Edie Wadsworth

Again, O Heavenly Father,

You have granted me strength to rise to the tasks of the day.

I thank You for Your mercy and love.   Without Your power upholding me I should be unable to live.

Give me a spirit of gratitude for all Your gifts.

Above all, dear Father, keep me grateful

for the gift of forgiveness of all my sins through the merits of Jesus Christ, Your Son and my Savior.

Grant that whatever need, whatever sorrow beset my day,

my faith in this forgiveness may remain steadfast and firm.

Let no grief of pain, no doubt or gloom,  come between me and the certainty of Your love.

If  it is Your purpose to try me this day with difficulties for the body or the heart,

grant that I may, by Your spirit,  conquer in this trial and hold fast to Your mercy,

knowing that the sufferings of this time are not worthy to be compared with the glory You have in store for me.

Make Your Word my joy,

Your counsel my guide,

Your presence my peace.

In Jesus Christ, Your only Son and my Savior.   Amen

If you’re new here and visiting from Bring the Rain or from Heart of the Matter, welcome.   You can visit more of my homeschool links here or find out why in the world we ever decided to homeschool in the first place here.  We use the classical model with a blend of The Well Trained Mind, Charlotte Mason and the Thomas Jefferson Education.

I have an unnatural love for books.

When I moved from my beloved suburban house with the garage turned schoolroom to the lakehouse {with no schoolroom}, the movers commented more than once that they had never moved anyone with so many books.   I tried to pare our library down a little but I have a very difficult time parting with books.  I want my own copy and I want it in the flesh and I don’t want to get rid of it.   Period.   It’s makes curriculum shopping my favorite activity of the year.   I want to use EVERY possible program and book.  I want to try My Father’s World and Tapesty of Grace and Sonlight and Calvert.    And I would except that I don’t want someone telling me exactly what to do because I want to decide what books we read and what passages we memorize and how long we spend on The Renaissance.   I want to be in charge of the books.

Hello Mr. UPS man, my name is Edie and I love books.

So this year we will continue on our classical homeschooling journey using a mish-mash, a hodge-podge of books and programs.  For my own teacher-training, I’ve been reading The Seven Laws of Teaching by Milton. I’ve gleaned a few pearls from it and it has reinforced some things I read in A Thomas Jefferson Education.

Namely, that you can’t teach anyone anything.

You can only motivate and inspire  them to learn.   I pray I’ll do more inspiring and less requiring this year.

My 8 and 9 year old are both doing 4th-ish grade and we’re in our third year of following the basic outline laid out in The Well-Trained Mind. I have tweaked our program every year to find what works perfect for us.  I finally feel like I kinda-sorta know what I’m doing.  Kinda.  Sorta.

Here’s what we’re using:

New for Us:

1.  Writing–Institute for Excellence in Writing by Andrew Pudewa

I bought the parent CD’s and am about half way through them.  I love this program already.  And I especially love that we will use the content for writing from our history and science and literature books, which will just enforce the things we’re already learning.   Although we don’t start our formal lessons until next week, we practiced the key word outline a few days ago and my reluctant writer said,  “I love writing now mom.”   Wow.   I hope that continues.

2.  Apologia Science Exploring Creation

We tried out the Astronomy book last semester and loved it.   We’re doing chapter one of the Human Anatomy book (cell structure and function) and then moving on to Zoology I—Flying Creatures of the 5th day.   We also plan to memorize Psalm 104 which goes along well with the learning about God’s creation.

3.  Bible—A Bible History by Concordia Publishing House

We have previously used Veritas Press and have completed Genesis Through Joshua and the Life of Jesus.   This year we plan to do Judges through Malachi from the Bible History book and then memorize Luther’s small catechism for the Lord’s prayer.  We will listen together to teaching on the articles of the Lord’s Prayer beginning with the first petition on IssuesEtc.  We also will memorize the books of the Old Testament and possibly the baptism catechism.   In preparation for teaching my girls from this portion of the Old Testament, I’m working my way through this series of wonderful lectures from iTunes university.    For any christian interested in a Christ centered Old Testament class, this one is phenomenal and of course, you can listen at your leisure.   I highly recommend it.  You can find it by opening iTunes university {from the main menu of iTunes} and searching “Concordia Old Testament”.   It consists of video lectures that span Genesis to Malachi.

