A Time and a Season

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven

-Ecclesiastes 3:1

Spring is in the air!  

It is another beautiful day at our house! 

I have been praying and seeking diligently for some time now, about our next year's course we should take. I have needed to take into consideration a few things:

• All of my kiddos are ready for me to encourage them to take on more challenging work
• We have embarked on our dream to have a small animal farm (we now have chickens, and plan on goats in the future). This means that we will have other projects to focus some of our time on. Including:
• 4-H....we have begun participating in 4-H projects and are very excited for all that this program has to offer us!
• Scouting- Ephraim has officially joined the Cub Scout program, so he (we) will have additional projects and meetings to attend.
• Gardening/Canning.....we WILL be doing our very first at our house this year.
• A possible addition to our family......yes we are beginning to think: baby

All of these things are going to require more TIME of one particular person in our family...can you guess who? ME 

So I have been desiring to find a curriculum guide that COMBINES as much as possible together, that gives me a lesson plan (that is easily adapted when wanted), and covers our age levels of at least 7 years to 11, with emphasis on being able to challenge the oldest to strive harder and higher. I wanted all of our reading, writing, vocabulary, spelling, to be inter-linked with our History lessons. I wanted it to follow our CM (Charolette Mason) style of doing things with living books and short lessons. I wanted more time to create fun games and projects to support our lessons and to be able to give some devoted time to preschoolers.

Is this even possible?

A couple weeks ago after putting the kids to bed. I was sitting on the computer doing internet searches for Literature-based curriculum. I found a lot of great things...but a lot of them required me to make the book list and plan out the unit studies. I would love to be able to sit down and do that...one of my favorite things is to come up with our lesson plans and find exciting new ways to learn. But based on my above list, I feel my time is better spent teaching and not planning. I want to be able to have fun with the kiddos, not spend hours on the computer researching or creating. 

And then I stumbled upon this:

I watched the several introductory videos on the site, and as I did a warm sensation spread throughout me. I thought: This is it! But then my brain said: Hold on...you need to research this more, there is nothing worse than getting something that doesn't work for you family. 

The hour was growing late and my eyes were bleary so I forced myself to pin it and wait for the next day to read more. When I got the chance the next day, I sat down and opened my homeschool pin board to find the link to the website. There I found someone had made a comment: We are in our 5 year of TOG and we love it!  I immediately replied asking her questions. She responded promptly telling me about the age range of her kids and that her 16 yo was graduating this year. That was all I needed to inspire me to dig deeper. 

This is what I found:

• The creator was a homeschool mom (and dad) of 6
• It was created because she wanted a way to spend more time teaching and less time planning, and she wanted her children to be instructed in the most important lessons of all...CHRIST.
• The company put 3 weeks of lesson plans and other resources on their site for FREE for us to explore and try out before purchase.
• The Core of the program is History taken from 4 divisions of World History. (The same way we already began doing it this year..with The story of the World history program.) Starting with Ancient Times. It also has a strong focus of tying history into events taken from the Bible.
• Each Year contains 4 units, which can be purchased separately, which makes it easy to start at anytime with in your other course of study. 
• There is a print, digital, or combination of program material.
• Each lesson plan contains lessons from elementary through Highschool levels, which are broke up into levels and not grades. They are: lower grammar, upper grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric
• There is great flexibility of levels being taught and it is supper easy to give a student a challenging assignment from a level above without changing their whole lesson level. And it works the same for giving an easier assignment to a student who is struggling in a certain area like writing or reading, without messing up the other lessons.
• The only areas of study it doesn't cover is Math, Science, and any specialties like foreign languages or Music studies. There is even play scripts so you can put on a play just as a family or in a co-op (oh yeah, it has lots of info on how to use it in a co-op).
• There are lots of hands on projects available to do.
• The book list consists of books that are easily found on the internet or at the library. They also have a book store where you can go to purchase the books on the list if you don't want to shop around or borrow.

Are you loving it yet?

I am!

This program is truly an answer to my prayers!

So I ordered a couple Units from Year 1 which fits in with our current study of Ancient Times for us to begin right away and test out to see if it works for us and if it will work for us for our whole year program.

I have received the package and poured over the material this week....so far I think it looks great! We will begin to implement the program next week.

If you would like more info go to their site: http://www.tapestryofgrace.com/explore/

I was not invited to give this review and I did not receive anything for it. I simply liked what I saw and wanted to share my opinion. If there was anything in my notes that was not accurate..I apologize and please let me know so that I can correct it. 

