{books}

Education is not filling a pail but the lighting of a fire.  ~William Butler Yeats

Lovely. All our homeschooling books have arrived save one …  ♥

Brown is Beautiful

I tried to come up with a clever title for this post, but I really couldn't think of one. So can you guess why brown is beautiful? Well, I mean the reason why that is the title of this post? yeah, I thought not. It's because I just ordered ALL our homeschooling materials for the coming year. And when that brown truck comes to my house it will be a beautiful day. Or couple of days. I am looking forward to several deliveries. One from My Father's World, one from Rainbow Resource, one from Timberdoodle and one from Home Science Tools.

And so it's officially official … the money is spent and the plans are made. I can't wait to send my declaration of intent letter to the school system :)

Homeschooling Plans for Our Next {First} Year

First, can I tell you that I want to redesign my blog … again? What is wrong with me? hahaha

OK … so I have been searching through some really great homeschooling sites and blogs and gathering inspiration for next year. In many ways it feels like our first time doing this. And I guess in some ways it is. It will be my first time homeschooling 2 little girlies (well one little, one not-so-little) instead of just one.

In order to organize my thoughts I went searching for a yearly overview planner. I found one and printed it out, but it was plain and I'm not. So I (of course) made my own. It looks like this:
It goes in my handy dandy notebook. If you like it, you can access a blank version here and print it out for yourself if you'd like. It's colorful, of course :) … if you don't want to print it in color, you can simply print it in grayscale, or you can access the blank black and white version here.

As you can see, they are doing nearly the same things, even though they are 6 years apart in school. More about that coming soon …

Home School Home

So … we've come full circle here in our home. We'll be homeschooling again beginning next school year. This is my research notebook:

We'll be using My Father's World Rome to the Reformation (as you can see above).

I was driving myself CrAzY with all the curriculum out there. There is SOOO much of it. I am thankful for having homeschooled in the past, so I am aware of philosophies and such already. So it was a just a matter of finding the right (read "PERFECT") curriculum for my girls.

Do you see all those notes above? Pages and pages were full of thoughts and ideas. And prices. Yes, it's not cheap. Oh, it can be if you want or need it to be, but right now I want neither. I was leaning toward Sonlight, but then I would lean toward My Father's World, or piecing it all together myself. Finally I was at the end of my researching rope. I had been praying about it all along, but Saturday morning I begged God to show me what to use. He gently let me know that I was asking Him the wrong question, that I need to be asking Him what HE wants me to teach my girls. So I did. And God, in His infinite wisdom, led me to use My Father's World for both my girls next year (and hopefully the next and the next). He knows just what I need and just what my girls need. And I can see now why it will be the perfect fit for us and for what we ALL need to learn.

I'm looking so forward to it. Lydia is looking forward to it (that's another praise that goes straight to the Father). Grace doesn't have any idea about it.

I plan on writing more later about what we're using and why, but I gotta run to work! Later ...