Changing styles

It's been forever since I last posted and I apologize. I've let some family matters, holidays and a rejiggering of our approach to homeschooling keep me away from my blogging duties. On to that rejiggering...

All of my family's homeschooling experience so far has been radical unschooling. No lessons, no curricullum, lots of learning from everyday experiences. It's been a joy and given us a real freedom in how we approach learning. Lately though, probably for the last six months or more, I've been more talk then walk and our homelife has been getting more mundane, boring and uninspiring. Not the fault of the radical unschooling but the fault of a mom who didn't feel inspired to help her kids pursue their passions anymore.

So we thought maybe it would be good to shake things up a bit and take a step into the ecclectic approach to homeschooling. I purchased an actual math curricullum for my daughter. She really does enjoy some sit down time with workbooks so I thought I'd give it a try. She has a particular love of fractions so I also ordered up a fractions workbook from the Key To... series. And Easy Grammar. She's telling stories and starting to want to write them down so I thought that might be a good way to help her get some tools she needs to do that.

Other subjects, along with more math and language arts, are probably going to be approached by a sort of on-the-go unit studies approach. Catherine loves Greek myths and ancient Greece so I set out to find resources related to that. I'll detail those in a later post.

Since I'm fairly hopeless at organization I got a piece of bristol board and stuck a couple of file folders along the bottom. One is for worksheets and activities to do, one is for the finished worksheets and activities. Above those there's a title ('Ancient Greece'), a map of ancient Greece (blank so we can fill in the city states as we study them) and I also attached a clothespin to hold a 'Resources Used' sheet and a 'Glossary of Terms' sheet. I'll post a picture in a later post.

What works for me about this approach is that I can make up the poster to fit the theme of the month ('King Arthur' in March and April may be 'The Human Body'. There's no rhyme or reason.) and then stick stuff in the to-do folder as I go. No need to pre-plan stuff and just enough organization so that I keep motivated without getting bogged down. We'll see how it goes but it's been fun so far.

This month is half done but I'll still link to some of the resources I used later and report what we do from now on.