Then, you just let each child have their level-appropriate math/lang. arts, separately. So, with one child is in 7th grade, and one  in 4th, I had the option of  choosing year 4, 5, 6, or 7, and using whichever one I chose for both kids together. 

I chose the level based on the period of history and the science discipline that it covered. I needed one we hadn't already covered, and that would fit into my "classical plan" for our history rotation. Last year, my older child studied Medieval/Early Renaissance, and my second oldest one studied Late Renaissance, and then some Colonial Life and The Revolutionary War. The previous year we looked at the Ancients...  So, I chose a Sonlight year that covers Early Modern American History(something we have never covered). We will get to study the Westward Expansion, The Civil War, The Great Depression,  the World Wars, and much more....all through Literature!

For Science, I chose the year that offers Health, Medicine, and Human Anatomy. Mainly because we haven't studied it before(we've done Astronomy, Biology, and touched on Physics), and because our monthly co-op will have an emphasis on Human Anatomy this year, so it will be a good fit. 

I've also found a great writing/language arts program that is for 4-7th graders. It is the IEW program through Classical Conversations. I will be bringing both kids to a weekly meeting, and then continuing their lang. arts work at home.

I'll have my 6year old niece with me for Kindergarten, two days a week this year, so I'll use a Sonlight Core that will combine her readings and studies with my 4 year old's, modifying what I ask from the younger girl.

I'm going to attempt to make a looser schedule for this year. If we aren't able to accomplish all we need to, I'll tighten it up a bit, but I'm excited and hopeful about trying things a new way.

Will we achieve a  Beautiful Homeschool this year? What does a Beautiful Homeschool look like? Well, ...If I see more joy on my kids faces, than disappointment, if we have some "aha!" moments while we read and discuss, if my kids are inspired to look deeper into the subjects we are studying during their "free time",  if, at the end of the day, our relationships are strengthened and deepened, and not strained, then I will believe we have truly attained The Beautiful Homeschool! To that end, I will continue to research, plan and pray!

I'll keep you posted on how it's going!

Love,

Jen 
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Comments

Luke Holzmann said…
Thank you for sharing this. We talk about how fantastic Sonlight is for multiple ages and how to combine Cores, but it means so much more when we hear it straight from people who are doing it [smile]. Thank you!

~Luke
September 1, 2010 at 7:53 AM
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