The big announcements you've all been waiting for

Good afternoon! Love this weather? It is 94 degrees and about as humid. Hard to imagine the crisp apples and golden leaves that will be scattered at our woolen feet in only a few weeks....it will be like that on September 4th, right?

Well, we might have to run the air conditioner and suspend our imaginations a bit, but September 4th is the first day of the new school year for the Maplelawn City and Country Home Academy (rolls right off the tongue!) and we are working our bums off getting ready.

I have quite a list of new plans and new ideas and I am going to list them out here:
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We are going to take things Month by Month and reassess at month's end. So some of this is September plans, really.

I am going to wake up early and get myself together. Those who know me know this is a huge step, massive, indescribably huge and I might even cry. But thats ok.

I am going to get the littles** (Charlie and Casey) up early, if they do not so so of their own accord. We will have little kid breakfast together, it might even be so early that we hang out with Dada, who has to be to work at 7 am somedays.

Me and the littles will spend the early and mid morning time doing sweet and precious nursery school types of things.
Mother Goose book and record

Play Doh

ABC's

123's

Colors

Shapes

Finger Puppets

Watercolors

Crayon drawing

Dancing and playing circle games

Playing music with instruments/dancing ribbons

Hide N Seek

Little action poems and rhymes

Reader Rabbit Toddler CD-ROM (an old classic fave of Greta and Mickey's)

Simple crafts such as beading and gluing and construction paper type of stuff

Magnet letters

Puzzles

Lots of repeating and daily rhythms like Calendar Time and counting down to events

"Tea party" types of manners games

Playing with and enjoying our cool toys that we hardly ever play with! Blocks and push-poppers and stuffed animals and just all that Fisher price stuff we have all in baskets getting ignored!

Going outside for short intervals to "pick flowers/find special rocks", sort of mini nature study for tots

Little kid playing kind of stuff, like crawling down the hallways with scarves on our heads and growling and pretending we are tigers and all the stuff I did with Greta and Mickey and completely ditched Casey on.

and mostly,
Reading and reading and reading from our vast library of sweet and vintage and much beloved children's books and Poems.


All of this will be in the morning. Greta and Mickey have really changed over the past year, and have both changed into children who, instead of bouncing up and down on Mommy's bed in the morning, are more like to sleep in, be very grumbly and quiet in the mornings, not super hungry, and both seem to be quite interested in making their own food. So, we had a long talk about me "doing nursery school" in the mornings with Charlie and Casey and letting them kind of come around at their own pace, and they seemed really honored and very happy and relieved, which was cool. I set a few rules, though:
No watching TV. It would be too distracting for me and the littles.

You are welcome to join us in anything, and sometimes I might need you to (watch Charlie with that paint for a sec, while I go get paper towels!!)

Clean up your breakfast mess and do your morning chores list before anything else.

You can read, hang around, play outside (or in the "gym" we hope to build soon) play video games or Cd-Roms quietly, play with pets, or just do whatever. You are more than welcome to do some of your assigned schoolwork or work ahead in your workbooks, but just know that you do not "have to " do any "schoolwork" until after lunch.

Really different from anything we have ever done before!

Steve gets home for lunch around 11:10 am. So I am thinking that about 10:30 I will be done with the littles and I will brush myself off from all that floor playing time and go work on lunch. Greta and Mickey will be helping me keep the littles together during lunch prep, and once our pool is down, they are safe in the backyard, too and I do hope for lots of outdoor swingset fun this fall!

So we all have lunch with Daddy, and he goes back to work at 11:50.

At this time, I will be getting Charlie ready for his nap. We just have no idea what to decide about Casey napping yet. I feel with all my heart that he needs one, and yet, it can be quite a debaucle. Part of it is poor discipline on my part, but he may be outgrowing the need for a rest, although I find this difficult to believe. Greta and Mickey took naps until they were 6 even if they were just trained to stay in their beds and read. So, more updates on this before 9-4-07

but anyhow
So lets say Casey naps or watches a little video or soemthing, and Charlie goes down for a good nap, 2 or 3 hours has been typical. Then Greta and Mickey and I will have our schooltime. We aim to start by 12:30. in years past I have laid out rhythms without times because that seemed more realistic, but now that we have Daddy coming home for an 11 o'clock lunch everyday, saying actual times is ok and good.

So 12:30 we will begin our schoolwork. We will be working on lost of different things, but let me lay out the Core here and then I will go into all the extra curricular stuff we have too.

Five In A Row is a book in which you read a story (we are going to get the books from the library. they are mostly older "classic" stories) to your children and then you explore different topics and areas related to that story. It is considered a "Literature Based Education" which is close to my heart and to the Charlotte Mason philosophy which is my favorite thing to ponder on this Earth. even thinking about Charlotte Mason makes me glow with happiness, and I will never give up on this methodology even if I have wandered away from it, we will try try again.