I will try to give an updated review after we have used the program for a week or two.

Happy Day!

BFB Blog Giveaway!

I just received an announcement from Beautiful Feet Books. They are having a GIVEAWAY on their blog. One person will win 2 FREE  downloads of their study guides PLUS 1 download for a FRIEND! Isn't that nice?

Don't know about BFB? Check them out HERE! I have downloaded a couple of guides from them. They are nice little guides with book lists and suggested activities. There are different levels for most of the subjects.

If you would like to enter the giveaway you can visit the BFB Blog.

Good luck!

Happy Day!

What's the Weather?

Weather is all around us. It effects pretty much everything we do.

We love spending time outside when the weather is nice!

For the next couple of weeks we are going to be looking at the weather and breaking it down, trying to solve some of it's mysteries. 

To help us I have gathered a few library books:

On the Same Day in March

a Tour of the World's Weather    By Marilyn Singer

*This one goes all over the world showing how the seasons are different in other places at the same time.

What's the Weather Today?   By Allan Fowler

*A quick little read (easy) that takes a first look at different types of weather

DK Nature Activities 

Weather watcher       By John Woodward

* This is a great little book with good explanations with pictures and activities to do, we are using this a lot throughout our study

Sequences of Earth & Space

Rain       By Andres Llamas Ruiz

*This book takes you through the water cycle with great illustrations

I face the Wind   By Vicki Cobb

*A fun book about air and what it does, with some activities to help promote your own observations about air.

The Rainbow and You    By E.C. Krupp

*Become a "Rainbow Watcher" with this book. It teaches about light and colors.

And we already had this book in our own library that we have used throughout our Earth Science studies this year:

(Reader's Digest) How the Earth Works    By John Farndon

*Lots of activities listed in this book and some good info, not very good for just reading from, but a good resource for planning and gathering facts.

I think I have planned this pretty well. I have used my Mini Unit Guide to plan it out and we have 8 weeks of weather study and activities all lined up. We are going to read stories, keep a weather log, and do lots of fun experiments. To keep track of it all I have created this Weather Journal:

You can download this for FREE!

Some other resources we will be using will include documentaries about weather that I find on Netflix and I have also downloaded a few things from Currclick:

Simple Days Unit Studies: All About Weather

*A nice little ebook with basic info about the weather 

My Little Weather Book

*A great preschool weather journal for my little ones

Whatever the Weather (Teacher Book Bag)

*Weather picture cards and weather word cards 

Looks like a cloudy/overcast day here today.....What's the weather in your neck of the woods?

Have a

Happy Day!

Update:
A blog I follow, livinglifeintentionally, posted a FREE weather unit on her blog. Go here to check it out or find her blog button on my sidebar.

"Be ye Perfect...."

"Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."

-Matthew 5:48

Our new Scripture Study for the next couple of months is going to be focused on virtues of the Savior. 

We have a serious need in our household to re-visit the importance of the Beatitudes.

I have noted that several of my blogging friends have begun using the We choose Virtues program. It looks wonderful and would totally use it...but it will have to wait until the budget can fit it in. So until then.....

I have taken a few resources I have on hand and a program I have used in the past and smooshed them together into one study.

Lat year I took the Beatitudes as explained by Gordon B. Hinckley (a Prophet of the LDS church) and developed a book listing our family rules under each "B" as they applied, along with consequences and blessings of those behaviors. I still have it all put together so there was no work to do there. ( I will try to seek it out on my hard drive someday so I can try to pass it on for anyone interested). 

I also purchased and downloaded this book onto my Nook about a year ago:

It is a well put together program meant to be used for FHE (family home evening). I have used it as a guide in putting together the study we will do. I have chosen a few of the virtues that I feel we need to work on in our home. I will read the scripture stories that the author has written about and we will also use the scripture references. The author also has included Hymns to be sung, I have kept some of the songs but have chosen to use some different ones that I feel would be easier for my Kiddos to learn (because I want them to actually remember the songs in hopes it will remind them in a moment when behavior needs corrected). I have used the Church's music website to print off the songs and download the MP3 (which is all FREE in case you didn't know). Here is the link.

If you haven't figured it out yet I love to teach through creating Journals. It is very similar to notebooking, in fact you could probably say it was the same thing with a different name. 

