Homeschooling for His Glory

It is the end of August and School for us is starting this coming Monday. Planning for this upcoming school year has been on going since May, and hopefully I have settled on what we will be using. This year I have a 9th grader and a 7th grader. I cannot believe I will have a high schooler in the house. Time really flew by.... So what are our curriculum choices for this year? A couple of notes before I lay the choices out: *****Last year we switched from online Math to paper Math. Hubby did not like the idea of doing Math online and wanted the boys to do paper math, so we switched to Alpha and Omega Lifepac (which is a curriculum he has used when he was in school). **** I am planning for my high schooler to be homeschoold all the way, so am working on a 4-year high school plan that will allow him to be well equipped to take the ACT and some AP classes comes 11th grade (which are what universities in Canada look for). Some outside grades will be nice too, so I will be thinking...

Week 4 of the 2017 Virtual Curriculum Fair is here, and it is time to talk about History, Geography, and Science. You can check  Homeschooling Hearts and Minds  our host for this curriculum fair to read more about it. Social Science has been the easier school subject to cover since grade 2, when I stumbled upon  Tapestry of Grace.   There has been no turning back and will not be. I invested in the four years of this curriculum which is rotation based curriculum. This is our 7th year using it and we are at our 2nd rotation of year 3 (The Exploration Age). With TOG the boys have been able to explore the World from past to present from a Geography and History perspective. The advantage of repetition offered by this curriculum is that they get to look at time from different perspective when they go over certain periods of time again. Also with TOG you cover civic as well and government which allow for the kids to really understand the world around them. My oldes...

Week 3 of The Virtual Curriculum Fair hosted by Homeschooling Hearts and Minds is all about Math and Logic, discovering patterns. How did (do) we tackle this in our homeschool? Read along! I will first start by saying that I have two children who approach Math very differently. One loves it and the mechanics of it, but sometimes struggles with the logic of it (he's got his own logic, which he gets from me unfortunately). That said, he does pretty well and is actually ahead of his grade. My other son does not like the repetition and practice aspect of math, though he most often has little difficulty to understand the concepts. He is doing fine and is at grade level. In the elementary levels we have used Singapore Math (grade 1 and 2), which I would highly recommend. It is a strong Math curriculum. The boys got strong foundations from it. We ended up settling for Math on the Level, which attracted me because of its cost effectiveness. MoL covers everything you need for g...

Welcome to week 2 of the 2017 Virtual Curriculum Fair hosted by Homeschooling Hearts and Minds . This week we will be talking about the Language Arts. When it comes to the Language Arts, it is a very important subject in our homeschool. As a classical homeschooler, mastering the Language Arts is a very important step and component of our study. Reading: Both the boys read at a young age with minimum teaching from me. I had to catch up in teaching them some phonics so that they could learn to read well. I do believe both whole language learning and phonetic learning are essential for a good reading education. They both read above their grades and have good comprehension. I am very thankful to The Logic of English as it helped me fill in the gap of whatever they lacked in the area of phonetic awareness. I used the Essentials program then and would recommend both the Foundations and Essentials, as a worthwhile reading and spelling curriculum. Read my review of it to learn more...

2016 was a pretty skimpy blogging year for me. Ask me why, I am not sure I have an answer for you beside life happening and writing inspiration fading. With a new year upon us I will try to get back on the blogging scene and what best topic to start the year with than giving you a glimpse into what homeschooling looks like in our home with now two teenagers. In the past 4 years I have enjoyed participating in the Virtual Curriculum Fair hosted by Homechooling Hearts and Minds , so I am happy to start my year participating once more. For those who are not familiar with the Virtual Curiculum Fair, it is a month long series of posts, where over 20 homeschoolers share about their homeschool curriculum and how they homeschool. The weeks will go as follow: Week 1: See How We Learn/Welcome to the VCF Week 2: Playing with Words Week 3: Discovering Patterns Week 4: Exploring Our World Week 5: Seeking Beauty So how do we learn here? this is the topic of this ...

For my last review this year, I have a very timely and important product for you. We live in such a technological and advance era that it can be scary to hear about all the things our kids can be exposed to using internet devices. As homeschool children especially, the use of devices is a daily occurrence, and we cannot always be right next to our children to see where they end up on the Internet. The product the crew got to review this past month is one that will help you monitor just that threat while at the same time teach some accountability. Accountable2You  is ash online service put out by a christian company that wants to help families and individuals to take control of their internet habits by keeping them accountable. Accountable2You offered the crew four of their plans to check out: Family Plan :  perfect for multiple family members and for multiple devices Individual Plan:  monitoring of one person, up to six devices Group Plan:  perfec...

My oldest is very interested in movies and film. So, when the chance to review a filmmaking course, through the Homeschool Review Crew, came along he asked to be on it. The course in question is called Online Christian Filmmakers Academy and is put out by Family Gravity Media, a division of Family for Christ Ministries inc. As you can tell this course is put together by Christians, who love filmmaking, and want to pass on what they have learned to the younger generation. The course is a set of video modules (5 in total): The Camera - covers everything that has to do with a camera (type, lenses, ISO, support) Cinematography - covers color temp and white balance, lighting and framing Sound - covers equipment, microphone, recording Pre-Production - covers story, screenplay, paperwork, the team Production - covers the crew, etiquette, directing, the slate, and the actual step of the filming process. Each module in turn contains a set of videos on that topic. The videos ...