“The question is not, — how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education — but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?”
― School Education: Developing A Curriculum
Hello lovely people.
I was contemplating spending time telling you what happened in our lives since the last time we chatted, but that would take a super long time. Also, I have more interesting things to show you and tell you at this point. I will over time let you know what has worked, and what has not worked for us in our homeschooling journey so far, but for now, I want you to enjoy experiencing a day in the life of our homeschool Monday.
It is such a lovely thing to finally put to paper what we do in a day, it definitely helps me to see that we do learn so much by the end of it. Each of our days has a slightly different rhythm, but today we are going to share what a Monday looks like. I hope you enjoy it.
So here is our Monday Rhythm (Some days we don’t get it all done, and that’s ok if we don’t, we just fit it in at some other point in the week).
First off during breakfast time we do our morning basket. This is just a series of things that we do each morning that bring truth, goodness and beauty into our lives as a start to our day. We start off by singing a hymn (we follow Happy Hymnody for that,www.happyhymnody.wordpress.com it’s amazing). After our hymn we then read our devotion for the day and the Bible, we cycle through different devotional books, at the moment we are reading “Hide the word and Seek the Lord Devotional” by Stephen Elkins. Once we are finished reading that the kids are usually finished eating so we move to the couch, they will then play quietly with a toy or lie on the carpet and listen while I read our Christian Fiction books. Right now we are reading Pilgrim’s Progress by Taylor (Its a kids version and its lovely), we then read “The Prince Warriors” by Pricilla Shirer (this series has been so popular in our household that this is the second time we are reading it, it is all about spiritual warfare but written in a manner that children can understand. It shows children how to put on their spiritual armor, to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit and to be aware that we do not battle flesh and blood, its truly amazing.) We then finish off our read-aloud time with a classic and at the moment we are reading Heidi.
After Morning Basket we move on to daily chores. We each have our chores to do and so we all move around the house doing our bit. The kids make their beds, tidy their room, pick up toys around the house, change, brush teeth, put washing in the machine and turn the wash cycle on and vacuum. That’s their level at the moment and they will increase as their skill on current chores increase.
After chores, we then move onto circle time. This changes with the seasons, so at the moment we are doing Spring circles, this consists of spring books, poems, songs, and some maths movement. This Monday we are doing butterflies, so the invitation to learn I set up was all about butterflies. The boys get called to the table and they play with what I have set up while I read aloud, everything they are playing with is relevant to the season we are in and the topic we are reading about. Once I had finished reading and they had exhausted their play, I took the opportunity for them to make a life cycle of a butterfly with our natural materials at hand, it was so much fun to do and to watch!
After this, it was so close to lunchtime that we had our lunch. Every day after lunch the boys have a quiet time in their rooms of about 1.5 hours. During quiet time they are on their beds with their books of choice and 1 toy, no talking just being quiet and having some space. Jesse usually falls asleep during this time. It is a time for mom to rest, recharge and get ready for the afternoon activities.
After quiet time was up Jesse was still asleep. So Jordan did his nature journaling. We journaled about the butterfly lifecycle, and I told Jordan to invent his own butterfly which he drew beautifully.
We then moved on to doing our Waldorf Math, at the moment our maths block is Quality of Numbers, basically meaning that the child develops a relationship with the numbers 1 – 12, realizing that they are more than just counting implements, it helps the child fully develop a deeper understanding of what each number represents and means in relation to them and the world around them, we are really enjoying it. I also scheduled to do Right Start Maths on this day too but we didn’t get to do it. Time really just got away from us, and it was already about 2.45pm by this time.
I also scheduled Letterland and Spanish today, but we didn’t manage to get to that either. Jesse also missed out on his nature journaling because he was asleep so we will pick all of that up another day this week.
After Math Jordan did his piano practice, he is doing Simply Music, we are just loving this program.
After piano, we had an afternoon snack and called it a day with ice cream and swimming and crazy wild boy games outside. Boy mom life hahaha.
And that was a walk through our Monday.
Did you enjoy the walk through?
If you have any questions feel free to get in touch, also follow along with us on Instagram @atwinkleintheireyes to see what we are getting up to.
God Bless you and have a fantastic week.
A Twinkle In Their Eyes 