July 2020 (I started writing this, and it never got published. I wanted to get it out there!) *Post contains affiliate links.
For the 2019-2020 school year, we did make some changes from last year, the biggest one being that we had a shift in method. We joined the Classical Conversations community that was new in our area. The classical method of schooling wasn't something I knew much about, and my
At the same time, I decided to start a homeschool co-op for our area. I had been meeting with several parents throughout the summer of 2019, and it was so clear that a strong homeschooling community was needed. Even then, people were leaving the public school system in droves, and the vast majority of them had no experience with schooling at home, nor did they have good sources for support. I was made an admin of the local homeschooling group on Facebook mostly because I posted more than anyone else at the time. So I decided to go all in and start a co-op. After meeting with a local business owner, I was able to arrange for a location (a martial arts studio, in fact). With a handful of volunteers, we started the year with 3-4 classes including art, music, and yoga. The first day we had 60 people show up - it was a very exciting time! I revised some bylaws from another organization, a board was established, we did some fundraising, and we were able to get insurance. Long story short, it ended up being an overall success. We did experience some good growth the next semester, but then March happened...
Overall, we did have a lot going on in our lives during the 2019-2020 school year, but we had such a great time together as a family, and I would not trade it for anything. W completed first grade, and R (sort of) did preschool. She mostly prefers to play outside or play with dolls, which is totally perfect. She turned 4 in January.
Here is an overview of what we did for each subject:
Bible: Bible Quest and Bible Bee (summer)
Fall/Spring: Bible Quest. This curriculum takes the classical approach and goes through the Bible very methodically and purposefully, beginning with the story of Creation in Genesis. Each lesson has a memory verse that is set to a fun tune (the CD is included), and there are other memory statements to go over throughout the week. They even have additional activities for older ages, so this curriculum can be used for a very wide range of ages, from the youngest kids to high-school aged kids! I have really enjoyed it because it has allowed us to go in-depth into the Bible. For example, in the New Testament there are a handful of lessons on the life of Jesus, then it goes into early church leaders such as Paul and Peter. We expanded on this by watching some of the videos on Right Now Media, which we got for free since we were members of Classical Conversations. They have a set of cards that goes with it, but we never really used them. Right now the kids really love coloring, so I usually print off coloring sheets to go along with the memory work or find a craft to go along with it. It's very simple but effective.
Summer: Bible Bee
I stumbled across Bible Bee when I was looking into Bible Drill (which I did as a child in the Baptist church.) I don't know if Bible Drill is even a thing anymore, as I wasn't able to find anything about it, and none of the local churches do it anymore. Bible Bee is a vaguely similar concept in that it includes a heavy emphasis on memorization, and older kids can actually go on to compete in the national bee in November of each year. But for the majority of the summer, kids are working in their Bible Bee workbook, and there are different age ranges. W absolutely LOVED doing her workbook last summer. The theme was Worship, and the focus was on Psalms. This year the theme is Trust, and the focus is on Genesis (the story of Joseph). The workbooks for the younger kids contain a large variety of fun activities, devotionals, and coloring pages. The older kids have a lot more in-depth questions and activities. This is actually designed to be done as a community/group study. You can sign up to be a host for your area, and then you meet with other families to go through the material. I actually did sign up to be a 2020 host (I have the T-shirt and everything!) but of course, government tyranny made it impossible for us to actually meet with anyone. Regardless, we had a GREAT time with this, and the theme was very timely for 2020. Almost every day the kids and I pray that God will help us trust him because he has a plan amidst all of this chaos. The story of Joseph has always resonated with me, so this was wonderful. We will definitely do this again next summer.
We used a wide variety of things for Spanish this year. W is still really young and gets frustrated very easily with making mistakes, so using the apps was a little bit of a challenge. She did much better with the Complete Book of Starter Spanish. It contains very easy activities and coloring sheets that introduce vocabulary. We used ALL the pages, so that was a great investment for us.
Muzzy is super fun to watch. I may have enjoyed it more than the kids did! I actually got the OLD set on DVD from eBay instead of doing their new subscription service. I feel like the kids absorbed a little from it, but it certainly has its limitations. There aren't that many episodes, and you can only watch it so many times without it getting old. Still a cool video series - just totally supplementary. I wish they had 100 more like it.