What we’re still using:

4.  Saxon 4/5

We have a few lessons to finish from book 3 and we’ve been working on flash cards for multiplication.  I bought the DIVE CD and hope my girls can learn to be a bit more independent with math.  Neither of my girls is math minded so we will continue to look for ways to make math come alive.   We’re currently accepting any and all suggestions.

5.  History–Story of the World 3  Early Modern Times

We have about 6 weeks of Story of the World 2 to finish beginning with The Reformation/Renaissance.   I love Story of the World.   Susan Wise Bauer inspires me and has been my constant companion during my homeschooling journey whether from her history books or her books on education.   I recently came across these set of videos from her own homeschool and they were so comforting to me.   She’s washing the dishes while she does dictation with her son or she’s making mac and cheese before she sends her teenagers off to rest time.    I know, amazing isn’t it?   She requires ‘rest’ time  even for her teens.   I consider her my mentor, my teacher—-the master of all things homeschooling—and her school doesn’t look that different from mine.    At least at a glance.  I really appreciated that look into her world.

6.  Grammar–Rod and Staff 4

We switched from Shurley Grammar to Rod and Staff during the middle of last year.   I like it so much better and I’m hoping that this new writing program will help apply more of what we’re learning.

7.  Memory Work

We will memorize:

A portion of Martin Luther’s speech at the Diet of Worms, A Bird Came Walking Down the Walk by Emily Dickinson,   There is No Frigate Like a Book by Emily Dickinson,  ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson,   Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll (thank you Mrs. Brown),  Elizabeth I’s speech at Tilbury (thank you blog friend),  the preambles to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence ,  Paul Revere’s Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,  The Children’s Hour by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,  the presidents of the United States, a history catechism,  Psalm 104, portion of the Sermon on the Mount,  Luke 12:22-32.

We will also continue to review all the memory work from the past two years which is a quite a thick stack of poetry and scripture.

I’ve written about my thoughts on memory work and how important I think it is.   It’s also deeply gratifying to have some ‘tangible’ evidence of your learning.   There are so many benefits to memorization and it’s one of my favorite aspects of home schooling.

8.  Literature

Our curriculum is centered around history and we try to correlate some of our literature to that.    We will start this year by reading a biography on Martin Luther and a historical fiction work about the Mona Lisa (we’ll be studying daVinci first in art) called The Second Mrs. Giaconda.  Some of our other books include  The Princess and the Goblin, King of the Wind,  At the Back of the North Wind,  Just David, Stories of Don Quixote,  The Happy Prince and Other Tales,  The Enchanted Castle,  English Fairy Tales, poetry of George Herbert, The Witch of Blackbird Pond,  Johnny Tremain and excerpts from Paradise Lost.    I use Ambleside Online as a resource for good literature and have recently been visiting the Tapestry of Grace website to find additional classic literature.    We also will continue to read an abridged Shakespeare play per week by Charles and Mary Lamb and will also continue to work our way slowly through the unabridged Pilgrim’s Progress.   The girls will be reading books on their own during rest time and free time and having just finished the Harry Potter series, we’re starting the Chronicles of Narnia.  {we’ve never read them all in order.}   The Narnia series will be our leisure read-aloud which we tend to read while having breakfast, after lunch, and at bedtime.

The importance of literature and in particular reading aloud to children has been recently reinforced again.   In my prep for the writing course, I’ve heard Andrew Pudewa say several times that the single most important thing we can do for our kids is read aloud to them and to continue doing so long after they are old enough to read to themselves.     I hope to continue our habit of spending 2-3 hours a day reading various books and passages aloud.

9.  Languages

We are hoping and praying that we’ll have our wonderful Latin/Spanish tutor again this year, Mrs. Harms.   We used Latin for Children towards the end of the school year and will continue to do so.

10.  Fine Arts

The girls take about 7 hours of ballet instruction each week and will again be taking piano lessons.  We will be studying Chopin and Handel  in music history and Leonardo daVinci, Michealangelo and Rembrandt in art history.

11.  Spelling

We’ve been using Spelling Workout but I’m not sure it’s the right program for us.  I’ve been looking into Spelling Zoo and All About Spelling.  I think we need something more auditory.  For now, we’ll finish up our Spelling Workout books and try recording the words on a tape recorder and using that audio recording to help us practice the words.  Any thoughts?

Whew!  Now if we get through all that, it’ll be nothing short of a miracle.

Wish us luck, we start tomorrow!

If you homeschool and would like to share your curriculum resources or would like to find out what others are using, visit the Heart of the Matter blog hop or Angie at Bring the Rain.