We will be using Singapore Math and have yet to order these books, but they are cheap. Steve has already volunteered to do any math I am having trouble with in the evenings with the children. The frequency is yet to be determined, but I have had difficulty in the past with Greta getting frustrated with certain concepts that I know she is capable of, and Steve is having better luck with her. I may be the one to play more math "games" with the kids and he do the hardcore arithmetic. We will see. But we are memorizing the times table this year, if I have to bust out my sing a long cassette, I will! (it is SO weird and funny that it actually works and sticks in your head. Its rediculous, from the 80's, and we have laughed long and hard over the tunes.)

We will be using all sorts of things as copywork, such as passages from vintage children's readers, selected articles from the New York Times, poetry, even cookbooks and other things. This will serve to help the kids with their handwriting, their spelling, and hopefully their habit of attention. Greta will be given longer passages than Mickey, and when they finish, they are encouraged to embellish their work with pretty decorations in the margins, or to make it look really nice, to earn a coveted place on the Bulletin Board. (Only super wonderful work gets to go on there, to show Daddy or any other understanding visitor) So sweet that they still care about this. I go on and on about how this is SO GORGOEUS YOU COULDNT HAVE POSSIBLY HAND WRITTEN THIS! and I lament how bad my handwriting is and how I wish I had been made to appreciate good handwriting (true). I will be reading aloud to them alot, outside of the books for the Five In A Row. I have lots of stuff I could read to them right here at home, and they both have expressed an interest in Re-Starting Harry Potter book one as a read aloud. I would be honored and might have to buy a big bag of tea for my throat! We also are going to try to re start our Little House on the Prairie series and we own a fabulous book called A Literary Education by Catherine Levison which is chock full of excelent recommendations of literature classics, most of which I have never read, I am ashamed to say--but this makes me even more excited to dive in with the kids.

We will be exploring History in a new way this year, through reading lively biographies of great historical figures, playing historical board games, and working on our Timeline notebooks. I cringe when i hear them say stuff like "Its from the olden times, like the 1940's" in reference to something that is really more like the 1700's and so we will be doing ALOT of discussing and figuring out all about inventions and wars and I really feel a need to focus on the WHEN this year. I was so into Hellen Keller and Henry Ford and Thomas Edison and Abe Lincoln as a child, so maybe we can start with those folks. I know many books start with ancient times but for my kids this has gone over like a lead sleeping pill and we are not doing that again for a while.
I am hoping Daddy and some family freinds will be able to get all into wars and monarchies and military type of stuff because thay have the capacity to make it all come alive unlike myself.

Now here are my ideas that we are going to be definately doing, but that I have yet to make definate time slots and frequencies for, but must by Spetember 3rd:

Art study
Art creation

Music appreciation (classical and current)
Playing an instrument or being in a choir. Want to enroll them in local homeschool music class but cannot afford. Will beg grandma for money or do ourselves.

Cooking for real, not just holiday cookies

Health Class/Sex Ed. Germs, organs, puberty, disease, nutrition, social morals, etc

Library trips for pleasure. Meaning, pick your own books. Outside of something completely innapropriate, I do not care if it is Spongebob Goes to Camp, just read to yourself, for pleasure, each night before bed.

Still on the fence about French.

Extracurricular plans:
Girls Scouts 2 Thursdays a month
Campfire Scouts once a week, I think it is going to be Monday afternoons
Waldorf art class, Greta only, Tuesday afternoons in a local home
Real Gym Class, I dont know who or when yet, at a local fitness center, with other local homeschoolers. Cannot afford yet but trying.

Workshop class. We will be doing hammering. nails, screws, glues, and building of all sorts. Saturdays, I am thinking.

Learning to play Magic the Gathering well, and possibly starting up a small league.

Learning to play Dungeons and Dragons, as an ongoing campaign, with Daddy and the gaming pals.

Having literary symposiums with our friend, P, and Steve and I. We would like to run this as a book club, with us all reading one book at the same time, and then having weekly (?) discussions about it and hopefully offshooting crafts, games and maybe even field trips. We have dreams that this will grow over the years to include other friends and their kids once they get a few years older. We will be starting with the book A Wrinkle In Time.

Field trips to use our awesome museum pass.

Playdates, kid-swaps and the like with our favorite friends. This might even branch into some full fledged babysitting so Steve and I can go on a date! My reward for upping my workload by about 2000% in the next four weeks!
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For myself, inspired by my husband's astonishing transformation from couch potato to true athlete, i will be taking last year's emotional and fashion transformations that I accomplished and take it to the next level in the form of--GULP!--exercise. I am going to speedwalk until I can afford a lady bike. I have already joined him morning and night in some crunches/push ups type of stuff. Wwe both have zero interest in starving but have been drinking much less pop and are working on eliminating all the junk food.
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That is all for now, but to say that I am excited is an understatement. I am shaking and honored and thrilled by it all. WOOHOO!!!!!!