Rosetta Stone didn't end up working for us, as W would get upset when she missed anything (even though it's simple enough to correct. She's just hard on herself. I used Rosetta Stone personally. It's pretty repetitive but reasonably effective. It's not my favorite app but I invested in the lifetime program, so I definitely want someone to be able to use it. Same with Duolingo, though she has recently mentioned remembering certain vocabulary words from Duolingo, so we might give that a try again soon. The free version is great, although I did have premium for a while, and I thought it was worth it. I was using it every day personally for a while and learned a LOT. I'm hoping to get back to that someday soon.
Music:
Prodigies Music (affiliate link) I discovered Prodigies last year when I was searching the community for any kind of choir or music program. (Didn't end up finding anything. You can see my in-depth post about Prodigies music HERE.) We did this during the fall with our homeschool co-op and then didn't continue with it in the spring since we had so many other things to do. I LOVE the program and am hoping to get back to it soon once we get everything else adjusted!
Character: Little Lads and Ladies of Virtue I have a tendency to want be really detailed when we go over each subject, so I chose this book specifically because it has one chapter for each character trait. It's organized really well, with activities and prayer prompts for each day of the week. There is even a coloring sheet included for each week (when there's coloring involved, my kids are always happy with that!) They include a chart at the back where you can cut and paste badges for each week, which we didn't end up using but is a cool thing anyway. The BEST thing about this curriculum for us was the memory verse for each week. It doesn't come with music on its own, but the kids were always inspired to come up with their own tune for the verse each week. (I can't explain how happy it makes me for them to be creatively inspired without any prompting from me.) They had a ton of fun doing that, and they remember most of the verses as a result. The most memorable one for some reason was deference - like who even knows that word anymore? They STILL talk about showing deference to one another. Awesome.
Geography: Later in the year, I decided to start doing in-depth studies of various countries. Since I have always wanted my kids to be bilingual in English and Spanish at some point, I decided to start with Spanish-speaking countries like Mexico and Spain. We tried to follow along with the Classical Conversations memory work a bit after that, so we did a few European countries, but then I ended up just focusing on South America, and we kept going with that all through the summer. I had a little bit of a hard time finding a curriculum I really liked for this because almost all of them seem to take a regional approach, but I wanted something that went in-depth for each country individually - for at least two weeks. I finally discovered Expedition Earth, which was almost exactly what I needed. It doesn't include every single country, but it has a lot of them. It also comes with a workbook and animal flipbooks for each country. You print out a passport in the beginning, and the kids can add stamps or stickers for each country you study. W ended up doing a lapbook for each country, which helped explode her creativity. She had SO much fun with it and took a lot of pride in doing one each time. (And doing a lapbook wasn't even technically a part of that curriculum.)
Character: Little Lads and Ladies of Virtue I have a tendency to want be really detailed when we go over each subject, so I chose this book specifically because it has one chapter for each character trait. It's organized really well, with activities and prayer prompts for each day of the week. There is even a coloring sheet included for each week (when there's coloring involved, my kids are always happy with that!) They include a chart at the back where you can cut and paste badges for each week, which we didn't end up using but is a cool thing anyway. The BEST thing about this curriculum for us was the memory verse for each week. It doesn't come with music on its own, but the kids were always inspired to come up with their own tune for the verse each week. (I can't explain how happy it makes me for them to be creatively inspired without any prompting from me.) They had a ton of fun doing that, and they remember most of the verses as a result. The most memorable one for some reason was deference - like who even knows that word anymore? They STILL talk about showing deference to one another. Awesome.
Geography: Later in the year, I decided to start doing in-depth studies of various countries. Since I have always wanted my kids to be bilingual in English and Spanish at some point, I decided to start with Spanish-speaking countries like Mexico and Spain. We tried to follow along with the Classical Conversations memory work a bit after that, so we did a few European countries, but then I ended up just focusing on South America, and we kept going with that all through the summer. I had a little bit of a hard time finding a curriculum I really liked for this because almost all of them seem to take a regional approach, but I wanted something that went in-depth for each country individually - for at least two weeks. I finally discovered Expedition Earth, which was almost exactly what I needed. It doesn't include every single country, but it has a lot of them. It also comes with a workbook and animal flipbooks for each country. You print out a passport in the beginning, and the kids can add stamps or stickers for each country you study. W ended up doing a lapbook for each country, which helped explode her creativity. She had SO much fun with it and took a lot of pride in doing one each time. (And doing a lapbook wasn't even technically a part of that curriculum.)
Other books we used for geography were Eat Your Way Around the World and Geography Through Art.