With our study of the Book of Mormon we used regular composition notebooks, but I wanted to mix things up a bit for this new study. So I have sat down at my computer for hours and made some journal pages outlining the things that I want us to focus on in this study. Each Journal starts off with having the song "I'm trying to be like Jesus" in the front. This is going to be our "theme" song for the whole study. I have also included the song "Our Primary Colors" so we can have a quick song to sing as a reminder as to what we are trying to do everyday. Following that I have the Beatitudes sheet that you see at the top of this post. Then comes a "Be (Grateful  )" page that includes a short spot for a journal entry. 

Then comes the song that goes with the first virtue that I have put under that Beatitude. 

After the song comes the virtue page:

It includes a spot for a definition, scripture reference, and story resource. Along with the stories that came in the Teaching Christ-like Virtues in the Home book I have found a few articles from the Friend and printed them to read. My plan is to focus on one Virtue each week, but I have several listed under the 6 B's so we will focus on the "B's" for longer. 

After the virtue page I have printed off a dictation (or copywork) page that I have in our K-5 Language Arts program from Love to Learn.  I plan on having them write a scripture or other quote that pertains to the virtue. Normally to save paper I copy everything front to back but this time I left them blank so they can use that side to draw pictures. I find that it holds their attention if they can draw while we are singing or I am reading a story. 

I just repeat this sequence for every virtue under ever "B" for the whole journal. The Teaching Christ-like Virtues in the Home book also had journal prompts and suggested activities at the end of each lesson. We may or may not use these. I will probably use the journal prompts for my older Kiddos for writing in their regular journals sometimes and if the activity inspires us then we'll try it out. 

So there you go. My long winded explanation of our new study focusing on the virtues of Christ and how we can become more like Him. I hope to gain a more peaceful atmosphere in our home and to find the Kiddos doing things for one another and being obedient (no questions asked!). 

If this is something you would like to try or if you have a need for some virtue journal pages for your own study you may get the journal pages I created here:

My Journal of Virtues

* You are welcome to Pin and to share as much as you like....I just ask that you use it for personal or classroom use only. Do not sell or copy. And please link to my blog post NOT the download link. 

Thank You!

Happy Day!

Spring Planning

These are books we bought at last years Scholastic Warehouse Sale!
I got a little excited.....

It is that time again. To gather resources and plan our next couple months of study in more detail. I have our year outlined, but every couple of months I sit down and look at what we will be doing so I can make book and supply lists and plan any other fun activities we might want to do as well. This way I can track with my Kiddos progress as we go, giving focus to their current needs. I also like to set any needed goals and evaluate ones we are already working on.

On my planning list:

Create a Science Unit about Weather with a background theme of Rainbows that spreads to other subjects such as Art, and giving a basis for some fun preschool activities fitting the theme.

Art: Explore the colors of the rainbow and experiment with mixing colors. For the younger ones learn names of colors if not already known and play matching games.

Literature: Read books about Rainbows, Weather, and current Ancient Times studies (Story of the World).

Grammy Award Winner!
I bought the MP3 Album from Deseret Book.
The link below will take you there

Music Study: Create a fun unit based on Jenny Oaks Baker's "When you Wish Upon a Star". I would like us to listen to selections, identify each song within the selections (if you haven't heard it before click on the album title link. She has done amazing mixes of Disney Melodies with her Violin.). I hope to have some copywork pages, and worksheets for filling out song titles, instruments heard, Movies they are in, and a place for writing (or drawing) how the songs make them feel. We will probably spend about a week on each song.

As I have been jotting down ideas for these upcoming Mini Units (I call them "mini" because we usually only spend  from one to six weeks on them and they don't cover every subject) I decided I needed a better planning worksheet than what I already have on hand.

So I created these:

The above worksheets are for the initial brainstorming and gathering of ideas and resources. I may use several drafts of these until I get it right!

The worksheets below are for pulling it all together and planning when to implement all of the fun! I made two different kinds. One is just a general by week planning guide. I would use this one for lessons planned for the whole family, or if you are planning for only one child. The other worksheet is if you want to only view one week at a time and what each individual student will be working on. There are spots for up to 5 students ( because that's how many I have) but you could make extra copies for however many you needed. This one is good if you have many age ranges  and levels of study, so you can give individual assignments and projects required for each. Maybe you will use both...I probably will!

scroll down for the link!

Download it here for FREE!

Happy Planning!

What are you planning for Spring?