Eat Your Way Around the World is simply a book of recipes for a handful of countries. It matched up reasonably well with the other books we used, and when it didn't I was able to find other recipes online for that given country. We did enjoy making some of the traditional meals from each country, though the kids didn't always care for them. It helped me personally since I tend to lack creativity in the kitchen!
Geography Through Art has several craft projects for each country that range in difficulty. We didn't use this as much as I was hoping since these projects take a bit more planning than I am accustomed to, but the kids LOVE crafts and I will definitely be using it more over the years. One project they really found memorable was soap carving from Brazil. You can see a lot of our geography foods and crafts on the Litmosphere Academy Instagram page - @litmosphere.academy
Eat Your Way Around the World is simply a book of recipes for a handful of countries. It matched up reasonably well with the other books we used, and when it didn't I was able to find other recipes online for that given country. We did enjoy making some of the traditional meals from each country, though the kids didn't always care for them. It helped me personally since I tend to lack creativity in the kitchen!
Geography Through Art has several craft projects for each country that range in difficulty. We didn't use this as much as I was hoping since these projects take a bit more planning than I am accustomed to, but the kids LOVE crafts and I will definitely be using it more over the years. One project they really found memorable was soap carving from Brazil. You can see a lot of our geography foods and crafts on the Litmosphere Academy Instagram page - @litmosphere.academy
Classical Conversations subjects - The following subjects were done with our Classical Conversations community. I will do a separate post going more in-depth into our experience with that! We did choose to enroll in the 2020-2021 program initially but then did not end up pursuing that.
History: Classical Conversations (CC) Memory work. Classical Conversations was on Cycle two this year, so we went over Medieval History and, later, the history of warfare. Doing CC definitely helped simplify things for history, as I didn't have to buy a separate textbook. I was able to find coloring sheets with copy work for most of the weeks, and that helped us a lot. CC has official history songs for each week, which I loved. Both girls really enjoyed them as well.
Language Arts: CC Memory work. We only did the Classical Conversations memory work for English this year (along with reading every day of course), and it worked out fine for us. It went over parts of speech in-depth with the memory work, which was great.
Latin: CC Memory work. Classical Conversations went over first conjugations this year: present, perfect, imperfect, future, pluperfect, and future perfect. We didn't do anything else with Latin this year, since we were just getting started.
Geography: CC Memory work. Classical Conversations focused on European geography this year, with a little bit of Asia and Oceania thrown in there.
Art: Foundations of art, great artists, music theory with the tin whistle, orchestra, and composers. Classical Conversations covers the foundations of art using Drawing With Children by Mona Brooks.
Art: Foundations of art, great artists, music theory with the tin whistle, orchestra, and composers. Classical Conversations covers the foundations of art using Drawing With Children by Mona Brooks.
It introduces the concept of OiLS (elements of shape): circles, dots, straight lines, angled lines, and curved lines. Then we go over things like perspective, mirror images, etc. Then we use an AWESOME book called Discovering Great Artists, which has some really cool art projects along with a mini bio of each artist. It's one of my favorite art books because the projects are pretty easy and memorable. I actually wrote two syllabi for our co-op based on this book for the spring semester.
After covering drawing and artists, we moved on to music theory using the tin whistle. Most of the parents and tutors seem to dislike this portion, but I thought it was enjoyable. Our tutor did a good job of maintaining control during community day. It's just an introduction to notes, rhythm, and using an instrument, which I thought was great.
The last section is orchestra and famous composers. This section got kind of screwed up for us because of the government tyranny nonsense, but it would have been a cool thing otherwise. The main thing I remember is watching "Beethoven Lives Upstairs" with the kids - it had been about 20 years since I had seen that movie. I love how it really brings Beethoven to life. We were supposed to use Classical Music for Dummies, but to be honest I never even cracked it open.
I'm just thrilled to able to spend every day with my precious children. We have adjusted our methods and schedule many times, and to be honest we have not really found anything that works consistently. I'm trying to work with all the different stages and seasons of life. The kids love to PLAY, and I want them to be able to do that as much as they can. They love doing arts and crafts, and they love going for walks and to the playground and library. I've definitely eased up on a lot of things over the past few years and have tried to start taking things a little more slowly. I got myself into a bit too many things this year with both CC and the co-op, but the one silver lining for me about the COVID/government tyranny is that it helped me realize that we were too busy and I was too stressed. I want to be more intentional about living each day more slowly with my children and taking advantage of every precious hour we have together. They are growing so fast, and time already feels like it's going by at warp speed. <3
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